In a digital world, it has never been more important to use social media for the growth of your business, whether you are using it to increase sales, brand awareness, or boost your reputation, Instagram is a platform that can facilitate all of this.

Understanding how to produce content for this platform is a crucial element to ensure that your business succeeds in a competitive world, simply uploading some basic photos to your feed is no longer going to produce the results you are after. Therefore, learning the effective methods to produce successful content on this platform is key.

 

The Instagram Algorithm

To start producing successful content on a platform, it is very beneficial to understand the processes behind the platform and how its algorithm works in order to use it to your advantage.

The Instagram algorithm is constantly monitoring what content gets seen most commonly and what content it does not favor as much, it will decide what order the news feed displays in, what orders stories and reels show, what posts show up on your explore page, and much more.

Here are the factors that contribute to making the Instagram algorithm work in your favor:

• Relationships – Instagram’s algorithm pays attention to how much you engage with other users and how much they engage with you. The higher this engagement the more your account is likely to get reshown to those users next time they open the application.
• Interest – Instagram monitors users in order to see what their preferences and interests are so they can optimize the platform to give them the best user experience, but if you have your account set up correctly using the right hashtags, biographies, and keywords, you increase the odds that Instagram will start showing your content to users who may be interested in it more commonly.
• Timelines – Posting at the optimized time when your audience is online, increases the chances your content will be prioritized in being shown to users as the algorithm deems recent content as more important.
• Frequency – The more active your Instagram users are, the better this will be for your business as somebody who consistently logs into Instagram has a higher chance of seeing your content on their feed, compared to someone who is less active on Instagram.
• Following – Similar to above, people who follow lots of people will have a lower chance of seeing the content compared to someone that doesn’t follow many people.
• Time of session – The more time a user spends on your content, the more the Instagram algorithm will reshow that user similar content from your page which is why engagement is so crucial.

Taking into consideration the factors discussed above, it can help us better understand the kind of content that you want to produce in order to maximize your customers retention.

 

Profile Optimization

Your profile is the social media form of your website, here you can add a biography (a small description of who you are and what you do), your profile image, a link, action buttons, and a few other features. You must ensure that your profile makes a good impression so it sticks out in comparison to your competitors.

It is also very important to turn your Instagram page into a business page so you are able to reap the benefits of analytics and tracking, which will help improve your performance on the platform.

Ensure that you have all your information filled out on your profile including company phone number, company email address, company location, company category along with a killer biography and any link that you would like.

Once your profile is complete, you can then focus on creating content that is going to make your followers stick around.

Creating Engaging Content

There are a few steps you can follow to maximize the results you get from your content, the structure below demonstrates this:

• Plan your content
• Monitor analytics
• Schedule posts and post consistently
• Focus on building a community

To go into further detail on the above, you must first plan your content and have a general idea of the kind of content that you want to create that you think will fit your target audience. Once you have done this, you are ready to begin posting content and monitor the kind of analytics that each individual post produces to find out what content works best.

There are many tools that you can use to create engaging content, one example would be a website called Canva. This allows you to develop designs, social media posts, graphics, logos, edit images, and lots of other features that will be great for your page.

As soon as you get the hang of creating content, you should consider scheduling your posts so you publish at similar times and days which will help boost you in Instagram’s algorithm. By this point, you should be in a rhythm of consistency when it comes to posting content regularly.

The next step is to focus on building your community which will go hand in hand with the content that you are already bringing out and gives people something to engage with you on.

 

Building Relationships

Similar to engagement, building relationships is imperative to your success on instagram, not only having relationships with customers but also with other businesses and companies that are in similar industries or in the same industry as you. The more you interact with these pages the better you’ll do as the algorithm favours users that are consistent in their communication with other people on the platform.

In addition to this, engaging with other pages similar to yours may lead to something that can benefit both of you such as a collaboration, which sparks even more interest from users who are already interested in what they have to offer.

An example of how you can engage with your community would be doing a free giveaway where your followers have a chance to win something that you offer for free and all they have to do is engage with your post, such as leave a comment and tag their friend.

Also, engaging with other pages such as asking questions and leaving comments on their content will help other users notice you especially if you ask smart questions and have discussions that stand out amongst other users. The key to this is to offer value and this will increase the probability that someone is going to engage with your page simply out of curiosity.

In conclusion, like anything else in life what you put in is what you get out, the more effort you put into your social media the more you will reap the rewards in the form of new customers, followers, growth, and happy clients.

If there is one main point that you can take away from this article it would be to consistently post high-quality engaging content daily and maintain relationships with your audience.