One major culprit for decreased engagement is the ability to fully automate the posting, a change that was implemented earlier this year, much to the joy of marketers (no more having to remember to post scheduled content on weekends!). The good thing about automation is that it does the job for you and saves you time – but, this can also be a bad thing. Spending less time on the platform means that you engage less with other users and their content. No one knows the exact ins and outs of Instagram’s algorithm, but it is clear that it favours users who are themselves actively engaging with others’ content on the platform.
After a while of scheduling all the posts in advance and letting Hootsuite take care of the automated posting, we noticed a drop in the number of likes on each post. Luckily, there is an easy fix to this problem. This simple trick will work wonders for your Instagram engagement levels even if you have not automated your posting!
Spend 5 minutes before your post is scheduled to go out liking, commenting and following, and 5 minutes after it has been posted. It will not have the same effect if you spend 10 minutes liking, commenting, and following at some other point in the day (although it won’t hurt to do this in addition to engaging when posting!). Yes, it is really that easy.
Doing this consistently can in our experience as much as double your organic likes on each post – without spending a penny on advertising. It will also boost your follower numbers.
Being able to automate your Instagram posting is still a very useful tool for those times when you cannot do it manually, but spending just 10 minutes a day is worth it to radically boost your results.
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