Here are some reasons why your engagement may have dropped recently:
1. An Increase in Irrelevant Followers
If you’ve recently had an increase in followers, either from follow/ unfollow, from an irrelevant giveaway, or from an irrelevant ad, you may have a lot of followers who couldn’t care less about your content. This becomes a problem when your engagement (the main driver of reach on Instagram) takes a hit.
When you gain followers, make sure you’re gaining them because of the actual content, products or services your account has to offer.
2. Ignoring what your Followers Want
If your followers are consistently loving a particular topic or type of content, but you try to push out the things they don’t care about. Maybe you like to create a particular type of content, but your followers don’t value it as much as you do. Even though that’s what you love to create, take notice of what your followers respond to and create more of that. A good rule of thumb is to post 80% of the value and entertainment material that your audience engages with, and 20% of anything else (such as salesy posts or cta’s.)
3. Constantly Have Salesy Calls to Actions
CTA’s are important, but not so important that you should do them all of the time. 90% of your posts should be focused on engagement and building your community. The other 10% is where you can actually sell your products or services. In this way, you’ll have a much higher ROI directly from Instagram. Whereas, if you’re always telling people to go to your website and check out your services or buy your product, no one will care and your engagement will drop (if it was ever high in the first place.)
So, you know that annoying lady who’s always trying to get you to buy stuff from her MLM, or interest you in a new business opportunity? Don’t be like her on IG. Don’t constantly sell to people. Instead, first, connect with people and position your brand as someone they know, like and trust. Once they trust you and your raw honesty, what you say they should do, buy or invest in will carry 99% more weight than if you were a stranger to them.
4. Your Hashtags are Drowning You Out
Do you see a hashtag with 42M posts and think “Oooo, lot’s of people will see this post if I use this hashtag?”
If this sounds like you, please stop. Amount of posts doesn’t tell you how many people follow that hashtag, it tells you how much competition you have. First, decide on what a medium-sized hashtag looks like for your niche. Often, this number will be under or around 10K. Now, choose a couple of high-competition and super low-competition hashtags to mix in with your medium-sized hashtags. This will help your post actually get seen, rather than getting drowned out by all of the millions of other posts using those big hashtags.
5. Posting at the Wrong Times
If you post when all of your followers are sleeping like two people might see your post in that important time slot where Instagram decides whether or not your content is good and whether or not to push it out to more people.
Look at your insights to find out when your followers are the most active. This is your prime time to post for maximum visibility, maximum likes and the highest number of impressions possible.
I hope that these reasons for dropping engagement have been helpful to you. But, if your mystery of lost engagement remains unsolved, check out our Strategy Sessions where you can get personalized, one-on-one feedback on your Instagram strategy. Let us help you discover what could be improved and what awesome practices can be optimized to work even better for your business.
