12 Nov The Best 3 Ways To Get Engagement On Your Instagram Posts

In my experience building passionate communities for restaurants on Instagram, there are three key things that I’ve learned that you need to do to drive engagement on your Instagram.

Firstly – if you’re not already, you want to start getting involved with video – like it or not it’s the future of everything. It’s actually really easy to get started, and I think the easiest way is just to commit once a week to making a five-second video of you just making a little food porn video playing around with your food. Another tip that I really like is every time you do a story on Instagram, for your first story, just record a fifteen-second selfie of you introducing the video, and that’s a really easy, low-risk way to get you more comfortable with making video.

The second thing is photos. How Instagram today is, if your photos aren’t great, unfortunately, you’re not going to do well on Instagram and it could even do more harm than good. But don’t worry, it’s easy to get good photos. The most important thing is you need a good phone camera, and these days, that’s going to be a phone camera with a dual lens. They’re not cheap, but it’s an investment you’re going to have to make if you want to be on Instagram, and it really does make a huge difference.

The other thing is when you’re shooting. Make natural light your friend because your photos will look so much better in natural light, and if for whatever reason, you’re in a dark place, there isn’t much natural light, then you can invest in an artificial light which on Amazon, costs twenty pounds. That’s really affordable and doable.

The last thing is to always edit your photos. There’s a load of free apps out there, like Snapseed, that you can use on your phone. It takes twenty minutes to learn, very easy. So always edit photos so they can pop off the feed.

As I always say, if you want to be engaging on Instagram, always be engaging. And what I mean by that is on every post, always think about how are you going to be able to get a response and here’s a really simple way to do that. At the end of every post, just ask a question to try and start a conversation and have some posts based entirely around setting out an opinion and asking people’s responses. The more interesting and genuine the question, the better the level of response.

It takes a bit of practise to come up with great questions but the only way is to start, so start asking questions and don’t sweat the details!

I hope you found those three tips helpful. I know they’ve really worked for me. And if you just start with those, you’re going to be well on your way to building a passionate community and really standing out from your competition.