Beyond trying to gain subscribers, it is crucial as part of your presence on Instagram to ensure that your posts are seen by as many users of the social network as possible.
This means that you should, in Instagram Terms, be looking to increase the coverage of your posts, that is, the number of unique people reach more Instagram followers for your photos & videos, and this can be achieved by a large number of your subscribers and followers. Learn here how to get 1k followers on Instagram in 5 minutes for free?
It doesn’t matter if you have 100 or 100,000 subscribers, you’ll want every piece of content you’ve spent time on to impact as many people as possible.
And the good news is, you have a lot of responsibility for increasing the coverage of your posts, using the right levers.
I will explain throughout this article how to make sure that your posts are displayed more in the news feeds of your subscribers, but also of other users with a potential interest in your content.
In other words, how can you be sure that your post is seen by as many subscribers as possible?
- Post at the best times according to the habits of your subscribers
This may sound like the basics when it comes to increasing the coverage of your Instagram posts, yet many users are still confused about the good times to be worth posting.
How do you really know when to publish your content on Instagram? Here are some ways to have a better visibility on this subject:
Observe the statistics of your professional profile in the “Audiences” section, in the “Subscribers” section, to have a view on the hours & days of your community’s connection:
Observe the publications with the best performance for the “From home” data, that is to say the number of times your publication is displayed to people who have subscribed to your account:
- Reference your posts with hashtags & places
The SEO and ID features that Instagram offers shouldn’t be overlooked in the goal of increasing the coverage of your posts.
In this second part, I take stock of the role of hashtags & places in this context.
Make good use of the potential of hashtags
Adding multiple hashtags to your posts is a well-known method of increasing their discoverability potential to new people.
However, it is never obvious to users how many hashtags to include in the captions of their posts, especially since many of them are not aware that the Shadowban phenomenon can seriously affect the development of their visibility.
Concretely, it is strongly recommended not to always use the same hashtags on your posts, because Instagram will identify you as a spammer, and will not display your posts to people searching for content by #.
How then to have a good use of Instagram hashtags?
I advise you to integrate a maximum of 9 & 12 hashtags per publication, always original. You can afford to add the same hashtags twice, maybe every 3-4 posts, to keep your risk as low as possible.
Here are 3 types of hashtags that come up often:
- Brand hashtags
- The hashtags describing the photo / video
- Hashtags relating to the company’s values
- To find new ideas, you can very well go through hashtag generators.
But however, should you choose popular Instagram hashtags or niche hashtags?
We mean popular hashtags: these are the threads of hundreds of thousands or millions of posts, which would make your content appear within seconds to visitors of those hashtags.
Instead, I advise you to have a strategy of qualified hashtags, used maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of times, with a real chance of being discovered by people with a strong interest in what you have posted.
You can then, without any problem, decide to hide your hashtags , that is to say, place them in the first comment of your Instagram post.
For better readability, I also advise you to add black bullets between the caption of your post and your hashtags.
The place: an often forgotten opportunity
When you arrive at the caption editing screen for your post, it is possible to add a location, in order to let users know where the content was produced.
It sometimes happens that there are several submissions for the same place, which means that users have identified their posts with different Instagram places (but which in the end correspond to the same real place).
My advice, in this case, is to select the one that stands out first in the results, because it is the one that users will automatically come across when they search.
- Increase your chances of appearing in the “Explore” section
Once Instagram users have finished consuming the publications & Stories of their subscriptions, they often go to the “Explore” section , that is to say the screen accessible by clicking on the small magnifying glass at the bottom on the left of the application.
The big question to ask yourself when marketing on Instagram is then: how to appear in this infinite list of content, and what are the criteria used by the social network to select certain publications?
First of all, you have to understand one thing: it is impossible for two users to have the exact same content suggestions, because the algorithm analyzes the behavior of each of them:
- liked publications
- the time spent looking at publications on the same topic or including specific hashtags
- the sectors / domains of the Instagram accounts that we follow
It is very interesting to note that the update of this section, when there is a variation in the content consumed by a person, is done in real time.
Without wanting to, you have an impact on the suggestions made in the “Explore” section, and the purpose of the network is simple here: to keep you as long as possible consuming publications on a topic that interests you.
Knowing this, how do you adapt and appear in this section?
Here are some ideas:
- Post content with the same hashtags as competing accounts displayed on “Explore”
- Ensure that you get as many interactions as possible (likes, comments, recordings) as quickly as possible, because it shows a strong interest from subscribers
- Share your posts in Instagram Story
If you didn’t know it yet, it is possible to give your content more visibility by sharing it in your Story.
To do this, you simply need to click on the “small paper airplane” icon at the bottom of each of the photos & videos of your posts, then click on “Add a publication to your Story”.
Then, all the classic options for customizing your Story will be offered to you so that you can add text, hashtags, places and filters.
Once published, the Story allows you to give a second life to your publication, which for many reasons had not been seen by the subscribers of your account:
- they weren’t connected when you posted
- they do not look at the classic publications but only the Stories
- To better master the features of Stories, I invite you to consult my complete guide on the subject.
- Optimize your content & captions to promote sharing in private messages
Adding hashtags and a place to your post is a good thing, but it is important to think about your content so that it generates a maximum of private shares, and thus is discovered by new people, that is to say not subscribed to your account.
In this context, you must therefore think about the real added value of your content, which should not be a simple promotion of a product / service, but of a publication having an impact on the daily life of people high enough to be worthy of ‘ to be shared.
Put yourself in the shoes of your subscribers and ask yourself the question: in which cases would they be led to think “This post is great, I absolutely have to send it to my best friends”?
This can happen because you just posted:
- a consumption suggestion
- a useful tip
- an inspirational quote
- humorous happy
- etc …
To dig into this subject, I invite you to read my article: 20 ideas for marketing publications to post on Instagram .
- Bypass Instagram algorithm for more visibility
You probably know this: to reach more Instagram followers has developed an algorithm , that is, a computer program that sorts the posts you receive in your news feed.
If it was not active, you could be inundated with content from your subscriptions, resulting in a bad user experience.
So, knowing this, the coverage of your posts can be drastically impacted positively or negatively depending on how this algorithm perceives your account.
How to be well seen by it?
Here are some ideas:
- favor publications with a strong ability to generate interactions
- use the Poll , Question , Quiz and CountdownStories stickers
- Boost your posts with Instagram advertising
The last step is the most drastic if you don’t get the results you want when it comes to your post coverage: advertising.
This can be set up in two different ways:
- From the application via the individual publication boost
- From the Facebook Business Manager
- In the first case, this is the simplest solution to reach new people in a targeted way: you will only be offered a few simple steps to complete to determine the objective, target and budget to allocate to the campaign. It only takes a few minutes to upload your first sponsorship campaign.
In the second case, it will be a question of going through a more sophisticated, more professional and essential module for the Community Managers.
Beyond boosting an already posted publication, it is possible to create an advertisement with unposted content, which opens up the field of possibilities.
It is also offered the functionality to retarget personalized audiences, that is to say people who have already heard of you either by visiting your website, by interacting to reach more Instagram followers & Facebook posts or being part of a file. ’email addresses.
