Much like it happened to its big sister, Facebook, Instagram has also seen a steady decline in organic reach. If your business depends in the least on how many people see your content on Instagram, you’ve got two choices: start paying for ads or keep reading.
How to Improve Instagram Organic Reach: 4 Tested Ways
Turn on Sharing for Your Stories
This is a very quick fix to a very common problem: a lot of my agency’s clients have their stories sharing settings set up wrong, which means that even if people find them interesting enough to reshare, they won’t be able to.
Make sure yours are shareable – here’s how to do it. And, while you’re at it, don’t forget to ask people to share your stories every once in a while.
Use All the Post Formats on Instagram
Different post formats have different reaches. For example, these days you’ll get the best reach with reels because they are Instagram’s newest post format and their answer to TikTok. Before that, it used to be IGTV.
A good rule of thumb is to get on board with new post formats as soon as possible to get as much organic reach as possible before said format becomes mainstream and the feeds become overcrowded. A quick reminder of the type of posts you can create for Instagram:
- Feed posts that can consist of a single photo, carousels of photos, or short videos
- IGTV – for longer videos
- Reels
- Stories – don’t forget about the multiple options within stories, most of which encourage interactions and boost reach: AR lenses, polls, questions, fundraising tags, product tags, links, and others.
- Highlights
- Guides – collections of stories on the same topic.
- Live video streams – you can invite other accounts to join, too!
- Shopping – adding products just like in an eCommerce shop
Allow Remixing of Your Reels
Remember how I said that Reels are Instagram’s answer to TikTok? Well, you can use them exactly as you use a TikTok, if you enable their remixing.
This means that other people will be able to respond to your clip and create a duet where your two videos are shown side by side, for instance. This can significantly boost your organic reach and even get your content viral.
Encourage User-Generated Content
If you give people a reason to post about your brand, they will. The best way to get mentions or story re-shares is to create giveaways. But you can also:
- Mention other people in your posts (only if they are actually connected to it!). This will encourage them to share your post.
- Comment and interact with content that mentions you – always! It’s a form of reward and, in the end, a form of basic courtesy. A mention on Instagram is a sort of virtual “hey there!”, so it would be kind of rude to ignore it, right?
Wrapping Things Up
We tend to forget the most important part about social media: it’s supposed to be social. When you interact with other accounts, others interact with you, too, so you’ll pop up in more feeds.
As great as your Instagram content may be, it won’t make it into all the relevant feeds without a bit of help. Help it along its way – it’s not an easy one!
Need help with increasing your Instagram reach and gaining more followers the organic way? My team of expert social media marketers and I are just a click away. Let’s talk!
