Instagram has an algorithm, do you?

It’s no surprise that Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms, and people spend the most time on Instagram than any other platform. If you are looking to up your Instagram game, we have a few suggestions for your page that can increase your engagement.

Social Insider conducted a study analyzing almost 7.5 million Instagram posts to come up with a formula for creating the most engaging Instagram post.  This is the place where most people spend their social media time, so by following this equation, you can plan to create more engaging posts that lead to an increase in followers and visibility for your brand.

More content means higher engagement.  If you think you should be posting more, then it is time to check out Instagram’s new scheduling feature and create more posts for your calendar.  Here at HMA, we post on our Instagram five to six times per week. We do this not only because we want to keep our followers engaged, but because we are writers and want to share our expertise.

Pages that post more frequent on a consistent basis have and retain more followers.  If you have the budget and resources to create more content, it is worth it to post more.  More followers and higher engagement!
A picture is worth a thousand words – isn’t that why Instagram was created in the first place? When posting content, you have a few options: a photo, a carousel (multiple photos in one post) and a video.  The most popular posts are single photos and carousel posts.  It’s more about the content of the image than the words in the caption because the most engaging posts have captions fewer than ten words.

To complete the formula for the most engaging Instagram posts, you would need to incorporate at least 20 emojis to supplement your ten worded caption.  This by far is the strangest finding, but it makes sense once explained.

The most used emojis on Instagram are the ones that convey happiness and love such as the heart eyes.  This means that brands and influencers are using positive emojis to help convey who they are as a person and how they feel towards their content.  Another reason for this could be that the use of emojis humanizes the post.  Don’t be afraid to over-do it with emojis so long as you are portraying positive emotion.