To watch the full Instagram Live, click here!
In case you missed it, I’ve started doing Instagram Lives once a week or so, where I talk through things I’m experiencing on Social Media right now and tips I think could help you.
I’ve recently recovered my atrocious Instagram Story views – seriously they were dire. Barely anyone was watching after I neglected them and relied solely on soulless scheduled stories.
Scheduling stories have their place, and I’ll be doing a later Live all about that, but it’s definitely not to be 100% relied upon, you can’t use the stickers available, which means less interaction, which means reduced viewership. I was active, but I was not present.
So how did I turn that around?
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I posted in the moment. Remember that people are nosy, they want to see your messy desk, that you’re working on the sofa, what you get up to on your days off. Of course everyone has their boundaries regarding personal content, but if you get creative there’s plenty you can share in the moment.
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Using stickers. As I said before, not using them caused my engagement to plummet. They’re the easiest way for your audience to show interest in your content, so in future Instagram will show it to more people, eventually resulting in an increased viewership.
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I posted content anyone can reply or relate to. If I constantly post solely about Social Media Management, the only people who are going to read or respond are those who are right ‘there’ and ready to buy. That’s a tiny, tiny percentage of my audience and it alienates everybody else. By posting relatable content about my business as a whole, being a mum, being a woman etc… people can easily respond because they can relate and because they don’t think they’re walking into a sales pitch.
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I genuinely involved other accounts. One of the most annoying things on Social Media is being needlessly tagged in something purely for views. No thank you. But where I can authentically tag another business, for instance if I’m visiting them, if I’m sharing their content, if I know we’ve spoken about this topic already. Then they’re notified, and hopefully they’ll share it back.
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I go through my own feed and start the conversation myself! I’m a huge believer that if you crave something, you have to offer it yourself. So if you’re wishing for interaction but you’re not interacting yourself…. then you see the issue. Get onto your feed and reply (again, authentically) to people’s stories. Then Instagram will share your content to them, they’ll be more inclined to interact with your stories, and so on and so forth. Honestly this is possibly the thing which made the biggest difference.
I hope these help, it’s not a quick process for sure – it takes longer to build your viewership back up than it does to lose it in the first place, but hopefully it’s good to know that it’s not impossible!