Engage Your Instagram Following with the Right Content [Infographic]

If you focus on one social channel in 2015 it better be Instagram. With over 300 million active users and 3x more engagement than Twitter, it offers the richest opportunity for exposure and conversation around your brand.

The biggest problem with Instagram right now is content. Marketers are fumbling left and right trying to guess which content will yield the highest engagement. This results in a veritable buffet of options to sort through when it comes time to post. Should we go for videos? What about celebrity endorsements? Are “Calls to Action” actually working?

Luckily the latest Spredfast Social Report details a deep analysis of raw data to surface every answer to the Instagram content conundrum.

Some of the findings will genuinely surprise you, so get ready for a major shift from what you thought was working.

The Rules of Engagement

Having gone through the data of over 50 lead brands, Spredfast came to some surprising conclusions. The unequivocal leader in driving Instagram engagement turns out to be simply including a Call to Action within the text of the image description. This may surprise many marketers trying to avoid a direct approach on Instagram. They also found that Celebrity endorsements and product placement lead to a huge boost in engagement.

These results further supports the argument that brands utilizing more traditional direct marketing tactics on Instagram will generally see the best engagement numbers. Unsurprisingly, the data shows that overlaying text on an image can actually drop your engagement. The reason for this is as simple as the fact that Instagram is a visual channel. Thus, beautiful images that tell their own story without text will typically fare better.

The Science behind the Elements

Now that we know which elements drive engagement, the next step is finding the ideal mixture to include in your own feed. There really is no perfect answer here as the right formula will vary based on the brand and product. However, the report managed to break down both a winner and loser from the data analysis.

Spredfast concluded that simply including a Call to Action paired with a Celebrity endorsement  drove the most engagement out of 16 possible element combinations. The worst mistake a brand can make is including every possible element. This leads to confusing the audience with no clear path toward what they should be interacting with. Keeping things simple and memorable will lead to the largest engagement you’ve ever seen.

The insanely detailed report from Spredfast included so much more than I was able to outline here. They went as far as to break down the effectiveness of each possible element combination. The even took a revealing look at how video is performing on Instagram which honestly had me rethinking my own content strategy. Go, download the free report now to see their impressively useful insights for yourself.

Also a huge shoutout to our friends at Venngage whom helped create these stunning infographics. Be sure to check them out if you’d like the same on your site!

While Spredfast is a sponsor for this post, all opinions are true and our own.