Easy ways to make your Instagram content more engaging right now 

Thanks to its one billion strong user base, Instagram is often cited as being the holy grail of social media success for brands. Standing out as a small business can be hard though – not only do you have limited time and resources to pour into your social media, you’re more unlikely to have high profile celebrity influencers pushing your products and winning you followers.

Superstar influencers like Kylie Jenner are said to command around half a million pounds per post . Even accounts not in that league charge several hundred to several thousand pounds for sponsored collaborations meaning you’ll probably have to find other avenues to grow your social following. That means you’ll want your content to be the best it can be and speak for itself.Read on to find out how you can make it more share-worthy, comment-worthy and like-worthy right now. 1. Use Stories Stories are one of Instagram’s most popular features – so much so that the average time spent in the app increased by 8 minutes in tandem with the launch of this feature. Stories generate lots of views and engagement and are also thought to drive more direct messages, so you can theoretically use Stories as a means to generate more communication with your followers.Using Stories is as easy as uploading an image or video as a standard post, doesn’t require any special tools or add-ons and takes no extra time. Plus, you can use your existing content as the basis for a Story so there’s no reason at all not to try your hand at this today. 2. Be an active user This is another really easy tip to implement but one that can make a big difference. Comment on other posts (from your business account) and like and reply to comments on other photos. By engaging yourself, you’re currying favour with the Insta algorithm. Where you reply and your comment gets responses and likes, it gets shown to more people – which in turn leads to more clicks and views of your own account profile. Another benefit of this is that the more content you consumer, the more inspiration you’ll come across for your own posts. Plus, you’ll start to see what kind of content is successful. To implement this tip, all you need to do is start scrolling. 3. Mix up your posting times While the Insta community is very active, not everyone is on the app all the time. Experimenting with different posting times will give you concrete evidence as to when the best time to post is. Again, this is something you can try right now. Schedule your posts for the coming week at a range of different times and record which time slots get the most likes and comments. 4. Repost content If your product is tagged in a post by a different user, re-share that content on your profile. You can download apps to make this process easier. Encourage others to tag you in images with your product, service or at your location and watch your engagement build.