The New Rules of Instagram Growth: Why Engagement Matters More Than Ever

The last several years have seen Instagram experience a major transformation. A site that once just featured visual content and creativity has now become essential for brands, businesses, and creators. Yet, because Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users and over 130 million photos uploaded each day, being on Instagram alone is not enough to make you noticeable. The main focus of the new rules is on engaging your audience, which means you should understand them better.

This article analyzes why Instagram is becoming more important and what strategies startups, marketers, and entrepreneurs can use to succeed.

The Rise of the Algorithm

Gone are the days when Instagram operated on a chronological feed. Since 2016, posts have been ordered based on an ever-evolving algorithm calculating "relevance." This essentially increases the visibility to content that a specific user is likely to enjoy, react to, comment on, or share.

In other words, the algorithm favors engagement. And its impact cannot be underestimated. The average Instagram post only reaches 7% of one's followers—a significant drop from a few years ago. So, even if you have a large following, low engagement leads to low reach.

Consequently, the focus has shifted from vanity metrics like follower counts to engagement metrics like likes, comments, saves, shares, story replies, and time spent viewing content. These signals to the algorithm that followers are genuinely interested. Insights from reviews on Path Social, a popular Instagram growth service, also highlight this shift in priorities. Many users report that sustainable growth is closely tied to how well content performs in terms of real engagement, rather than simply increasing follower numbers.

Know Thy Audience

Nowadays, understanding your customers’ preferences, problems, and what they value plays a vital role in achieving success. It is crucial to share content that engages people and promotes communication.

Even now, various brands create content and release it without thinking about who will use it. This approach is no longer good enough.

Instagram’s growth of small communities makes this demand even stronger. If you’re targeting busy mothers, yogis, or wealthy travelers, your content and efforts to build a community should be highly focused.

Strategies to Boost Engagement

We've established that raw follower numbers no longer guarantee reach or sales. You could have 50k inactive followers and be outperformed by someone with an engaged 5k audience. Here are 5 proven tactics to ignite genuine engagement:

Lean Into Instagram Stories and Reels

Instagram actively steers users towards these immersive, full-screen formats, which lend themselves seamlessly to engagement. Creative polls, questions, stickers, links, and interactive countdowns can all catalyze comments and shares.

What's more, viewers subconsciously equate disappearing content with exclusivity and urgency to respond. So, leverage these psychological drivers through ephemeral content, people feel they’ll “miss out” on if they don’t react quickly.

Optimize Hashtags Strategically

Hashtags remain invaluable discovery tools, enabling content to surface to interested audiences without existing followers. Yet generic tags like #startup or #entrepreneur attract lots of competition.

Instead, identify specific pain points and desires that you alleviate for customers. If you sell productivity software for developers, go beyond #programming to hashtags like #codelife, #devlife, and #programmerfuel. Tools like Path Social's Hashtag Generator analyze performance data to suggest optimal tags.

Reward Loyal Followers

The Pareto Principle applies strongly on social media: roughly 80% of your engagement comes from 20% of followers. So, show extra love to those superfans.

Spotlight their user-generated content (UGC) in stories or feed posts. Reply to their comments and questions. Offer exclusive behind-the-scenes content or special discounts to power users who consistently like, comment, and amplify your brand. Building a community of brand loyalists pays dividends.

Collaborate With Micro-Influencers

Influencer marketing remains a formidable Instagram growth strategy in 2023. But rather than splurging on celebs, tap into micro and niche influencers with highly engaged, targeted audiences.

If you sell yoga apparel, collaborate with yoga bloggers in different cities. For a travel startup, work with geotagged wanderlusters. Aligning with relevant voices who actively converse with their fans around shared interests sparks ripple effects.

Interact, Don’t Broadcast

Finally, adopt a conversational tone that invites engagement. Pose intriguing questions. Launch live Q&As. Encourage users to tag friends who'd find posts useful.

Essentially, enable two-way dialogue instead of a one-way broadcast. This builds community, retains audiences better than push advertising, and provides invaluable first-party data on what content resonates.

The Power of AI and Automation

Executing an engagement-centric Instagram strategy requires resources that many solopreneurs, small business owners, and time-crunched marketers lack. Thankfully, artificial intelligence and automation tools have unlocked new growth possibilities.

Path Social is a pioneering platform using AI to drive results. Their suite of free planning and analytics tools provides actionable Instagram insights without the need for coding skills or data analysts. Users of any level can:

• Uncover optimal hashtags and captions for engagement.
• Download competitors' top-performing content.
• Benchmark performance against industry standards.
• Identify follower interests to inform content topics.
• Audit accounts for fake followers hampering reach.

These insights then power Path Social's core service: an AI-powered influencer network. Their algorithm precisely matches brands with influencers who create content that their target audiences are highly likely to enjoy and engage with.

By eliminating guesswork, their clients gain relevant followers, likes, and story replies from ideal customers, not bots or inactive accounts. One beauty startup using Path Social gained over 2500 targeted followers per month, increased their engagement rate by 32% in 3 months, and made over $40k in sales attributed to the platform.

The Future of Instagram

With Instagram growing into a large community, knowing how to use engagement metrics instead of vanity ones is very important. Startups and entrepreneurs who create content that caters to specific groups will have an advantage over others.

Meanwhile, making use of AI-powered tools allows small brands to compete equally with large companies. Those brands that follow Instagram’s new rules will likely achieve steady growth and better profits. Amidst the noise, forming real relationships beats everything else.