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Instagram, the leading multimedia-oriented social media platform, is a goldmine for marketers worldwide. With its vast reach, the platform has become a powerful tool for connecting new audiences.
Did you know:
A staggering 83% of Instagram users report discovering new products and services on the platform.
When it comes to engagement, Instagram is a front-runner.
Around 200 million users visit at least one business profile daily, and 130 million users interact with shopping posts. This indicates a plethora of opportunities for businesses that consistently produce engaging Instagram content to expand and retain their audience.
Creating a diverse range of posts that resonate with your target audience is crucial. Your audience needs to be intrigued and entertained to leave a lasting impression.
So, let’s dive into 15 Instagram post ideas that can supercharge your engagement.
15 Must-Try Instagram Post Ideas
Let’s take a look at 15 Instagram post ideas you can try out to boost your business’s engagement.
1. Embrace Behind-the-Scenes Content
Sharing behind-the-scenes content is a fantastic way to build your brand on Instagram. It doesn’t require a massive investment of time or resources, yet it can be incredibly effective.
The beauty of behind-the-scenes content?
It fosters audience trust by revealing a more personal side of your business. As demonstrated by the Helmut Newton Foundation, it can also generate excitement around upcoming events or projects.
Behind-the-scenes content allows you to introduce your team, share your aspirations, and exhibit your brand’s personality in a more relaxed manner. This can lay the foundation for a stronger brand identity.
How do you generate behind-the-scenes content ideas?
Consider your customer profile and what your existing customers say about your brand.
Are there aspects of your brand that are sparking online discussions? Is there anticipation building for a new product or service?
You can quickly and effectively engage your audience by offering a sneak peek into popular aspects of your business.
2. Optimize User-Generated Content
For brands with an active user community, user-generated content (UGC) can be a powerful tool for boosting engagement and driving conversions on Instagram. UGC is not only easy for businesses to use, but it also serves as excellent social proof for customers.
Did you know:
Studies have shown that UGC can increase click-through rates by 400% and conversion rates by 8.5%. Additionally, UGC can lead to a 20% increase in returning visitors.
Take McDonald’s, for example. Their use of UGC, combined with humor, has garnered significant audience engagement. However, this self-deprecating approach might not suit brands aiming for a more serious, prestigious image.
While not all brands receive daily UGC, you can still encourage content from your followers. Consider hosting competitions where users post content about your product or invite followers to share memes or discuss a fun but divisive topic.
The effectiveness of UGC lies in its ability to serve as social proof. Instead of just hearing from your brand, your audience gets to consume content their peers produce.
3. Utilize Inspirational Quotes that Resonate
Inspirational quotes are another simple yet effective Instagram post idea. Sharing quotes that resonate with your audience can be impactful, especially when posted in the right context.
Author and self-help podcaster, Mel Robbins, provides a great example of how to use inspirational quotes effectively. She not only shares attributed quotes but also encourages discussion on the topic in her post comments.
By inviting her followers to share their thoughts and like the post if it resonates with them, Robbins has garnered over 58,000 likes on a quote in less than two days. By monitoring the number of likes each quote receives, she can refine her selection process to be even more impactful in the future.
Building on the example above, consider diving deeper and to take data-driven decisions for quotes, hashtags, and more with SocialPilot’s Instagram Analytics. This platform allows you to analyze and monitor audience behavior, post-performance, and even hashtag efficacy for your Instagram Business accounts.
With detailed metrics on audience demographics, followers’ activity data, and insights into the best times to post, SocialPilot equips you to make informed decisions.
4. Boost Engagement with Contests and Giveaways
Especially for small businesses, contests and giveaways can be a powerful strategy to enhance audience engagement and establish an online presence.
As demonstrated in the example above, offering a prize to a lucky winner can motivate users to engage in activities like tagging a friend, following your page, and liking your post.
While this approach involves giving away a product for free, your prizes can vary in scale. Depending on your reach, they could even be a shoutout, a free consultation, or a lunch date with a founder.
So, where do you start?
Creating a competition is a relatively straightforward way to generate engaging content without needing to think too far outside the box. By following the right formula, you can significantly increase your follower count in a short period.
5. Engage Your Audience with Polls and Quizzes
Polls and quizzes can be an excellent way to maximize your engagement potential. There are numerous ways to use quizzes for Instagram post ideas, and inviting users to comment their answers can drive substantial engagement.
For instance, Pringles used interactive stickers to create quizzes where users could answer questions about the brand within the platform’s Stories function.
A great Instagram Story post idea is creating quizzes or polls on the platform and adding them to Stories. Simply select either the quiz, poll, or questions functions from the list of elements to add to a story and build an engaging post from there.
A great way to build audience trust through this approach is to ask questions about your business, its heritage, and any potentially fascinating facts for users.
6. Explore the Power of Collaborations or Shoutouts
Instagram has become a hub for collaborations, with added functionality to share posts more efficiently between brands and influencers.
Surprisingly…
Statistics show that influencer marketing is increasingly popular, with 61% of social media users stating that they trust influencer recommendations, compared to just 38% claiming to trust branded content.
Take this post from Zachariah Porter on behalf of Dunkin’ Donuts as an example.
Paid partnerships can result in influencer posts appearing directly on the profile of the represented company. They can also draw significant traffic, with more than 41,000 likes generated in a week—a total that has already surpassed the 17 posts published by Dunkin’ prior.
7. Make the Most of Educational Content
Creating educational content is another effective way to build audience trust.
As demonstrated by Walmart, educational content can take the form of tips, tricks, how-tos, or other relevant and intriguing content that aligns with your industry niche.
This Instagram post idea’s beauty is that it adds value to your audience and demonstrates your ability to provide useful information.
Next, you can consider:
8. Launch a Product Teaser Campaign
Sometimes, the ideal Instagram post doesn’t need to provide a wealth of new information to generate buzz.
As shown in this post from PlayStation, a simple reminder to your followers about an upcoming product or service launch can generate significant engagement.
This strategy requires minimal time and resources, yet a simple countdown to a new product launch can be an excellent way to generate excitement for a key event for your brand.
9. Repurpose Customer Testimonials and Reviews
Similar to the power of user-generated content, repurposing customer testimonials and reviews can be a great way to post Instagram content that serves as strong social proof.
An interesting example?
McDonald’s clearly shows how to repurpose customer testimonials engagingly in the image below. In this case, the fast-food giant used a positive post about a seasonal product to announce its return to the menu.
Take your positive user reviews and build a context around them that can amount to more than just sharing positive audience sentiment. Use their feedback to announce that a popular product is back in stock or that a service is being enhanced.
10. Build Content to Win Seasonal Appeal
Seasonal content, while having a relatively short shelf life, can significantly boost engagement by tapping into the season’s excitement.
Look at this beautifully crafted post from Waterstones, which combines a seasonal image with a heartwarming book quote. It appeals directly to customers in an authentic, non-corporate way.
Additionally, seasonal posts can be used to promote relevant products that experience varying levels of customer interest throughout the year.
How do you better understand when your products could experience seasonal demand?
Consider using Google Trends. This tool can help you identify when searches peak for certain goods and services, allowing you to time your seasonal promotions effectively.
11. Themed Posts or Series can be Great Recurring Content
Themed posts or series can be a great way to latch onto trends and develop a recurring content feature for followers to enjoy regularly.
For instance, eco-friendly retailer Alex and Ani use the hashtag #MondayMotivation to showcase their product alongside a motivational quote. This approach provides a more accessible way of promoting products while engaging in popular trends.
Other recurring hashtags that have gained popularity on Instagram include #ThrowbackThursday, which typically involves sharing images or posts from the past, and #FollowFriday, which can help brands share their key collaborations or sister companies with their followers.
Moreover, to further enhance the effectiveness of themed posts or series, tools like SocialPilot’s AI Assistant can be invaluable. With the AI Assistant, you can automatically generate relevant hashtags tailored to your content, ensuring you tap into trending conversations and maximize your post’s reach.
12. Remember to Ask Questions
Some businesses overlook that their Instagram followers can be a large-scale focus group for ideas and insights. Therefore, asking questions can bring many benefits to brands.
Once again, McDonald’s provides a prime example of how to pose questions to followers in an engaging way.
In the example above, McDonald’s is gaining free insight into its most popular former menu item—potentially paving the way for a successful reissue. These types of Instagram post ideas can be structured so marketers gain valuable feedback on market sentiment towards products or services.
For businesses seeking to boost customer engagement by asking questions, consider what thought-provoking questions you could ask.
Are there any divisive topics surrounding your industry?
Could you gain insight into potential product improvements?
You might be surprised at how asking useful questions can generate audience engagement as well as valuable consumer insights.
13. Showcase Your Company Culture
Looking for Instagram post ideas for businesses? Here’s a good one.
Instagram is an excellent platform to showcase your company culture. As a public-facing facet of your business, it’s the perfect tool for shaping your image for your customers or clients. It’s ideal for sharing insights into your working environment, team members, and company events.
For instance, COR Development Company has used its platform to introduce followers to core team members, providing a write-up about their role and thanking them for their service. This approach can be mutually beneficial both internally and externally. Your employees can view these posts as public recognition for their good performance.
14. Utilize Trending Topics to Your Advantage
Social media platforms like Instagram thrive on memes and trending topics. This provides businesses with the invaluable opportunity to create viral posts that latch onto these trends. For creative marketing teams, utilizing viral content to engage your followers is perfect for entertaining your audience.
Who did this well?
Waterstones, for example, was one of many brand social media accounts that opted to latch onto viral promotional content for the Barbie movie by repurposing it to cover popular book authors.
Relevance is key for this type of Instagram post idea. By finding creative ways to repurpose memes to suit your industry and target audience, you’re more likely to create a buzz around your posts.
And our final Instagram post idea is:
15. Cover Before-and-After Transformations
Before-and-after transformations can be a great way of showing the positive impact of your products or services. Here, you can juxtapose old and new content to present how your brand can help solve problems visually.
This content is excellent for brands that offer services, like Vanpuravida, which posts content showing how it provides makeovers for camper vans.
The beauty of this content is that it’s easy to utilize for marketers and can provide a positive contrast for the impact of products.
All these amazing ideas, but you know one thing you must get on board with?
A good social media management tool!
Maximizing Instagram Post Engagement With SocialPilot
So, you’re armed with a treasure trove of fantastic Instagram post ideas, but you might be wondering, how do you manage all of this effectively? How do you ensure that each post is timed perfectly, reaches the right audience, and truly engages your followers?
Enter SocialPilot, a comprehensive social media marketing tool that can take your Instagram strategy to the next level.
