EPISODE 3 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: HOW TO TACKLE THE INSTAGRAM ENGAGEMENT DECLINE (BYE LIKES!)

Instagram organic rating engagement got you down? Let's tackle this head on. I'll take you through the strategies we're using with our class to get some great results at the moment. Hello. Ah, Instagram, I feel like this has been the flavor of the month for the past two years. As you know, Instagram has recently removed likes, and as of a couple of days ago, Facebook too. Now you're probably listening to this weeks down the track, so interested to hear whether or not you are seeing an impact from these changes. Now I'm not actually totally devastated about any of this, and let me tell you why. In my opinion likes are just a vanity metric. They don't equal money in the bank, and it's the same with your follower account. Also, just quietly, I think Instagram has done this, so we don't as obviously notice the declining engagement across the platform. It's definitely heading down the same path as Facebook is in terms of reach and engagement, but that's another story for another episode.

So change is a happening. What can we do about it? Look, at the end of the day, we do not own these social media platforms or our followers. Instagram, was always going to move towards a monetization model. It's unrealistic to expect the virality you could experience on Insta three or four years ago, without some form of paid ad spend. Even for influencer marketing now, they're not reaching as many of their followers, so it takes a lot more posts and collabs to actually get in front of an audience organically. Here's my advice to you to minimize the impact of the changes and maximize your visibility.

 One, make use of all the tools that Instagram is offering you. Whenever a new feature or function is introduced, Instagram will push that hard and reward those early adopters using it. So at the moment, it's really a focus on Instagram TV. In mid July, Insta actually started giving us the ability to include a preview of Instagram TV on the grid, and in people's normal Insta feeds. To be honest with you, prior to this, I totally avoided Instagram TV. I never watched them and I certainly had that mindset of "Well, if I don't watch them, why would I waste my time creating them for others who might not watch them?" Anyone else guilty of doing this with social media? Once I saw this change and with how they're appearing though, I noticed so many of them popping up on my fade. I did jump on board the bandwagon. I've done a few now, ideally I want to work in a weekly Instagram TV episode into my feed, because the views and comments have been awesome. They've also been seen so much more than my regular grid posts, and they allow me to add so much more value than I do in a ten second Instagram story.

Tip number two, move the focus away from everything being super curated and beautiful. Show the real behind the scenes messiness of your life and business. I think if you haven't heard of Celeste Barber, you're living under a rock. She is real, and raw, and hilarious. We want that in our lives, not the perfect model, making us feel bad about ourselves. I think we're becoming more and more work... I can't believe I just said work, when it comes to real life versus social media life. Embrace it and show your personality. I think this is a real advantage we have over large corporations, or small to medium sized businesses.

Number three captions. A one sentence caption, just does not cut it anymore. It's not going to stop my scroll and get me to engage with you. Tell me a story, share something interesting, give me something valuable, be vulnerable, you get the idea. Posts that gets saved, using that little triangle icon thingy, are deemed important by Instagram and you'll be boosted up in the feed. So while people may appear to be lurking more, if they are saving your Instagram posts, then Instagram recognizes that this is something that they want to see and is valuable, and they'll reward you for that.

Number four, start a conversation. Specifically make use of the Instagram Stories stickers of, ask me a question and join a chat. Also DMs are where it's at, at the moment. I have heard so many business owners complain about all the ways that people will now contact them. Yes, you can reminisce about the good old days where people would just call up directly, but the reality is we're getting busier than ever and people are hesitant to stop what they're doing, leave the platform and then pick up the phone to contact you.

Make it easy for your customer. Yes, you could be getting emails, submissions from your contact form on your website, phone calls, Instagram DMs, Facebook messages, Facebook comments, texts and so on, but you need to accommodate this. If you can keep people on the platform and communicate with them through DMs, that's great. That's what Instagram wants. They want to keep people on the platform, because more eyes on the platform equals more advertising dollars for them. Give the customer what they want. So Instagram counts this as engagement, if you are DMing people, and starting that conversation from a story is a really easy way to make this happen. In short, for the love of dog please respond to your Instagram DMs and comments.

Number five, don't forget to add hashtags to your Instagram Stories. Yep, stories are now searchable by hashtags too. Every little bit helps. And to make it non spammy, you can make them super small or even make the text the same color as the background so people don't even know they're in there.

And finally, explore some paid advertising and promotions. You might decide to create an ad that shows your content to anyone that visits your website, or even your existing followers. You won't need a large budget for this. These people already warm, they already know who you are and they've heard of you. Even just $5 a day is a great way to reach these people. It's far more expensive and far less effective to reach new people. So why not work on nurturing what you've already built organically. To do this, I like to set up the ads as an engagement in the back end of Facebook Ads Manager. Make sure you select the placement as Instagram only and turn off the Stories placement. It's my pet hate when I see Instagram Story Ads that aren't actually in the right format, I just flipped straight past them. All right. I hope that has helped give you some tips around tackling the latest Instagram engagement decline. Thanks for listening guys. See ya.