When it comes to social media, it’s important to be – you guessed it – social. In addition to being social with other people’s accounts, it’s key to encourage that social engagement on your own content. But on a fast-paced, quick-scrolling platform like Instagram, how do you capture people’s attention so that they stop the scroll and engage with your posts? I’m sharing 5 CTAs to improve your Instagram post engagement.

But first, let’s take a step back and look at engagement as a whole.

Types of Engagement

To understand why it’s important, it’s crucial to understand what the different types of engagement are on Instagram. When it comes to feed posts, engagement typically falls into a few key actions:

• Likes
• Comments
• Saves 
• Shares
• Video Views

Depending on your overall social media and company goals, the engagement you prioritize may vary. For instance, if you’re aiming to build brand awareness, shares are an important metric to track because the more your content is shared, the more eyes you’ll likely get on it. 

Why Engagement Matters

You probably hear social media managers and marketing experts talk about building an engaged social media community often. That’s because engagement is an important way to build your following and nurture those followers into customers and brand advocates. 

Whether you’re a blogger looking to build credibility with your audience so you can secure more brand deals or a business owner looking to increase sales, that nurture of followers into customers/advocates is key.

You can use Instagram feed engagement to do this in a few ways, including:

• Creating conversations with your audience so you can strengthen your relationship with them
• Identifying content that resonates with your audience so you can create more of it
• Uncovering FAQs and questions from your audience so you can answer them
• Showing you the products/services your followers love so you can sell more of them
• Increasing brand awareness so you keep your customers coming back for more
• Boosting your overall reach so more potential customers find you

But engagement doesn’t just come overnight. It’s important to use cues and encourage the engagement you’re looking for.

5 CTAs to Improve Your Instagram Engagement

So, how do you encourage your followers to engage with your content? It boils down to something so simple that it’s often overlooked.

Tell them what you want them to do.

As people scroll through Instagram, it can be easy to move on auto-pilot. They see a post, double-tap, and don’t even think about the countless other options they have for engaging with your content. This is why it’s important to give them a gentle nudge in the direction you want them to go.

To do this, it’s important to use a CTA, or a call-to-action. A CTA is a marketing term for an instruction on what action you want your audience to take. For instance, a button is a form of CTA. 

With Instagram feed posts, you can use space on your images or put lines in your caption that signal what actions you want your audience to take. 

Here are 5 examples of CTAs to help you boost your Instagram feed post engagement.

Double-tap if you agree

This is an easy way to garner likes because it’s a low barrier of entry. The easier you make your CTA, the more likely people are to engage. By including a statement or opinion on your post graphic or upfront in your copy, you can easily direct your audience to share their input as well. 

Similarly to double-tap if you agree, you can ask people to double-tap if they love a new product you’re highlighting or if they are planning to do something.

Drop an (emoji) if you agree

Just like the double-tap to agree CTA, asking your followers to drop a specific emoji if they agree with your opinion is an easy way to draw in engagement. It can be especially fun for your audience when the emoji play into the post content itself. 

If you run a boba shop, you may ask your followers to drop the boba emoji if they love boba in their milk tea.

Are you team X or team Y?

This CTA is great for polling your audience because it’s a simple this or that question. It can be as simple as asking if people are team coffee or team tea in an introductory or meet the team type post, or you can use it to learn more about what products your followers like most.

For instance, if you’re working on a new product launch, you might ask people which color or style they prefer. Alternatively, you may poll your audience to learn more about if they prefer when you go live in the morning or afternoon.

If we’re sticking to our boba shop example, you may poll your audience to see if they’re team milk tea or team fruit tea.

Tag a friend who…

I love this CTA because it’s a great way to attract non-followers to your page. The only caveat, you need a good reason to encourage tagging!

There are a few ways this can play out depending on the content type:

• Educational posts: Tag a friend who needs to hear this too.
• Inspirational posts: Tag a friend to send them a sweet reminder too.
• Product posts: Tag a friend you’d share this with.

Let’s pretend our boba shop is doing a BOGO offer for the weekend. They may end their post with the CTA “tag your boba date” or “tag who you’d share your BOGO with” to help encourage engagement while spreading the word about their weekend promotional offer.

Save this post for when you (insert reasoning)

I love this CTA for educational posts, though you can use it for other content as well. Encouraging your audience to save a post helps let you know if a piece of content is valuable to them over time.

What do I mean by that?

If I’m creating a post with a valuable Instagram tip or how-to, I’ll use the CTA to “save this post for what to do when” an event happens. I can then see how many people saved that post and use those insights to gauge if the post content has long-term relevancy for my audience. If the likes-to-saves ratio is high, I know this topic is important to my followers. If it’s low, I know the content isn’t that important to them long-term.

To keep up with our boba shop, if they do a post with a special flavor or secret menu item, they might encourage followers to save the post for the next time they stop in.

Start growing your Instagram post engagement

Whether you’re asking people to double-tap, drop an emoji, or something other than these 5 altogether, the important thing is to just start encouraging your audience to engage. The more comfortable they get with engaging on your feed and the more you reward them for it (yes, that means replying to comments and interacting with them back), the more engaged your Instagram community becomes.

Still not sure how to get started with asking for engagement? Contact me today to learn more about how a social media strategy can help you find the right CTAs to use for your Instagram.