The 4 most frequently asked questions about Instagram
If you are responsible for maintaining your company’s Instagram profile, you probably have asked yourself these questions.
Head of Social Media
September 10, 2020
If you are responsible for maintaining your company’s Instagram profile, you probably have asked yourself these questions.
When we receive inquiries about Instagram, the same questions are often asked. How often should I post? When should I post? How should the combination of organic posts, stories and ads look like? And how does Instagram’s algorithm affect my overall performance?
Therefore, we have tried to gather the answers below. The truth is that it is completely individual from company to company and depends on your target audience and your content.
Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for how much you should post on Instagram to achieve the best success on the platform. It varies from brand to brand and depends on different variables such as your target audience and your content. Therefore, our recommendation for the number of posts also vary from customer to customer, and will definitely change over time.
When deciding how active you want to be on Instagram, it should be a decision based on your business goals, your followers, the content so far and general best practice.
Regarding how often you should post, it is more important to focus on the quality of the content for your target audience than the amount of posts. It’s about finding a balance where you can deliver quality content to your users while being consistent in the amount of your posts.
This will not only create happy followers – and thus more interactions from your followers. It will also send a signal to Instagram’s algorithm that you are a quality Instagram account.
The average number of posts for brands worldwide is 1.5 posts per day (Union Metrics study), but that does not mean that you as a company need to post every day. It is important that you never post just to post. Then it is better not to!
The ideal frequency of posts depends, as previously mentioned, on your business goals and your purpose with your presence on Instagram. How much time and resources you can and will set aside for this, also matters.
If you as a company can ensure a high level of quality for each post, make sure you have the time and resources to respond to comments and engage your followers, then a constant and frequent post level will ensure that you grow quickly. In addition, it will ensure that more of your followers see your posts, and it will increase the chance of gaining brand loyalty from the followers and thus conversions.
The ideal number of posts per day / week / month therefore exists by balancing your business goals, resources, time, as well as reading and interpreting your followers’ behavior.
Stories is a great tool for engaging your followers while increasing your performance, if you connect this with your organic and sponsored posts.
In addition, stories on Instagram are the ideal place to start conversations with your followers with low quality content. It can therefore be a place where you allow yourself to focus less on the quality of the content, while in a post you should always have high quality and make sure that it fits aesthetically into the profile’s existing gallery.
Just as there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the most successful amount of postings, there is also no recipe for the most successful combination of your posts, stories and advertised content.
But what is certain is that the combination of the previosly mentioned three content types (organic postings, stories and ads) will provide you with a boosted performance regardless of your business goals; whether you want branding and awareness, leads, more followers or sales. And when it comes to ads, performance is undoubtedly also about how much ad dollars you are ready to spend on the various campaigns.
In addition, the quality of the content – whether it is organic or advertised – is of course also important for a good performance.
Based on the presence of your already existing followers on Instagram, you can ‘time’, which day and at what time you should prioritize posting. That way, you will ensure that as many people as possible see your post. You can find this information under ‘Insights’ on your Instagram account, it will of course change constantly depending on the Instagram habits and behavior of your future followers, therefore we recommend that you regularly keep an eye on your data and update your release times accordingly.
In addition to the active times of your followers, under ‘Insights’ you can also see who your followers are. This is very relevant in relation to your choice of content, tone of voice, competitions etc. This information is also relevant regarding selecting audiences for your advertised content on Instagram.
Our overall recommendation when you start will always be that you should set yourself some concrete goals for your presence on Instagram. This involves, among other things, considerations about the type of content, the amount of content, the location of content, the quality of content and the purpose behind your content.
Once these considerations and goals have been set, the content calendar must be designed and executed. This is about learning to read your followers to find out what type of content expands your followers, as well as what type of content creates conversions.
Instagram is a dynamic platform where it is about constantly listening to your followers, testing new things, nurturing your brand community by being ‘present’ and adapting your content and publishing flow so that it creates value for your followers and maintain their interest in your brand.
You may have heard, or even noticed, that organic posts do not achieve the same interaction or reach as they did in the past. From Instagram, we hear that generally only about 10% of your followers see your Instagram posts.
This is because the Instagram algorithm now assesses the relevance of your post to your target audience and only sends it out to those of your followers who Instagram considers will ‘like’ or comment on the post. For Instagram, it’s about relevance and about serving the interests of Instagram users in the best possible way.
In order to achieve a high level of relevance, you as a company can do several things – however, it can be quite time consuming.
The relevance of a profile is assessed, among other things, on the basis of the previous interaction from your followers on your posts, as well as what your followers otherwise like and comment.
Achieving a high level of organic relevance requires that you interact with the comments on your posts. When you keep the conversation going on your posts, you make sure that the post gets the maximum attention. This also applies to other people’s posts. When you comment and like other people’s posts, you signal to the Instagram algorithm that there is a relevant connection between the type of posts you interact with and your own posts.
That being said, it’s also important that you interact with care. It’s about ‘training’ the algorithm to connect the relevance of your Instagram profile to those you want to show content to.
Below we have briefly summarized what you can do to train the Instagram algorithm and achieve a high relevance with your target group.
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We help you review your existing data and your business goals, so that we can lay out a strategy for your activity on Instagram that suits your followers and your target group’s behavior.
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