We all know that something has been going on with Instagram lately…

Why is nobody seeing my posts?

I’m losing more followers than gaining them?

I used to get way more likes on these posts than what I’m getting right now…

Instagram is NOT an easy platform to have success on, and even if you do your research, it’s still so easy to get lost. My guess is that if you’re reading this post, you might be struggling to get your engagement back to where it was before all this started happening. Maybe you haven’t been growing anymore, maybe you’re stagnant and you’ve stayed at the same follower count for months now, or worse, you’ve lost followers and didn’t gain them back. If this sounds like you, I’m hoping this post will give you some realistic, actionable things you can do to start getting your following back on track.

Before I got married, the month leading up to my wedding I was very inconsistent in posting, this marked what felt like the beginning of the end lol. I was tired, uninspired, and didn’t feel like creating anything for social media. My inconsistency caused a major drop in engagement, and when I posted some of my wedding photos, I lost 300 some followers in just a couple days. The only thing I could think was why….

Looking back on that moment, I really don’t have a complete answer as to what went wrong, or why my wedding photos sparked a big unfollow loop, but I do know this: dwelling on it will only slow you down. Fast forward to months later and I’m trying different things, taking risks, staying consistent, still sharing wedding photos, and I gained over 2,000 followers in a week with a single post. This was at a time where I had been stuck at the same number for what felt like an eternity and in a matter of two weeks I reached 80K and my numbers continued to trend upwards. Now nearing 100K, I have some advice on how to increase your engagement on Instagram and grow your following. Let’s dive in.

I realized that it’s not all about the numbers.

You’ll drive yourself crazy if all you can think about is the analytics and the numbers. Counting your likes isn’t productive. Comparing your accounts to others in your niche isn’t productive. Beating yourself up over fluctuations in your engagement isn’t productive. I know that’s probably something that you know deep down, but it can still be tough to put it into action. Just know that while these tips are meant to help increase your engagement, your numbers are going to fluctuate, and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

Also remember that these numbers aren’t just numbers, they represent real people. See the value in your community, no matter how big or small, and making it feel tight knit with the amount you’ve got. These people have chosen to follow along with you for some reason or another, don’t take their presence for granted!

I figured out a consistent posting schedule that works for me.

Working a full time job, sometimes it can be hard to keep up with posting art seven days a week. it’s just not feasible for me. But, I have found that regularly showing up in some capacity, every day, is extremely important for the growth of my page.

If I’m not sharing a post about art, I’ll share…

A picture that I already have in my camera roll of me or something from my personal life.
A piece of video content in the form of a reel.
- Reels have become really helpful for me because they take a lot less time to create than the art does.
If I don’t have anything to share on my feed, I can at least be posting on stories.
- Posting on Instagram stories is a great way to keep your audience engaged. Even if only a small percentage of your followers are actually seeing the stories, if somebody new comes to your page and you have stories posted with fun content about you, your day to day, or behind the scenes videos, they’ll know your present and up to some fun things. Maybe they’ll want to follow along!
  - I also enjoy using stories because I feel like it’s a great outlet to show more of my personality.

I started creating similar content to my top performing posts from the last year.

During times when I felt like I wasn’t sharing anything that my audience was really engaging with, I struck gold when I started going back to some of the posts that brought so many people to my page in the first place.

Reinvent some of your old ideas, reuse some of your previous concepts. If something you talked about really stuck with your audience, talk about it again! Below is a picture of some of my top posts from the past year. Just in this snapshot alone, there are three illustrations that are extremely similar. All three performed well and according to my Instagram insights, each of those three brought over 1,000, almost 2,000 new followers to my page.

Lesson learned, if you find something that works, stick to it!

Can you spot the three similar illustrations?

I started creating content with a different mindset.

I am a huge advocate of creating content that YOU want to create, but if one of your goals is increasing your engagement, it helps to consider what might add value for the people that are following you. Let’s break this down…

In the past, I have created content by asking myself this question:

“What’s going to generate likes?”

This strategy did nothing for me.

The question I ask myself now when I create content/art is this:

“What’s going to elicit an emotional response?”

What I’m after here, is creating something that’s going to hit a nerve for somebody, something that they’re going to look at and think, “that’s so me” or “I needed to hear that”. I want to create something that will make people want to join in a conversation, or better yet they’ll relate to it enough to share it to their own Instagram story. Because the Instagram algorithm is favoring posts that are shared and bookmarked, it’s been a helpful strategy for me to create things with a lens of asking myself, “Is this valuable enough to be saved? Relatable enough to be shared?”

Sometimes just changing the lens your viewing your content in can change your entire strategy, so you can go from insights that look like this: