Starting out on Instagram is tough. I’m still building my following. I’ve figured out a couple of patterns that are best to follow when posting to get more engagement on posts. Here are 7 ways to get more likes on Instagram that I’ve found.
Post in the early morning, or the evening.
People tend are busy during the day, they check their feeds either when they are getting ready for the day or after they are starting to wind down. Of the two, evening tends lead to a slightly better output.
Here I posted around 5pm.
Post at the best time for you audience.
Know your audience. If you’re posting a shot from a past trip to another country, try to match your post with when they are awake. Thinking about your audiences you might be able to get two audiences at the same time.
For instance, this shot is taken in Switzerland, I live in Chicago. I posted at 7am (morning) Chicago time 3pm (evening) Switzerland time. I hit both my local audience and my Europe audience.
Hashtag your post
I’ve seen many great photographers fail to put any hashtags on their posts. Hashtagging is a central feature of Instagram. It’s a key way for others find your post.
I follow the four Ws + D rule:
Where? (stmaryglacier, colorado) What? (mountains) How? (lensbaby, tiltshift) Doing? (hiking).
Use only hashtags that have posts
Being creative is good, but if you make up a new hashtag or hashtags that has few posts – No one will find your photo with that hashtag.
On this shot every hashtag here has at least 1,000 posts.
Hashtag in different languages
Hashtagging in other languages broadens the size of your audience. You don’t need to use obscure hashtags. I recommend using Wikipedia instead of Google Translate.
In this shot I looked up the article ‘Dragonfly’. On the left of Wikipedia you’ll see a list of the article in different languages.
Add a geo location
Every photo was shot somewhere. You can only set one location, but there might be duplicates of the location on Instagram. Before posting try to searching the location to see which one gets tagged with similar photos.
For instance here you can see I set the location for this post to Steamboat Resort.
Like back
When someone likes your photo, take a moment to scroll through their feed and like a photo or two, maybe leave a comment. But wait a few minutes before doing this. What you want is to pull them back to view your feed. They sometimes recognize your username / avatar and will view your feed to like more shots. You’ve invested in them, they will now invest time back in you.
Everyone that liked this shot, I liked at lest one of their photos back.