25 Instagram Best Practices for Faster Growth in 2023
It seems like things never stop changing on Instagram. The network continues to adapt its features to compete in an increasingly crowded social media landscape. So, do Instagram best practices that worked in 2022 apply in 2023?
While the basics of your Instagram marketing strategy should remain the same, some of the tactics needed to achieve your goals are changing. Keep reading for a list of best practices to help you succeed on the platform in 2023 and beyond.
25 Best Instagram Practices for 2023
Instagram Marketing Best Practices
1. Set clear goals
You have heard it from us before and you will hear it again. Every great social media marketing strategy starts with a clear set of clear, measurable goals.
Do you plan to use Instagram to increase brand awareness? Promote product sales? Interact with your community? Maybe all of the above?
What you want from Instagram will determine what you should invest in it. Think about how different platform surfaces — news posts, videos, stories — can help you achieve real business goals.
2. Post at the right time
Hootsuite research shows that the best time to post photos on Instagram is 11:00 am on Wednesdays. For drums, these are 9:00 and 12:00 from Monday to Thursday. Keep in mind that the average business Instagram account posts 1.71 posts to the main feed per day.
This is a good place for you to start. But to find the most effective posting times for your specific account, you need to understand your specific audience’s Instagram habits.
Hootsuite Analytics provides a heat map showing when your subscribers are online most often. It also provides customized suggestions for the best time to post to your followers based on your chosen Instagram goals.
3. Plan your content ahead of time
Once you know the best time to post, you can start planning and creating your content ahead of time and then schedule it to post at the right time.
This allows you to produce quality content in allocated blocks of time, maximizing your creative resources. It also gives you breathing room to edit and carefully review your content before it’s published.
Hootsuite helps you post without any effort. It allows you to schedule your Instagram posts, videos and stories along with other social posts so you can see the full picture of your social media posting schedule in one content calendar.
It also gives you a good overview and lets you make sure you have planned the perfect mix of photos, videos, and carousel posts.
4. Engage with your followers
Remember: Instagram is not a broadcast service. This is a social network. This means your followers expect two-way communication and a sense of community. If you want people to engage with your Instagram content, you need to engage yourself.
When you’re just getting started, it’s easy to reply to private messages and comments on your own. As your following grows, it becomes difficult to keep up. At this stage, it is recommended to use some tools (and team members) to help manage your Instagram communication.
Hootsuite Inbox allows you to effectively manage your Instagram comments and replies by assigning messages to other team members for reply or follow-up. You can also create response templates for general comments and questions to reduce response time.
5. Tag your products
Nearly half of Instagram users make weekly purchases on the platform.
Brands that tag their products in feed posts get 37% more sales on average. And brands that tag two or more posts a day see a 117% increase in transactions.
Tags on different surfaces: videos, stories, posts and even ads. Sixty-one percent of weekly IG users say that tagged ads make them more likely to make a purchase.
Source: Instagram
6. Analyze and improve your results
We have already mentioned several times that you will need to experiment to find out what works best for your particular audience. This will be a constant theme throughout the post.
To find out the results of your experiments, you need to use Instagram analytics. The native Instagram Insights tool provides useful information to get you started. To get to the next level and get a detailed view of the results, it is recommended to use professional analytics tools such as Hootsuite.
Hootsuite’s Instagram analytics includes downloadable and exportable charts and graphs that make it easy to understand what’s working and what’s not. You can also see how your Instagram efforts compare to those on other social media platforms.
One particularly useful tool in Hootsuite Analytics is the ability to compare the performance of Instagram Reels with TikTok. This can help you refine your short video strategy—not just on Instagram, but on other platforms as well.
Instagram Reels Best Practices
7. Make (more) drums
Don’t use drums yet? Definitely time to start.
Instagram actively uses video in general and Reels in particular. The reels already account for 20% of the time spent on the platform. And Hootsuite research shows that videos get 300% more engagement than regular Instagram videos. The Instagram algorithm loves Reels too.
View this post on Instagram
Post shared by Julia | Polymer Clay Earrings (@indigoclayjewelry)
So, this is a simple but very important Instagram best practice. Just make (more) drums.
8. Show your human side
Videos that show a person get 25% more clicks. This is not the right format for boring product videos. Be dynamic and show that your products are used by real people. Get your team involved. Show some personality. Be human and have fun.
9. Make the most of the first 3 seconds
Grab attention right away with dynamic moves and teasers. (Just make sure you keep the promise given in the title – the bait is a big no.)
Show (and tell) people in the first three seconds what they will get from your video and why they should keep watching. On this note…
10. Add lyrics to your drums
Adding text to your reels provides a number of benefits. First of all, it makes your content accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. This is also important for the 20% of drum views that happen with the sound off.
Closed captions are now automatically displayed on the reels unless you turn them off. Users can always set this up in their feed if they don’t want to see subtitles, so it makes no sense for you to turn them off.
You can also add timed text to highlight certain points in your video.
View this post on Instagram
11. Use trending audio
Incorporating trendy audio into your videos is a great way to increase your visibility. You can identify a popular sound by the small arrow next to the name of the sound in any video.
Source: @biabeible
Click on a sound to see how many drums have already been made with that sound. Your best chance of getting promoted is to use a trending audio that doesn’t have too many other competing drums yet. Aim for 30K or less.
In this case, the track already has 285k drums, so you can keep looking for the one that has fewer competitors.
Source: Instagram
If you come across an audio you like, you can save it for later by clicking the “Save Audio”button. If you specifically want to use it to boost a trend, just make sure it’s still trending when you’re ready to use it.
12. Try a Pattern
If you want to use multiple photos and/or video clips in your video, a template can be a great way to get started. Using a template will automatically sync your clips with the audio in the original reel.
To find templates, open the Reels tab and click on the camera icon in the top right, then scroll to Templates at the bottom of the screen. Scroll until you find the video you like, then click Use Template.
Best Practices for Instagram Stories
13. Use interactive stickers
Interactive features like the vote button, quiz button, and question button really let you get to know your audience better. They also provide a great opportunity to engage your community and increase engagement levels.
Source: @yoga_international
Try asking your followers what kind of content they want to see from you. Or use a question sticker to answer a follower’s questions.
14. Save your best stories to your favorites
Instagram Stories are a great way to experiment with new ideas and more random content because they disappear after 24 hours.
But sometimes you want your stories to stay. For such cases, there are highlights of Stories.
Highlights are displayed on your Instagram page above the grid. In addition to saving your best stories, you can also use them to create space for additional information about your business or products.
Source: @sephora
Instagram Posting Best Practices
15. Develop a unified style
Your Instagram grid should have a visually consistent style and viewers should be able to immediately recognize one of your posts when it appears in their feed.
One way to achieve this is to keep the colors you use consistent with your brand’s style guide. Another option is to use design tools with ready-made templates, such as Canva’s integration with Hootsuite Composer.
16. Use the right hashtags
Social SEO may reduce the importance of hashtags, but that doesn’t mean you can avoid them entirely.
In particular, using certain niche hashtags can help you connect with existing passionate communities on Instagram. And creating a brand hashtag can help you gather user-generated content and social proof.
17. Write catchy captions
Yes, it is the image quality that will grab attention and stop scrolling. But you can’t ignore the power of Instagram captions. Instagram captions help users connect with your brand and learn about what you stand for.
Writing great captions is also one of the best practices for Instagram posts because they help the Instagram algorithm understand what your post is about to help with Instagram SEO. Captions are one of the sources that the algorithm checks for relevant keywords when someone searches for content on the platform.
18. Use alt text
This is another quick thing you can do to make your content more accessible and also boost your Instagram SEO ranking signals.
Alt text on Instagram works just like alt text on the web: it provides a textual description of what is in the image or photo.
Instagram uses artificial intelligence to generate automatic alt text for all posts, but you can customize the alt text yourself for better results.
Check out our detailed instructions for adding alt text to Instagram posts.
19. Pin your best posts
The first three places on your Instagram feed are premium real estate. Luckily, you can now choose what appears there. You can pin up to three posts (or videos) to the top row of the grid.
Try pinning your most popular posts or your most relevant ones. Is there an action going on? Or is a new product about to launch? Pinned posts draw users’ attention to the prize.
You can also get creative with pinned posts, as Rocky Mountain Soap Company did when teasing a new product launch:
Source: @rockymountainsoapco
Instagram Advertising Best Practices
20. Experiment with ad spaces
Instagram ads can appear in the feed, stories, videos, and Explore tab, with potential reach ranging from 713.2 million for the Explore tab to 1.32 billion for the Feed.
Instagram data shows that vertical ads have a 48% lower cost per action than non-vertical ads, so videos and stories are an obvious choice to test if you’re running video ads.
As with your organic strategy, you will need to do some testing to see which placements work best for your audience and your goals. It’s important not to get stuck on one format and rely on it to meet your needs. Instagram is constantly changing, so it’s important to keep testing to see if the effectiveness of different formats decreases over time.
21. Collaborate with creators
Working with influencers, also known as creators, to create branded content can increase the credibility of your Instagram ad campaigns.
View this post on Instagram
Meta-studies show that 78% of consumers say influencers help them discover new brands. In addition, campaigns that have branded content ads alongside regular ads have an average 53% higher click-through rate.
22. Unify your product catalog
Using a single product catalog for meta ads and your Instagram store makes tagging easier and allows you to get the most complete Pixel data.
Instagram bio recommendations
23. Make It Complete
You don’t have much information in your Instagram bio – just 150 characters to tell users who you are and why they should stay around.
But you can increase this by completing all the fields available on your Instagram profile, such as your profile picture, address, link, and account category. On this note…
24. Choose the right account category
Using the right category in your Instagram bio will help people find you and understand what your brand stands for.
This is also an important feature for rich tagging. If you’re collaborating with other brands or authors, expanded tagging shows each account’s contribution to the post, including the account’s category.
Source: Instagram
25. Get tested
To add credibility to your account, consider getting that blue check and applying for an Instagram verification. Instagram verification goes a long way in making your business account look more professional while preventing scammers from stealing your success.
Leave a Reply