Building an effective social media marketing strategy has become one of the key factors for success in most industries. Whether you have a small local business or an international company, your brand awareness and sales highly depend on your social media activities.
With roughly one billion monthly active users and many features it provides, Instagram is definitely at the center of any powerful social media marketing strategy.
As you gain more visibility on Instagram with the right content, you can reach out to new customers by increasing your brand awareness, creating a word-of-mouth marketing wave, boosting your sales, and building a loyal community around your brand.
Instagram reach and impressions are the key factors that can help you climb the stairs to success. In this blog, we will explain how Instagram reach, and impressions work, and we'll share five proven ways to boost your Instagram impressions and Instagram reach.
Reach vs Impressions on Instagram
It might be tough to determine which analytic measurements are most useful when monitoring and evaluating the performance of your Instagram campaign. One of the most popular questions in people's minds is the difference between Instagram reach and impressions when it comes to Instagram analytics.
Your Instagram impressions will almost always be higher than your Instagram reach in any Instagram campaign you run. This is because Instagram impressions refer to the overall number of times a post is viewed, whereas Instagram reach is the number of unique viewers.
Instagram impressions are highly important because they indicate that some of your visitors have viewed your content more than one time. This means that you have captured their attention and given them a reason to check your post again.
On the other hand, if you want to monitor or calculate the number of unique viewers of any of your Instagram campaigns, you should focus on Instagram reach.
How to calculate potential reach on Instagram?
As we discussed before, Instagram reach is the number of unique viewers that have seen your post. This statistic is estimated, so it may not be accurate all the time because when you calculate the Instagram reach for a post, you basically estimate that your follower has attentively seen your post while scrolling down on their feed.
So, for example, if you are running an Instagram campaign with an influencer who has 15,6 K followers, the potential Instagram reach will be 15,6 K. The downside is, as you can guess, you basically guess that all the influencer's followers will view the content which is hardly the case most of the time.
How to reach more people on Instagram?
There are two different Instagram reach types; organic Instagram reach and paid Instagram reach. In a paid Instagram reach campaign, you allocate a budget and decide on a set of rules about your audience's characteristics.
Organic Instagram reach is the costless way to interact with your followers and potential customers to boost your brand awareness and eventually sales. If you have the necessary know-how and play your cards right, you can boost your visibility, increase your audience and sales with organic Instagram reach without spending any money.
So, if you are up for it, let's discover some of the proven ways to boost your Instagram reach and impression.
#1 Post at Instagram Peak Times
If you want to make the most of your potential Instagram reach, you need to be careful about the timing of your posts.
Posting at the right times improves the Instagram reach and enhances the number of engagements. Otherwise, you cannot fulfill the potential Instagram reach of your account as there is a great chance that your followers will miss your post as they are not active on Instagram.
The Instagram peak times are not a secret; you can check out our blog "The Ultimate Chart: When is the best time to post on Instagram" to discover more.
Even though you are fully aware of the peak times, it can be hard to post at these peak times as Instagram doesn't have a post scheduling option, and you need to be online to share your content.
But fortunately, you can use the ultimate Instagram scheduler tool of Circleboom Publish to schedule your posts for peak times beforehand. As your posts are ready for the upcoming week or month, you can schedule all of your Instagram posts for the appropriate moments to boost your Instagram reach.
#2 Make the Most of Instagram Post Formats
One of the key factors of Instagram's success is it never stop rolling out new features. When Instagram came into our lives, all we could do was share posts in our feed. But now, you can share;
- Single visuals, carousels, videos in the Instagram feed
- Instagram Stories with many different fun tools like polls, questions, filters and tags
- Reels
- IGTV
- Instagram Live video streams
- Story Highlights on your profile
- Instagram shopping catalogs
- Guides
These different formats can help you increase your Instagram reach as you can remind your brand to your followers on different channels. Moreover, they also offer you a variety of tools to engage with your community other than likes and comments. It is important to build two-way communication instead of simply creating a monologue with your audience.
#3 Design Attractive Visuals
Millions of photos and videos are shared every day on Instagram. It can be really hard to stand out with your content to catch your audience's attention while they are scrolling down on their feed to boost your Instagram reach. So, the quality of your content is the key to grab your audience's focus for a moment.
Don't worry if you don't have a budget for employing a graphic designer in your team. Thanks to many designing tools out there, you don't need to be a professional graphic designer to create high-quality content.
Circleboom Publish offers its users a built-in version of the ultimate designing tool, Canva, with which they can enhance their visuals with unlimited ready-to-use templates, elements, and figures.
When you create your post on Circleboom Publish, all you need to do is click the button "Design on Canva" to access its limitless graphic features. Even for simple announcements, you can get help from Canva's ready-to-use templates.
Once your content is ready, you can directly post it or schedule it for a future date without even opening a different tab.
#4 Use Trending Hashtags
You may underestimate the power of a single word, but one of the most effective approaches to boost your Instagram reach and impression is to use trending and relevant hashtags.
Hashtags can help you increase your Instagram reach beyond your followers and help you catch the attention of potential new members of your brand community.
Building the best hashtag strategy is all about using the correct hashtags. The best result will come from a different combination of hashtags, including general popular hashtags to reach a larger audience, industry-specific, relatively with smaller audience hashtags and unique hashtags to your brand.
You can check out our blog, "the popular Instagram hashtags with over 400 examples for trending categories," to discover the hashtags with large audiences.
#5 Give Your Followers a Reason to Talk About Your Brand
If you can give a reason for your followers to post about your brand, you can increase your potential Instagram reach by getting through their followers. A popular way to do so is promoting User Generated Content (UGC) by motivating your followers with rewards.
If you already have a strong presence on Instagram with many followers, a good reward can be simply featuring their content on your account.
Or, you can run Instagram giveaways or competitions to motivate people to talk about your brand. This strategy can increase your Instagram reach as your brand will be visible on their account.
Another way to boost your Instagram reach and impression is to post sharable content. They can be different from business to business. It can be an inspirational quote or timely content like for special days or even memes for some businesses.
Wrapping Up
Organic Instagram reach is the silver bullet of success on social media. Once you construct the right social media strategy with effective content, your brand can go viral through relevant world-of-mouth channels.
But certainly, it requires a lot of energy, time, and dedication; you cannot just create a social media strategy and use it for the long run. You need to keep up with the new trends, monitor your performance, and make relevant changes.
A good and effective way to boost your Instagram reach and impression is to get help from a social media management tool to keep things organized and take the edge off operational jobs.
With Circleboom Publish, you can schedule your posts for the peak times beforehand, enhance your content with the unlimited graphic features of Canva without even leaving the dashboard and manage multiple accounts through a single dashboard.