Is there anything better than checking your Instagram and seeing a cascade of new likes on your posts? If you’re an influencer or a marketer, those likes can mean more money in your pocket. Even if you’re not monetizing your Instagram, likes are validating and they give you a sense of community and support.
Whatever the reason you want more likes this year, it takes strategy and planning to hit your goals. Follow these essential steps and tips for getting more Instagram likes in 2022.
- Identify your target audience
- Learn about your target audience
- Launch a giveaway
- Link up with other creators
- Interact and engage
- See what competitors are doing
- Seize opportunities to tag popular accounts
- Compare your posts’ past performance
- Conduct hashtag research
- Choose your timing wisely
- Post conversation starters
- Getting started with your top tool for Instagram likes: Snoopreport
Defining your target audience is critical in any mission of public messaging, including marketing, public relations, and yes, Instagram posting. One of the most common mistakes content creators make is trying to appeal to everyone because they think it will give them more potential. The truth is that there’s no content that appeals to everyone, so if you’re trying to be broad enough to target everyone, you’re actually targeting no one.
Decide who you want to target with your content. That could include people within a certain age range, those in a particular city, those with a certain interest, and so on.
Once you’ve decided who your target audience is, it’s time to dig into some research and find out what appeals to them on Instagram. One of the most effective ways to do this is with Snoopreport.
Snoopreport is an Instagram activity tracker you can use to get a glimpse into any Instagram account’s activity. In particular, it gives you a weekly report that includes the posts the person has liked, the users whose posts the person has liked most often, the top hashtags in the posts they’ve liked, new accounts they’ve followed, and their top interests based on the content they’ve liked.
You can use Snoopreport to track any public Instagram account. If you set it up to track certain accounts that fall into your target audience, you can see what content they’re most interested in and create your own content that appeals to them.
If you want people to do something, make it benefit them. You can put that principle to work with an Instagram giveaway.
Publish a post about a product or service you’re giving away and grant a drawing entry to every person who follows you and likes the post. Not only will you get tons of likes on this post but you’re likely to gain new followers. Your account will gain even more visibility because the engagement on your post will give it better placement in people’s newsfeeds due to Instagram’s algorithm. In essence, that one post sets off a domino effect that gains you more followers and more likes from those followers on future posts.
As they say, teamwork makes the dream work! Striking up collaborations with other content creators can be an exceptional way to gain likes for both of you. When you create posts together, with each of you posting it and tagging the other, you’ll each get in front of the other’s audience. Because the post involves someone that these audiences already follow and enjoy, the audience is more likely to follow and like your content too.
Instagram isn’t a one-way venue where you post content and people like it. Interacting and engaging with your audience goes a long way toward getting more likes on your posts for multiple reasons.
First, people are more likely to engage with your posts if you engage with theirs because they feel more of a mutual connection. You’ve paid them the respect of being an engaged audience member so they’re willing to do the same.
Second, Instagram’s newsfeed algorithm prioritizes showing people posts from accounts that they interact with often because it perceives that they’re close to these people. So, if you interact with certain followers, your posts will be more likely to appear on their newsfeeds.
Have you ever looked at the massive number of likes another content creator has received and thought, “What’s so special about them? What are they doing that I’m missing?” Now is the time to find out.
Take a close look at their content, especially the posts that get the most likes. Look for patterns among these successful posts, like the type of content, the message, and the aesthetics.
Another strategy for competitor research is using Snoopreport. Just as you can use this Instagram follower tracker tool to learn about your followers, you can use it to track competitors. Take a look at their audience engagement strategy – who they’re following, whose posts they’re liking, and so on.
In the same way that striking up a collaboration with another content creator will get you in front of their audience, tagging a popular account can get you in front of that account’s audience too, even if there isn’t an established collaboration.
For example, if you go to an artist’s concert, tag them in your post. Or, tag a celebrity in a post about something that reminded you of them. That tag could land your post on their followers’ newsfeeds, garnering tons of new likes and potentially new followers if they like what they see. A word of caution, though: the posts have to be relevant and genuinely associated with the account you’re tagging. Don’t stoop to spam tagging celebrities for visibility.
Remember the tip about finding the most successful posts from your competitors and looking for patterns and elements they had in common? You can do the same thing for your own posts too.
Take a look at the posts that have pulled the most likes and try to find commonalities among them, even if they’re just broad topics that several of these posts have in common. This tells you what types of posts appeal most to your audience so you can lean in that direction in the future.
Beware of getting stuck in a hole, though. If your posts do well when you publish quotes, that’s great, but you can’t exclusively publish quotes because your audience will get bored. You still need variety, but you can be strategic.
Including popular hashtags in your posts is a fantastic way to have your content noticed. To put this strategy into action, though, you need to do some digging to find those top hashtags.
One option is to use Snoopreport to find the hashtags that are most common in the posts that your audience members are liking. This is a particularly targeted approach because you’re not just using thriving hashtags, you’re using hashtags that are popular among your specific audience.
Another strategy is to go to the Instagram Explore page to see what’s trending and check the hashtags on those posts. There are specialized tools for finding trending Instagram hashtags too, like TalkWalker and SuperMetrics, though they do have fees.
10. Choose Your Timing Wisely
Instagram’s algorithm shows people posts on their newsfeeds based on relevance and interest rather than using a simple timeline. The algorithm does give higher priority to new posts, though.
This means that your posts will get more visibility and therefore more likes if you’re posting them during or slightly before your followers are online. If you have a professional Instagram account, this is easy: you have an Insights tab where it shows you the days and times when your followers are most often online. Plan your posting so you’re publishing during or just before those times.
11. Post Conversation Starters
On Instagram, engagement begets engagement. The more likes, comments, and shares a post has, the higher it will appear in other users’ newsfeeds, which means more visibility and more engagement. How do you get that initial engagement? You post a conversation starter.
Post a question, an “unpopular opinion,” or something else that sparks conversation. As users comment and respond, your visibility goes up and the likes will start pouring in. There’s a good chance that a boost in visibility will pull in new followers too, leading to more likes on future posts.