Is your Instagram not growing? A freelance graphic design can save you
If you've been having trouble growing your Instagram, it's most likely due to your boring posts. The competition on Instagram is fierce and if you're not making an effort to set yourself apart you'll blend into mediocrity and never grow your follower base beyond your family members.
Now you might be considering just giving up on instagram and focusing on other social media channels, but if you do that you'll be making a monumental mistake.
Why?
So if you leave now, you'll miss out on growing an impressive following.
In this post, we'll run through the style of posts that get the most engagements to ignite your imagination, and also show you how you can work with a graphic designer to grow your Instagram channel with minimal effort.
Instagram posts that get the most engagement
Engagement is the most important metric you should be pursuing on Instagram because the entire platform algorithm is predicated on it. Instagram wants its users to stay on the platform for as long as possible, to achieve this user activity (also known as engagement) needs to be maximized.
What is the Instagram engagement rate?
The Instagram engagement rate per post is calculated as the sum of likes and comments, divided by the number of followers you have, multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
There isn't a specific engagement rate number you should aim for, instead, you should aim to maximize your engagement rate. But to give you an idea of a rough benchmark, the average engagement rate on Instagram is between 1 and 5 percent.
Now here's a philosophical question for you:
If an Instagram post is published, and nobody engages with it, does it even exist?
An important lesson can be drawn from this question, if your posts will not engage other users, don't waste time creating it.
So what type of posts will users engage with?
Beautiful, captivating and immersive posts!
Posts that are strong enough to interrupt mindless feed scrolling and command further attention,
Let's take a look at some examples.
High engagement Instagram post examples
GIFs
Even though they're published as a video file, GIFs are not videos. They're a set of still images played in a sequence. The rigid frame by frame transitions create a captivating effect that loops naturally so users are drawn into the hypnotic like dance of the replaying images.
Stories
Stories are fun to watch because they offer a window into the personal life of Instagramers. Successful businesses use stories to speak to their most loyal followers on a more intimate level.
Another reason why stories incentify engagement is because whenever you post one, an Instagram colored circle appears around your profile pic. This piques the curiosity of users, which encourages them to tap on your profile to watch your story.
There's a reason why the most successful Instagram channels post such a high number of stories:
Source: rivaliq.com
Videos
Videos achieve the highest engagement metrics. People watch video 5 times longer than static images, and
millennials are 136% more likely to focus on videos on a smartphone. So you absolutely need to incorporate video in your Instagram content marketing strategy.
To squeeze as much value from your videos, you should aim to post unique videos that have been specifically created for you or your business. Re-posting existing videos is a lazy engagement tactic and users usually make an effort to find and follow the original creator of the video, so you're just contributing to someone else's fame.
The flip side to this is that if you create a highly entertaining videos that encourages reposting, you'll increase your exposure and grow your followers organically, without spending money on promoted posts.
User generated content
User generated content (UGC) is one of the most powerful strategies of growing your Instagram. It involves getting your followers to post content related to you or your business and getting them to tag you, or use a unique hashtag identifier. The incentive for doing this is either to win a competition or to simply have some fun.
Here are a couple examples
The cosmetic brand
@lushcosmetics encourages users to post photos of themselves wearing their favorite face masks. As a reward, the channel reposts the photos of participating followers on their channel.
Every week
@Gossier features its top tags in their stories. This is a great way to celebrate user generated content while continually encouraging users to pursue the possibility of being publicly featured.
Seamless panoramas
Seamless panoramas are great at encouraging user activity. Because the majority of the image is hidden, users are promoted to swipe through and see all of it. And because seamless panoramas makes you feel like you're completely immersed in the scene, users are likely to keep swiping through to prolong the captivating experience and momentarily escape from their reality.
Source: havecamerawilltravel.com
These posts are not easy to create and that's what makes them so alluring, only a few can pull it off perfectly and Instagram users are always yearning for a pleasant panorama post experience.
Publishing regular seamless panoramas will make your Instagram stand head and shoulders above your competitors.
Using a freelance graphic designer to grow your Instagram
As you may have noticed, taking your Instagram game to the next level requires a lot of time and talent. But if you don't have the blessing of either, you can still achieve an impressive Instagram following with the help of a freelance graphic designer.
Freelance designers can even create captivating videos so you can still take advantage of the impressive engagement metrics of Instagram videos.
Finding a graphic designer to work with is incredibly simple. Here's how you do it:
Head over to
Freelancer.com and select "I want to hire" or "post project"
Next describe the details of your Instagram project. You can upload any files to support your description.
Then select your budget and the duration of your project and you're done. Graphic designers will get notified of your posting and send through proposals on how they will approach your project along with a quote for their services. Once you've selected a freelancer to work with they'll Instantly get to work.
All payments are securely held and only released to the freelancer once you are happy with the quality of their delivery, so you have the peace of mind of knowing you will walk away with a final product that meets your expectations.
You can even
post a contest for the specific Instagram post you want and the most talented graphic designers from around the world will submit their entries for your unique project. Once you've chosen a winning freelance graphic designer, you can continue working with them to create all of your Instagram media, while you work on other more important projects.
Final thoughts
Instagram has been around for 10 years and every day new talented artists are signing up and wowing users. The bar is set very high. If you want users to, not only notice you, but follow you and convert to your offering, you need to leverage world class talent.