One of the most powerful tools for boosting and increasing engagement is Instagram. In fact, in today’s social life, Instagram, along with Facebook, are applications that, for personal use, can change your life, and for professional use, can change the position of your brand. Result? 99% better brand positioning or 99% bad brand positioning alongside awareness. For doing so, daily posting isn’t the best way to boost your brand. You need something more. You need a meaningful interaction to get the best engagement and reach. In this article, we will go through the best tactics to know how you should increase your engagement on Instagram in 2025. We will also dive into the best practices for this.
- Optimize your profile for Instagram search
Undoubtedly, Instagram is a search engine. Your customers are searching on Instagram with keywords related to your business. If you don’t show up, your competitors will! Here’s how to take advantage of the increase in search capability on Instagram. There are two fields within your Instagram profile that show up in search. The first field that can be displayed in an Instagram search is your handle. The second field that can be displayed in an Instagram search is your name. As a result, the trick here is to add one to two relevant keywords within your profile handle and your name to improve your chances of appearing in Instagram’s search results.
Origi Sunglasses uses this strategy exceptionally well. Notice how they use the word sunglasses in both their handle and their username. If someone searches for sunglasses, there’s a good chance that they will show up in searches. If you like to get free and relevant traffic to your Instagram page, that is one of the best practices for you.
- Re-engage your community
The Instagram algorithm prioritizes engagement, especially engagement within the first hour of posting. However, there is one engagement metric that is often overlooked but is the easiest to influence. This is nothing but comments. For sure comments are just as important as likes, shares, and saves. And the quicker you can get comments, the better your post will perform. So, how do you get as many comments as quickly as you can?
One of the easiest ways is to reply back to everyone who comments on your post as quickly as possible. That alone instantly doubles your amount of engagement. But instead of a generic reply like, “Thank you.” You should reply with a question or statement that gets them to engage and have an actual conversation. By doing so, you quickly increase the amount of engagement you have on your post, and it trains the Instagram algorithm on your relationship, making it more likely you show up in their feed. Here’s a pro tip to increase your chances of getting comments. Ask your audience a question in the comments and pin it as the first comment.
- Post at optimal times.
Over 500 million people use Instagram every single day, but that statistic is meaningless to you. The most important statistic is that your audience uses Instagram every day. because knowing that information unlocks the best times you should post to get maximum engagement. Here is a relatively unknown way for you to check your own stats to see when most of your followers are on Instagram.
First, head over to your Instagram insights. Next, click Insights and then your audience. Then scroll down to the bottom till you see the most active times and cycle through both day and hour. That is it! Now you know the best times to post because you know the exact times when your audience is on Instagram. Alternatively, if you use a tool like Hootsuite or Zoho Social to schedule your posts in advance, they should have the best time to post features built into it.
- Use strategic hashtags on every post.
When you use hashtags properly, you unlock massive reach potential for your posts at zero cost. That’s because Instagram posts that use hashtags increase engagement by over 12 percent compared to posts without them. And posts that use at least nine hashtags per post get 2.5 times more engagement than posts that only use one hashtag. But the truth is that all hashtags are not created equal. Some hashtags are too competitive for your post to cut through the noise. Other hashtags are not active enough to have any benefit. This means that having the right mix of hashtags is extremely important.
Here are two tips to help you maximize the benefit of using hashtags:
- First, make sure the hashtags that you use are relevant to your business. Do some hashtag research.
- Secondly, use at least nine hashtags on every post. You should include two to three hashtags with over 200,000 posts. Then two to three hashtags with between 80,000 and 200 posts. Next, two to three niche hashtags specific to your industry or your location, and then one to two branded hashtags. Note that when using hashtags, feel free to place them in your caption or in the comments. There’s no data available that shows a massive benefit of posting in either the comments or your caption. Add one hashtag within your story post. Hashtags work within stories too.
- Post more frequently.
Your worst-performing piece of content is the one you don’t post. And with that being said, if you want to grow on Instagram, post at least once per day at a bare minimum. But if possible, post even more. When you increase the number of posts, you increase your chances of getting engagement. You also train the algorithm to deepen that relationship between those who engage with your posts often. Just think about some of the fastest-growing brands on Instagram. They all post multiple times per day with no drop in engagement. The best examples are Gary Vaynerchuk, three times per day; Dave Ramsey, two to three times per day; and Fashion Nova, 10 times per day. So don’t be afraid to post more frequently. The key is to maintain quality while increasing your frequency.
- Post what is already working
If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. This is a saying we all know and one we can apply to create engaging Instagram content. Believe it or not, your audience has already told you the exact content they want you to post. The answer is hidden within your Instagram insights. on your Instagram profile, tap insights, go to post, and select engagement. Next, select any type of engagement you want to look at. That could be likes, saves, or profile visits … Did you use an image, video, or carousel? What colors did you use? What type of caption did you write? This single hack alone is likely the most useful. because it helps you to understand the exact type of content to create to increase engagement and saves you time from reinventing the wheel.
- Clean up your feed
There are posts on your page right now that are quietly hurting your performance. Time on the page is important to Instagram. Algorithm. The more time someone spends on your Instagram profile, the more it deepens your relationship with that person, which trains the Instagram algorithm. Unfortunately, though, not all posts contribute to helping your time on the page. Examples might be content with old promotions, content with lower-than-average engagement, and content with retired branding. But instead of completely deleting them from your feed, archive them so they are publicly removed from your feed, but you can still check comments and analytics on those posts.
Bottom line
To increase Instagram interaction in 2025, enhance your profile with relevant keywords, employ strategic hashtags, and publish when your target audience is most active. Focus on meaningful conversations by replying immediately to comments and asking interesting questions. Increase publishing frequency while retaining quality and repurposing popular material. Finally, clean up your feed by archiving old or low-engagement content to maintain your profile as visually beautiful and relevant.