How to Increase Organic Reach on Instagram

Table of Contents

• What is Organic Reach in Social Media?
• Why is Organic Reach Important?
• How to Increase Organic Reach on Instagram?
• Key Takeaways
• FAQs

What makes social media so powerful today? It is the organic reach of content posted online. If you are looking to increase organic reach on Instagram, you need to decode how organic reach works and how it can be useful for your brand or business. Social media is a channel that allows you to communicate freely with the rest of the world. And therein lies its true strength. Yes, you can always resort to paid media to promote your business and increase sales, but you can also choose to achieve the same result if you know how to increase Instagram organic reach. 

So, how is organic reach calculated? It is simply the number of views you get on a post without paying for it. This may be just a number in itself or a proportion of the entire audience base. While paid media includes putting in efforts and money through paid advertising like Google Adwords, organic reach, as the name suggests, is more natural. And, of course, unpaid. 

So, let’s dive right in and understand ways to increase organic reach on Instagram.

What is Organic Reach on Instagram?

It is not very difficult to understand and implement methods around how to grow reach on Instagram. However, many businesses struggle with doing so because of the new, upgraded, and complex algorithm that Instagram uses to select posts that will be shown to users. So, to increase organic reach on Instagram, understanding and decoding this algorithm is important. 

Instagram uses a standard set of metrics to rank the various posts shared on the platform. This includes parameters like:

• Your activity in terms of the posts you like and interact with.
• Your relation and history of interaction with the account that posts a particular content.
• Information about each post and the account that posts it. 
• The popularity of the account posting the content.
• Type of content being posted.

Instagram users have recently been struggling to figure out how to grow Instagram reach in light of this new algorithm, which, in a way, limits reach. But the good news is that Instagram rewards new content, connections, and formats for businesses. This is why it is crucial that, as a business, you keep rolling outposts that are relevant and fresh. 

Why is Organic Reach Important?

To increase organic reach on Instagram, it is important to understand why you want to do it in the first place. Organic reach has multiple benefits and helps in different ways.

• Understand that not every content or post will get you the desired results. This is why you have to keep looking for ways to grow your Instagram reach. Some posts may just fall flat and may never take off altogether. But to increase organic reach on Instagram, you have to rely on numbers apart from content quality.
• You can analyze and test your content based on your organic reach. It could become your testing ground for launching a new product or service. You can actually utilize organic reach to identify content pieces that promise to deliver more in terms of ROI (Return on Investment).
• Organic reach allows you to collaborate with influencers and cross-promote your brand. This helps you cut down on huge marketing costs while increasing your organic reach on Instagram. 

How to Increase Organic Reach on Instagram?

This is the most critical section on how to grow to reach on Instagram. While there are multiple ways to increase organic reach on Instagram, take a look at these top five tried and tested methods on how to increase Instagram’s organic reach.

1. Leverage the wide array of Instagram post formats

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Don’t shy away from using multiple formats for your posts. Make full use of the post formats on offer that include, 

• Photos.
• Photo carousels.
• Short videos.
• Reels
• Stories.
• IGTV.
• Instagram Live
• Instagram Shop.
• Instagram Guides.

In order to maximize impact, it is good to use different formats that are available at your disposal. Coupled with a steady content flow, using multiple formats for posting can increase organic reach on Instagram.

2. Share your Insta stories

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While talking about how to increase Instagram organic reach, one cannot forget this feature. Remember to turn on this feature so that your followers can re-share either on their own Instagram feed or as a direct message. Some brands often choose not to use this feature. This is driven by the need to control the content, which directly contradicts the whole idea of organic reach. If you don’t let others re-share your content, how will you increase organic reach on Instagram?

You are then empowering others to become representatives of your brand. And let them become ambassadors who find new customers and followers for you. 

Tag your location on your posts

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If your brand requires you to attract customers to a physical space, you must add location tags to whatever you post on Instagram. And do this for both stories and posts. Even if you mention the location on the collateral, also tag the location on the post itself. This allows visitors to search for it later and allows search engines to display your brand in relevant results. So, this only helps you expand your audience and reach out to potential customers. 

4. Make your content relevant

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Why would anyone want to share your post? The answer to this is also one of the easiest ways to increase organic reach on Instagram. You can easily leverage the reach of your followers by allowing them to share your posts and giving them a reason to do this. A few simple tips can help you do this: 

• Tag people in your post.
• Share pictures of real people using your product so that it becomes a natural hook for them to share your post.
• Return the favor by liking, commenting, and sharing User-Generated Content (UGC) that gives you a shoutout.
• Encourage your followers to use specially-curated hashtags that promote your brand. 
• Create highly shareable content, which could be in the form of images, text, etc.
• Use engaging content like polls or surveys.
• Share content, keeping your audience in mind, and what would excite them the most.

5. Create accessible content

This is one of the basics of Social Media 101. To understand how to get more organic reach on Instagram, you have to have the basics sorted. And it starts with making your content accessible. This directly impacts your viewership, which may significantly drop if your content is inaccessible. Instagram offers several features to make your content accessible:

• Enable automatic captions on IGTV. Instagram offers captions in 16 different languages! 
• Always use Alt Text for Instagram images, which helps viewers find images easily with keywords. 
• Instagram may use your Alt Text to source information about the content of a post, feeding back into the algorithm, which may ultimately increase organic reach on Instagram. 
• Check for comfort, in terms of readability and comprehension, by using automatic checkers. 
• While adding captions manually to stories, use large and clear texts.
• While recording a video, make sure the background and subjects are visible.

Key Takeaways

• Social media is a powerful channel of communication that allows you to communicate freely with the rest of the world.
• Organic reach is the number of views you get on a post without paying for the same.
• Paid media includes putting in efforts and money through paid advertising like Google Adwords.
• To increase organic reach on Instagram, one has to decode the standard set of metrics to rank the various posts shared on the platform.
• The parameters used by Instagram to rank your post include activity, interaction with other accounts, post content, and popularity of the account publishing the post. 
•  Five effective ways to increase organic outreach on Instagram include utilizing multiple post formats, enabling sharing for your stories, using location tags on posts, producing relevant content that people would want to share, and creating content that is accessible.

To increase organic reach on Instagram is to let a paradigm shift occur in your own mindset as a business. It involves a fair amount of churning, along with letting go of traditional social media marketing techniques. And when you can crack this, you will get easy answers to how to get more organic reach on Instagram.

FAQs