Follower numbers are nice to show in a screenshot but they have little bearing on whether or not an Instagram account is influential. A person with 8,000 engaged, active followers can sell more products, build more brand loyalty and inspire more conversations than an influencer with 400,000 followers who lacks engagement and has an engagement rate of 0.5%. This is what sets apart those who are popular on Instagram vs those who have made something of interest.
The smart influencers begin to understand this early on, and stop worrying about vanity metrics like their number of followers, and instead ask themselves, “Who is my audience, and what is it that they really care about?” For example, a strategy that includes using a tool like the Path Social marketing platform is based on exactly this idea, that better results will be achieved in the long run with targeted exposure to the right audience segments than they will be with mass exposure via random audience segments.
Instagram’s algorithm is based on the same principle. Posts that receive saves, shares, and more meaningful comments in the first hour are much more likely to make it to Explore pages and can be seen by new users than those that receive mindless double-taps from the right audience.
There are many would-be creators who fall into the trap of casting too wide a net. They fear that if they narrow their focus they will also narrow their audience. In practice, the exact opposite is always true. The accounts that grow the fastest and are able to build the most loyal communities are nearly always based on a narrow, well-defined niche with a recognizable point of view.
This is not about being rigid or restrictive. It is about providing a clear reason for people to follow you – and then come back. If a person visits a profile and can immediately understand the type of insights or value they are going to get from that social media account, they are more likely to follow and engage with it. They may come to your page, but they are unlikely to become followers.
Being specific on Instagram doesn’t mean publishing the same type of content. It means sticking to a particular perspective and catering to a specific audience. The fitness influencer who specialises in weightlifting for women past 40 is not limiting her audience; she is becoming the authority on a highly specific audience who has been ignored by other fitness content. Her followers do not stumble onto her page by accident; they seek it out because she is addressing their precise situation.
This micro-specificity is what makes micro-influencers so successful at delivering higher engagement rates than macro-influencers. There is plenty of research that details that brands favour micro-influencers (those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers) due to their capacity to create more genuine engagement and engagement rate than macro-influencers.
The reason for this is simple: smaller, more specific audiences share similar context and life experiences; the content is therefore more relevant to more of the audience. Breadth scales; depth scales.
The term “authentic” has been overused to the point where it has lost its meaning, but the idea is very real and tangible. When it comes to Instagram, authenticity is not about being unpolished or taking selfies. It is having a consistency between words and actions – between image and on-ground content – that is readily apparent.
Viewers are very adept at spotting when someone is trying to be relatable, rather than just authentic. This is increasingly the case with the ever more savvy audience of Instagram. When a creator’s voice suddenly changes when a sponsored deal appears, or they suddenly begin to promote a product line, and their recommendations align with whatever brand they are currently being sponsored by, regardless of suitability, engagement becomes less. Followers stop engaging not in an overt way, but by not leaving comments, liking, and sharing posts. It then has an adverse effect on reach.
Instagram Stories represent one of the most successful ways of engaging users between the highly curated posts on their feeds. Stories are less highly produced and more spontaneous than regular Instagram posts, which are increasingly elaborate and saturated. Questions, quizzes, and sliders are more than just distractions; they are a way to engage in conversation and make followers feel included rather than ignored.
The best of the new breed of influencers are taking Stories as a different medium altogether, rather than just reposting content from their feed or asking viewers to click on their link-in-bio. The backstage shots, unfiltered opinions, and answers to questions add up: familiarity. And trust is what a loyal following expects, which is the currency that they’re willing to pay in.
Having a good schedule and producing quality content is essential to building an engaged audience, but it’s not enough. The accounts that acquire the most engaged followers pay a lot of attention to “after content”. Engaging with comments in the first hour of a post is not only polite – it tells the Instagram algorithm that the post is sparking conversation, and can help the post reach more people.
More significantly, it communicates to people that they are being heard. Influencers who take the time to respond to comments, extend a welcome back to those who return, and take them into private messages instill a community around their content. As a result, a passive audience can become more of a community over time – one where the audience feels invested in the creator’s journey, and is more likely to organically share the creator’s content with their own networks.
There are many ways in which the mechanics of engagement on Instagram reflect basic human social behavior. People return to spaces where they feel seen and appreciated. Influencers who internalize this stop viewing their comment section as a performance metric, and instead begin to treat it like a room full of real people that deserve a real response.
