Motivating Instagram followers may feel like foreign territory for motivational speakers. These four tips for motivating your Instagram audience can help!
You’re staring at your phone, waiting to type a caption. Giving an inspirational speech in front of hundreds of people feels easier than this, so why is it so hard to write a simple caption for an Instagram post?
Motivational influencers have a knack for captivating an audience for long periods of time. But no one is going to read a long Instagram caption, so sometimes writing one can feel like foreign territory for an aspiring motivational speaker.
I did the research to find ways to motivate followers on Instagram as an influencer so you don’t have to. By collecting and examining data from some of the most popular LDS motivational influencers (Hank Smith, John Bytheway, Jody Moore, and Al Carraway), I was able to find tactics that they successfully use to increase engagement and motivate their audiences.
I looked at the 30 most recent posts from each person and divided them into categories and found which post types brought the most engagement from followers. A colleague and I coded the data with a Cohen’s kappa rating of .76, which indicates an acceptable consistency in our coding. If you’re interested in seeing the coded data and the results, check out my Codebook.
Below are four tips to help you motivate your followers and increase engagement on Instagram:
- Include a call to action. Based on my research, posts with a call to action had the most engagement out of all of the posts. Just like in your speeches, you want to leave your followers with something to not only think about, but to do. Including a call to action in your caption is the number one most used tactic by motivational influencers because it works. Check out this article to see examples of calls to action, and then give it a try on your next post (see what I did there?).
- Coordinate your post and your caption. Instagram posts that receive the most engagement include a picture and a caption that go together. An example of this is posting a picture quote and including a caption with your thoughts on the quote. This can be a quote from yourself (a book, a previous talk, a podcast, etc.) or someone else. When doing my research, I found that posts that didn’t have a caption that correlated with the picture didn’t receive as many likes or comments.
- Ask a question. This is great for follower engagement. Although you may receive less likes, you will receive significantly more comments, which shows that your followers are part of the conversation. Give them something to think about and let them answer in the comments. People love sharing their own opinions and experiences! This article will give you ideas of questions you can pose.
- Be consistent. Once you find what works for you, be consistent. This doesn’t mean that you can only post calls to action or just ask questions, but you want the majority of your posts to match. Based on the data I analyzed, posts that followed an inconsistent pattern did not perform as well as posts that did. For some people, that looks like posting videos with related captions, posting quotes using the same background and fonts, etc. This will help followers quickly recognize your content.
All in all, it’s important to be yourself. Take these tips and adapt them to your situation. It might take a while to reach a level of consistency, and that’s okay. Putting these tips to the test may boost user engagement, and it may help you to motivate your Instagram followers in a whole new way. This increased engagement appeals to Instagram’s algorithm which helps your posts get seen by more people—the more people you can reach, the more you can motivate.