The more calls to action, the better.
When building up your small business on social media, have you ever struggled with connecting with your audience? On Instagram, it can be hard to find an audience that engages often with the account—especially for editors who are small business owners or freelancers.
Advice from websites like Shopify and Later encourages users to include calls to action in their Instagram captions to help increase user engagement. Calls to action might include asking questions for users to answer in the comments, inviting users to click a specific link in the bio, or asking users to tag a friend in the comments.
The goal of a post is usually to inspire others to become more involved with your account and whatever services you offer. Having a call to action makes it clear what the audience can do and how you would like them to participate/engage. This is especially important for businesses, which are constantly finding ways to connect with their audience, advertise their services, and ultimately provide their services to those who need them.
To help editors who are small business owners or freelancers better connect with their audiences, I decided to look at freelance editors or small editing businesses on Instagram with this question in mind: how are they utilizing calls to action?
How Others Have Utilized Calls to Action
I looked at five different freelance editors/small editing businesses for answers:
@allwrittenthings
@cozycottagediting
@btleditorial
@sophie.cannatabowman
@penningandplanning
I picked six random posts from each account and then coded each call to action into different categories of calls to action and for tone to determine which tone and type of call to action were used the most. To confirm the reliability of the coding, two people coded the data and I then checked the Cohen’s kappa statistic, which was 0.639 for the type of call to action and 0.584 for tone (out of 1).
I found that 40% of posts use multiple calls to action, with 23% with “link in bio,” 17% with other types of calls to action, 10% with “contact me,” and 10% with a product/service. Fifty percent of posts use a friendly tone, 37% use a neutral tone, and 13% use other tones.
This data shows that editing businesses are more likely to use friendly tones and several calls to action, as opposed to neutral tones or having only one call to action. Because a call to action’s purpose is to make it clear how you’d like consumers to interact with you and your service, having a friendly tone and giving them multiple options might make them more inclined to act on that call to action.
Utilizing Calls to Action Going Forward
Engagement is vital when building up clientele on Instagram. Giving users several options to interact with you might remove the pressure to engage and allow users to interact in the way they’re most comfortable, while still interacting with you. And make sure to use a friendly tone (rather than simply providing information) to show the connection and humanity behind the account.
Next time you’re wondering what to use as your call to action, consider giving users multiple ways to engage with you. For example, you could say, “Leave a comment about ____ and DM me _____.” And if you’re interested in learning more about how to connect with your audience on Instagram, consider reviewing Bookmark’s other articles on Instagram.