Find out how sharing personal details with your fans can increase your engagement on Instagram.
If you’re an author on social media, chances are you spend a lot of time talking up your books. After all, you want to keep your fans in the loop. These days, for authors with middle-grade readers, Instagram is the place to be. But what should you be posting on Instagram to increase your engagement?
There are plenty of sources that give advice about how to increase engagement on Instagram. While posting about things like book signings, cover releases, and teasers are all well and good, Forbes emphasizes how important it is to also be genuine and show that you’re human in your social media captions. Similarly, Self-Publishing School strongly recommends that authors should take the time to share about their personal lives on Instagram.
The Research
Showing your personal side sounds like warm-and-fuzzy advice. But to see if sharing personal details from your life actually increases engagement on Instagram, I did a little research.
James Riley (Half Upon a Time), Shannon Messenger (Keeper of the Lost Cities), and Lisa McMann (Unwanteds) are all past New York Times best-selling authors who continue to write new books for their middle-grade fans. I hopped on their Instagram accounts to see how their work-based posts ranked against posts mixed with personal details about their lives.
For each author, I pulled a sample of 15 posts that only had information about the author’s work and 15 posts that included at least one detail about the author’s personal life (a total of 30 posts per author). Based on these criteria, another volunteer and I coded each post as either personal or professional.
After I made a few tweaks, my codebook (see below) for categorizing posts into either the professional or personal category had a Cohen’s kappa of 1.0, or an interrater agreement of 100% between me and the other independent coder.
Once the posts were categorized, I averaged the likes and comments in each group of 15 posts. Then to account for different amounts of followers, I divided the averages for likes and comments on each account’s posts by how many followers the account had. This gave me the follower engagement rate for each type of post without skewing the data due to different numbers of followers. Check out the results below!
So What?
The charts above tell the story: for these authors, posts with at least some personal details won out over solely professional posts when it came to boosting engagement on Instagram. But if you’re still not sold on personal posts, consider the following:
- James Riley’s personal post engagement rate increased by 83% for likes and 300% for comments in comparison to professional-only posts.
- For Shannon Messenger? Her personal posts had 70% higher engagement rate for likes and 120% for comments when compared with professional-only posts.
- Lisa McMann’s personal posts followed a similar trend compared to professional-only posts (with even higher results): 194% increase in engagement rate for likes and 560% for comments!
Even from these small samples, we can see a big benefit to engagement from including personal details in your posts. So if you’re wondering how to increase engagement on Instagram, try updating your fans about what’s going on behind the scenes. Getting up close and personal could be part of the boost your books need on Instagram.