How often do you scroll through your Instagram account and lament the fact that your posts just don’t seem to be racking up enough views, comments or likes? What if there was data out there that could give you a little bit of secret source to boost your presence?
Actually, there is.
The statistic bods over at Social Insider recently revealed some very interesting data concerning the most engaging post types for Instagram. Given the substantial growth and influence of the Facebook-owned image sharing social platform, it’s become a haven for launching and maintaining new brands and products.
Advertising on the platform is at an all time high and a whole new influencer market has emerged off the back of the platform’s ability to facilitate discovery and engagement with large audiences.
It’s no surprise then that when the guys at Social Insider released the numbers around higher engagement rates for carousel posts on Instagram, people started to take notice – and you should too.
What the Data Says
The data comes from research carried out across 22 million Instagram posts of which around 3million were carousel type updates. The study overall has revealed that carousel posts have a higher engagement rate than posts featuring a single image or video. Carousel style posts aren’t a particularly new feature to Instagram; they’ve been around for a while in fact. That said, they are more popular now than ever. This is clear if you compare 2017 with 2020; the amount of carousel posts which were has increased from 4% to almost 20%. That’s a huge jump.
Carousel posts’ average engagement rate is creeping up to the 2% mark (it currently sits at 1.92%). This rate is higher than single image posts, which only average 1.74% engagement while video racks up an average of 1.45%.
Instagram challenges our conventional understanding of social media platform multimedia types because we would expect video content to have a higher engagement rate than images and s text posts. This discrepancy, where Instagram video posts don’t perform as expected, is likely down to the psychology that users go to Instagram expecting images rather than video. There is also a stigma around audio as many users browsing Instagram on their mobile device do not have audio enabled a great deal of the time. This means part of the impact of video is lost during silent browsing.
The data breaks down a little further and tells us based on the research, how the average engagement rate is affected dependant on the number of slides in a given carousel post.
The results show a kind of arched result in which 2 slides and 8 slides are similar in response but with a dip in engagement between the two. Maximum engagement is reached for posts which utilise all 10 slides. In practise, this means that if you’re going to post anything between 3 and 6 slides, you’re actually better to round it up to 8 or more to maximise your post’s engagement potential.
Mixing Carousel Media
Things get a little more interesting when you dive deeper into the study to look at what happens when you mix media types. For example, adding a combination of videos and images to a single carousel post throws up some notable findings. Mixed carousel posts yielded the highest average engagement, jumping to 2.33%. This is a considerable increase on images alone, even at the higher end of the spectrum.
What is surprising is that very few carousels currently adopt a mixed media format – despite this being the sweet spot for boosting engagement. The study suggests just 7% of carousel posts use a mix of video and images. A whopping 88% of carousels use images only.
Telling Users What to Do
One other very interesting piece of info to come out of the study is whether or not telling users to swipe to initiate the carousel actually improves interaction with that carousel. Well, the data suggests that it does in fact help. Average engagement increases from 1.80% to 2% if your post indicates for the user to ‘swipe left’. For an improvement in performance it’s certainly worth considering isn’t it?
After all, some posts won’t really allow for visual swipe indicators if it compromises the look and feel of the post but there are a number of ways to be creative with this. Some brands also indicate in the text section rather than on the image. While it’s likely this would have a slightly lesser impact, it’s again well worth considering for the sake of notching up overall engagement.
Summary
If you’re not currently utilising carousels in your Instagram activity, this study suggests you should be. It also suggests that higher number of images or ideally a mixed media carousel is the best way to take the post type even further and receive maximum potential engagement for your efforts.
With a few of these tips in your arsenal for use where possible, you can take one of the top performing social media platforms for advertising and discovery that little bit further. Give it a try and let me know if you experience an uplift.
