If your Instagram account isn’t making the cash registers sing, low engagement is most likely the issue. You need a plan to suss out the reasons, improve engagement, and build a loyal community. It includes the use of AI for captions, reels, and ads because of the sheer efficiency AI brings to creative development and execution.
Here’s more on how to get more engagement on Instagram using AI.
What are the benefits of a good Instagram engagement rate?
How to get more engagement on Instagram using AI
- Create scroll-stopping creatives
- Tell stories people care about
- Write captions with intention
- Post at the right times
What are the benefits of a good Instagram engagement rate?
Instagram’s vast user base (at the time of this writing, it was the fourth most-used social media platform) makes it a promising destination for product discovery and purchases, which are increasingly happening directly within social media feeds (the U.S. alone has over a hundred million social shoppers). A higher engagement rate means:
- Increased reach as Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes engaging content — like posts with comments and shares — showing it to a wider, more interested audience.
- A community that likes and trusts you, and may advocate for your brand, helping bring more leads and sales your way
- Opportunities to know your audience better
- A higher likelihood of influencing purchase decisions and converting followers into customers
What’s a good engagement rate on Instagram?
An engagement rate between 1% and 3.5% is generally accepted as a good engagement rate on Instagram. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. Engagement tends to be higher for fashion, travel, and entertainment sectors. And the engagement rate of an account tends to go down as follower count increases. So, it’s best you compare how your account is doing against the average engagement rate for your industry, and pay attention to any rise or fall in engagement with changes in follower count.
How do you calculate your Instagram engagement rate?
Instagram Insights and third-party analytics tools automatically calculate your engagement rate and provide other valuable performance insights. You can do the math on your own using this formula: Engagement Rate = (Likes + Comments + Saves) / Reach x 100
- Likes indicate that your content appeals to people but these aren’t strongly correlated to business outcomes
- Comments (and your responses to them) are strong engagement signals, and tell Instagram algorithms that your content is valuable and share-worthy
- Saves indicate interest in your product/service or educational content, and can drive conversions
- You also want to look at direct messages as they can indicate if not guarantee strong interest and a readiness to buy, and shares, which suggest an appreciation for your content and expand your reach organically.
What does low engagement on Instagram indicate?
If people aren’t engaging with your posts, it could mean a few things:
- Potential customers aren’t connecting with your brand
- Your content strategy isn’t moving followers from interest to conversion
- You’re not building the trust needed to drive sales
- The Instagram algorithm is showing your content to fewer people
If your audience isn’t feeling your brand, it could be that your Instagram persona might not reflect the real you. Or Instagram might be limiting your reach because you don’t post consistently, your content isn’t what your audience typically engages with on the platform, or if your captions aren’t encouraging your audience to share their thoughts.
Teams operating at capacity are more likely to face these problems as they’re unable to create or test enough content for their Instagram pages. It’s a problem AI can solve by generating content ideas, captions, and visuals, so long as you use the best AI Instagram tools. See how AI can work alongside your team to make your Instagram valuable for your business!
How to get more engagement on Instagram — with AI
1. Create scroll-stopping creatives
Nothing attracts Instagrammers more than pleasing aesthetics. AI can generate images and videos from your instructions (prompts), but telling an AI Instagram tool what to create each time is bothersome and difficult to get right the first time, which can defeat the purpose of using AI as an efficiency tool. Recognizing this difficulty, generative AI marketing platform Typeface came up with the idea to create AI images in simpler, faster ways:
- Visual Inspiration Studio: Place your product in studio scenes or outdoor settings, and Typeface’s AI will blend it naturally into the background, retaining every product detail (logo, color, dimensions, etc.). Generate flat lays, macro shots, and on-location/lifestyle shots. Enhance images with mood lighting and color grading for feeds that pop.
- Image Studio: Place your product on a blank canvas, resizing, rotating, or moving it as needed. Use pre-made decorations or upload your own to use in your image. Use built-in editing tools to remove or add objects, and simple prompts (which a built-in Magic Prompt enhances) to generate entire backdrops withing minutes, with low-effort.
Image generated on Typeface
2. Tell stories people care about
Instagram is a storytelling platform. With a phone and a few good ideas, you can outperform expensive campaigns. But given how the competition for attention is fierce, co-opting AI’s visual storytelling capabilities can give you an advantage. Here’s more on how to get engagement on Instagram with AI-powered storytelling:
Share customer appreciation
User-generated content works as powerful endorsement. Ask customers with IG accounts for a shoutout or review, or use a tool that collects, obtains legal rights to, and curates UGC content. An example is TINT, which uses AI to identify influential users and analyze posts, and curates the best UGC and manages it across multiple platforms. You can also get employees involved in posting behind-the-scenes content to reflect real experiences.
Use the best Instagram Story ideas for your industry
Your Insta followers are likely checking out stories from dozens of people and other brands. If your Story game is strong and consistent, it’s quite likely that your followers will watch your Stories every time. Here are some ideas to explore:
- Share a weekly round-up of your blogs
- Share takeaways from your whitepaper
- Run a contest
- Announce deals
- Poll your audience
- Promote events and tradeshows
- Share your wins
- Share social proof
Repurpose existing content into reels
If you’re on YouTube or Vimeo, and have accumulated a large library of videos, you can repurpose them into Instagram reels. AI can transform longer videos into short social clips or combine video clips to create a sizzle reel.
Video Agent, Typeface’s AI agent for video, finds relevant clips and images from your existing libraries to create bite-sized social clips, video ads, and sizzle reels. Use simple word searches to find video sections and the AI will stitch a story and add captions, which you can edit using built-in tools.
Use simple word searches for your video concept and Video Agent will find relevant scenes and moments from your existing video assets. To create sizzle reels, share your campaign context or brief and Video Agent extracts related clips from your videos, generates a script, and combines clips into a sizzle reel with audio and captions. All elements are easily editable.
3. Write captions with intention
A great caption is like icing on a cake: it makes you want to comment, hit the like button, or maybe even share the post or save it to savor later. It works not only because it’s written well but written for its target audience and in a familiar brand voice.
Although writing engaging captions is second nature to marketing pros, time constraints from managing multichannel campaigns keep them from spending as much as they’d like on writing copy from scratch. It’s also why split testing and segment-wise analysis of campaigns move slowly.
AI generates captions in seconds, and while they may not come out perfect, they give you something to work with and improve to push out Instagram posts faster than what’s realistically possible on your own. More headlines, captions, and CTAs means split testing can happen sooner rather than later.
Narrato generates catchy Instagram captions based on your notes and product/blog URLs. It’s also handy for creating theme-based posts for occasions like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and more.
Steps to create Instagram captions on Narrato
- Select the relevant AI template (e.g., Social media post with link that use an existing piece of content as reference)
- Choose the social media platform, i.e., Instagram
- Select your brand voice or a tone of voice from several options like inspiring, witty, friendly, etc.
- Paste the reference URL or add your notes
- Select the caption length
- Upload an image or use Narrato’s AI image generator
- Hit Generate
Here’s a revised version of an Instagram post Narrato generated:
4. Post at the right times
Posting when your audience is most likely to see your content is one of the easiest ways to boost engagement on Instagram. When you share content during peak hours, more people actually see it instead of scrolling past in a crowded feed.
The key is understanding when your specific audience is most active. AI tools can help you spot these patterns by analyzing when your followers engage most with your content. Instead of guessing, you get clear data about the best times to post for your particular audience. On Narrato, you can schedule your Instagram posts to go out at the best times and publish directly to Instagram from the platform.
Make a real impression on Instagram
People follow brands on Instagram because they already feel some sort of connection or affinity. But if they like what they see — an entertaining reel or useful post — they can become followers. The key is to create great content and be consistent, and AI can help with both.
Narrato has helped businesses scale content and brought teams into smooth workflows where collaboration thrives. It’s not just an Instagram content creator but an AI writing assistant for almost all types of marketing content.
Start your free trial now.
