Instagram carousels should be the center of your 2022 social media strategy

5 data-driven reasons why you should focus on carousels for an increase in your Instagram engagement in 2022

1. Carousels lead to a higher average engagement rate

When it comes to top-performing posts on Instagram, things aren’t as easy as they may seem, because actually, best practices will be considered depending on the account’s size.

To all Instagram marketers, this is something you should know:

2. Using more carousels can help you increase your engagement per impression rate and make you gain more likes

The carousel post wins when it comes to engagement per impression across all profile sizes. This can actually reveal one of Instagram’s strategies, of pushing this type of content into the user’s feeds more.

With this in mind, think about prioritizing this type of content when choosing what to boost on Instagram.

Among the many benefits of choosing to place your bet on carousels is that this kind of post is the one that increases the median number of likes on Instagram.

3. Carousels lead to more comments on Instagram

Having an audience that presents interest in your topics, that’s open to communication and shows involvement is every brand’s dream and every social media manager’s objective.

But this ain’t an easy job, so, just in case you need a bit of help, check out these insights meant to give you a hand to improve your strategy:

4. Carousels are more likely to be saved by Instagram users

Depending on your business objectives, there may be better to choose one type of post format to make your followers do what you want.

Let’s talk about generating more saves, for example. In order for you to get as close as possible to this objective, when creating your social media strategy you should consider using more carousels because this is what triggers people to press that save button most of the time.

But of course, there are some exceptions, large profiles (those with more than 100K followers) being the ones here. In this case, relying more on images would be a wiser choice.

5. Carousels increase the chances of a higher reach rate

Each type of post has its advantages and possible gains for your business, so what’s left to be done is to establish your goals and start working towards them, with the right tactics and actions.

Among the multiple benefits of integrating carousels more into your content calendar is that they also generate twice higher reach rates than videos, at least in the case of small profiles (under 5K).

The highest reach rates for carousels are 1.27% for small accounts, but also for middle-sized accounts (1.20%), those between 50K-100K followers.

TIP:Embrace captions with a maximum length of ten words for amplified results

When it comes to the optimal caption length of a post, there are a lot of good debates. But let’s not forget there’s strength in numbers, so data is the most trustworthy source.

What the analysis of 102 million posts showed is that captions of up to 10 words, combined with carousels are users’ favorite type of content to interact with. And that driving away from this formula proved to cause a decrease in engagement with about 0.70%.

Still, for those cases in which you consider a longer copy is needed, to properly deliver your message to your audience, you should take into consideration this formula: pair captions longer than 30 words with videos.

Conclusion

Now, with Instagram being the platform that has won people’s hearts, a closer analysis of what works and what it doesn’t is a gold mine.

Instagram’s engagement can go on mysterious roads, but the good thing is that data helps you be prepared and adapt to whatever may come.

Seeing how Instagram carousels become more and more important in Instagram marketing, and the many benefits they can bring to a brand’s social media presence, it becomes undeniably that in 2022, every business that hopes to be successful on Instagram should for sure become a heavy user of Instagram carousels.

Story byElena Cucu

Elena enjoys mixing words with data in the digital marketing land, where she conducts social media studies. She likes to describe herself as(show all)Elena enjoys mixing words with data in the digital marketing land, where she conducts social media studies. She likes to describe herself as a driven-born digital storyteller.

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