How to Increase Reach on Instagram 4x Instantly with Instagram Polls

Hey, what’s up guys? Kenny Bost here at True North Social. I wanted to do a quick video about how to increase reach on Instagram with Instagram polls, and how they can increase the reach drastically versus regular Instagram posts. I’ve been doing some posts on our Instagram account about different types of stickers and how that can affect engagement etc.

But with the poll specifically, I’ve seen quite a few videos about people who are drastically increasing reach using Instagram polls. I was skeptical, because I’m like why would just someone interacting with an Instagram poll get the Instagram algorithm to increase how many people see it? And I think obviously or not obviously, depending on how much you know, the more that someone engages with your Instagram post, the more that Instagram is going to distribute that Instagram post.

 

instagram audience

I think this all circles back to basically the fact that Instagram wants to keep you on their social media platform as long as possible, that’s their goal. We’ve talked about this in other videos. We know that the reason that they are pushing up reels or video content in your feed is because you engage with that longer, and that, thus, keeps you in the app longer, and that means they can serve you more Instagram ads.

So like it or not, they are playing that game as much as they can. So they are pushing out that content as much as they can. And supposedly, the fact that if you do a poll in your Instagram stories, and that makes the target audience interact with it, then I guess we’re going to get more Instagram reach from it. So I wanted to give this a test, so I have a client of mine who does some, basically they sell vintage cars, it’s pretty big time thing.

And I wanted to test like hey, between a hard top and a convertible, which would you pick out of these two Ferraris, right? So I’m going to put together an Instagram story that shows the two cars, and then that way, I can put the poll sticker on it, people can pick etc. So let’s dive right into that.

 

instagram audience

All right, let’s create an Instagram story real quick, get that posted, and then we can check back in 24 hours once the story’s down and we’ll see if there were any changes in Instagram insights. So I’m going to pop up an Instagram account real quick, go to my Instagram stories to create a story, click on this one that I made for convertible and hardtop. We’ll click on stickers, poll and then we’ll ask a question. We’ll go convertible or hardtop? Okay. And then under yes, we’ll put convertible, and then under no we’ll put hardtop, so people can pick one or the other.

And then let’s center this guy, okay, make it a little bit smaller, get it in the middle, okay, there we go. We are live, and I’m going to refresh a little bit just to make sure everything gets up there, we get the ring, we know it’s good to go, all right, it’s good to go, great. So now we’ll check back in 24 hours and see what our results are.

And we’re back. All right, so I got some results for us, I want to pop open the Instagram account and then we’ll take a look at if it made a difference or not. Is this fact or fiction? So all right, we’ll open up our Instagram account real quick, okay, 40 to 60 percent. We’ve got some likes on there, let’s drop that back down. Click on Instagram insights, on Instagram insights we’ve got our Instagram stories here, and I have a couple previous ones.

So we’ve got this one which got 377, this one that got 485, and then we’ve got our new one that got 1500. So wow, that’s a fact. This for sure connected to our target audience and the Instagram algorithm pushed our Instagram reach quite a bit higher. Let’s pop open the Instagram story real quick again, I just want to take a look at the activity. I mean, these are all real people, I see no people with a bunch of numbers after their name or anything, looks great.

user generated content

Very healthy for the account. Scroll back up, and we’ll take a look at the voters, how many people voted for convertible versus hardtop, wow, super impressed. Accounts reached 1525 verse mid-300s, I love it. It sounds like we’re going to need to start doing some more Instagram posts.

Well, there you have it, so now we know. If we create more polls, we’re going to reach more people. And I have to assume that this is going to go for other interactive stickers, like anything else that’s going to drive people to kind of engage more with things, ask a question etc. I think it’s why we see so many influencers do this.

As a brand, it’s a little more difficult to do, I mean, maybe it’s not more difficult, but it’s less like you’re talking to an individual, so I think the bar is higher for return. But that goes across the board for any brand. But there was an example of us using a brand who offers a service, doing a poll and it worked amazingly. I mean, we’re talking about basically, almost quadrupling the analytics on that, or the metrics etc. Really happy with those results.

 

instagram reels

We’re going to do some more testing like this in the near future, and I hope you guys join us. I’ll make sure that the video title is grabbing enough for you to be like oh, I want to know. Do polls increase my Instagram reach? They do. We should obviously include this in our list of social media best practices.

I appreciate you guys joining me. Please like, comment, subscribe, whatever you want to do and I’ll see you all next time, bye.

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