Bookstagram or Instagram in general can be hard to handle with posts to schedule by a certain date. And of course the stress of wondering whether you’ll ever have an increase engagement is on your mind too. Now I am by no means an expert at all, but I figured I would share some tips I’ve learnt from my experience.

1. Bookstagram Is A Community

I know there are plenty of articles that state that engaging with others will benefit you. It’s true, but not many of those go through the details.

I have always found that posting genuine content works whether that be through posts, stories or comments as more often than not people want to share the love back. I would try to create relationships and soon enough many opportunities will come through such as getting in contact with small brands, publishers or even getting to know bookstagrammers that you may have admired for a while.

I’ve also found that turning on post notifications for a profile that has a decent following and being the first to comment helps. This is because people tend to like the first few comments they see and perhaps check out their profile. This technique works vice versa and liking comments of others will intrigue people!

2. Pretty Profile And Consistency

People want to follow you because there’s something about your profile which grabs their attention. It could be an aesthetic feed, hooking captions or a well written bio. Instagram is a place where people really do judge a book by it’s cover, so you want to make sure that you’ve done everything you can to come across as an account that looks genuine.

In a bio, for me it’s just a few rounded sentences which tells me about what is the purpose of your account and what you aim to do.

Captions should tell a story that will want me to read on and even comment.

Pictures should be of decent quality and my personal preference is that it’s an account which is inspiring for me. I don’t want to keep negativity on my feed. I also prefer an account that will keep to the same posting schedule as it could be something your audience looks forward to and gain more engagement.

3. Use all features

Instagram has many features and there are some most people aren’t taking advantage of.

I try to make the most of features, however I do know that I’ve not created an IGTV video. I know that people gain more engagement by making the most of what is provided to them. For example, stories are equally as important as posting pictures. The people who watch my story tells me who engages with my account the most and my story is also a way to connect more with my audience. From using polls to ask for their opinion or using a question box to get to know others better. I know I find it fun posting it and I’m sure others have fun getting involved.

However, I can use my story to gain more views by including hashtags or my location. As well as this, if you truly have made some good relationships on bookstagram then occasionally teaming up with them to provide good content and tagging them in your story could divert your audience to each of your accounts.

Whatever you choose to focus on, finding the right technique will soon come even if it does take a couple of tries! If I’m being honest, I rarely get things right on the first try!

I hope you have found this post useful and have learnt something new or even just taken these tips into account. This post was originally supposed to be offering tips on book blogging and bookstagram, however the post would be too long! So next week will be a post all about book blogging and the tips I’ve learnt. In the meantime make sure you check out my recent blog post a review on Clockwork Angel!

Have you picked up any tips? Any tips you’d like to share?