Instagram What’s Working: Creating Engaging Content!

This is Part 3 of a 10-Part series. Find all the links here.

Creating engaging content has made a huge difference for me on Instagram. Engaging content not only creates engagement with the people that follow you, it tells Instagram to share it with MORE people. Here are my four main pillars for engaging content on Instagram: Serve, Relate, Entertain, Call to Action, and Bonus: Ask For Help.

1. Serve

As the author of the post, it’s easy to forget that the post is not about the author, it’s about the reader! For me, serving is at the heart of my Instagram account. As you click through examples, you’ll see most of the posts share this in common. I always aim serve in some way: education, a product that would improve their life, fresh flowers for home or event, behind the scenes, hopefully make people laugh, feel better, etc.

While not every post needs to be a pitch, what you’re serving should correspond to what you’re actually all about. I love creating educational freebies and sharing them on Instagram. People get them by signing up for our newsletter!

2. Relate

They call it social media for a reason: it’s social! It’s about connecting and relating to people. Can you share something that others can relate to? For example, this post where I shared about the struggles of taking photos holding flowers (the comments are gold), rigged dahlia tuber sales, not planting enough sunflowers, or always wearing mismatched gloves. Silly examples, but relatable.

This could also mean sharing something personal about you and your life, even unrelated to your business (like your pets). Another really cool way to relate is to show a process, take people BTS, share a useful tool or show them a unique viewpoint of what you do. You can get really creative here–how can you let people a little more into your world?

3. Entertain

While entertaining and relating go hand-in-hand, I think of this one a little differently. Whether you’re entertaining by making people laugh, creating jaw-dropping images or videos, or writing a post that everyone reads into the comments to get every last detail! This is about causing people to linger because they are fully entertained by whatever it is that’s happening.

Here is an example. It’s a little BTS glimpse with some relatable copywriting, but the video itself is entertaining because while the content is simple, the video is a bit unusual because of how it’s created. It’s a Stop Motion, which is actually a series of photos stitched together into a video. You can see by the comments that people were entertained by the video. Unfortunately, the audio is no longer available, but it added to the entertainment.

4. Call to Action

Don’t be afraid to actually tell people what it is that you want them to do! If people are engaged with your content, they want to know what the next step is. Whether that’s signing up for your newsletter, a tuber sale, purchasing bouquets, entering your giveaway, etc. It’s almost so obvious that it’s incredibly easy to miss because we assume people know what to do. But people are busy, make it easy for them. Include a call to action so your reader actually knows what it is that you want them to do.

Bonus: Ask for Help

Technically, this falls under “Call to Action” but it’s one of my favorite things to do on the gram. Just because you are the author does not mean that you need to know it all. Not only is it OK to ask for help, it creates and builds a helpful community! I love asking for help, whether it’s for favorite photos for a website rebrand, which varieties people love, or help with keeping a dahlia.

Our first year farming, I wasn’t exactly sure how we would sell our flowers. It was June 2020, an odd time in the world. I sheepishly put out a post on Social Media asking if any businesses would be open to being a pickup location. We ended up with two businesses from that one post, which eventually grew to 6, all word of mouth! It was a big deal for me at the time, and we still deliver to local business every Friday, four years later.