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In the ever-evolving world of social media, engagement is the key factor in determining content success. The more likes, comments, and followers you get, the more credible, trustworthy, and influential you seem. Instagram is the most preferred social media platform today for creators, influencers, and brands to showcase their material, increase reach, promote brand awareness, bring engagement, and build strong connections. However, with the increasing competition, surviving on the platform and reaching your target audience is a formidable challenge. Getting high engagement is crucial to compete with such prominent creators and brands. Instagram algorithms favor and push content that gets high engagement and make it reach mass audiences. But the question is how to get that engagement. Besides buying likes and followers, engagement through Instagram pods is another beneficial option to increase likes, comments, and views. In this complete guide, we will discuss Instagram pods, types of engagement pods, how they work, and how to create, find, and join them.
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What are Instagram Engagement Pods?
Instagram Engagement pods are basically the group of users who collaborate with each other to increase engagement on their individual posts. They basically make a pact to like, comment, and share each other’s posts to increase organic reach and visibility. As engagement is a crucial factor in increasing organic reach, these engagement pods follow a give-and-take approach, increasing each other’s engagement where mutual assistance is the key.
The main idea behind this concept is to send a signal to Instagram algorithms that the post has high engagement owing to high quality, relevant, and engaging content. Instagram algorithms promote content with high engagement in other users explore pages, thereby increasing organic reach and visibility.
Do Engagement Pods Work?
This strategy has always received mixed reviews from the creators. On the one hand, it helps you get engagement and followers, discover feed exposure, increase visibility, help in community building, support, and networking, and build collaborative relationships. On the other hand, its negative side is they are not always effective, the engagement quality is not genuine, results are time-consuming, non-reciprocity response, and they are suitable only for short-term profits. With both pros and cons, whether pods work for you or not depends on your short-term and long-term goals and objectives. Moreover, it’s essential to follow the best practices while using this strategy as in case people get to know about this, it can harm your brand image. Instagram Pods are not organic engagement, which can alert Instagram algorithms if not used strategically. The best alternative to engagement pods is to buy likes for Instagram. It’s a straightforward, cost-effective, and fast approach to increase engagement and boost organic reach.
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Types of Engagement Pods
Some common types of engagement pods are:
Niche Pods – The members of niche pods belong to the same niche or industry. They share the same interests and are related to a particular field. Some examples of niche-specific engagement pods are – travel, fitness, health, beauty, marketing, etc. These pods are most relevant as the engagement is from targeted people who are actually interested in your field and content.
Broad Pods – Contrary to niche pods that are industry-specific, broad pods include a group of people from different fields with one common interest – increasing engagement rates. The members from different niches, like travel, beauty, fitness, food, etc., work under a single roof and increase each other’s engagement.
Comment Pods – These pods focus on posting comments on each other’s posts. This means each member of the pod posts some meaningful and relevant comments on others’ posts rather than liking them. Emojis and generic words are generally not acceptable.
Like Pods – Contrary to comments pods, these pods are beneficial for increasing the number of likes. The members of like pods agree to like the posts of fellow members and increase their engagement.
Followers Pods – In followers pods, the members agree to help each other gain new followers. They simply follow each other to increase followers and encourage retention.
How to create your own Instagram Pod?
If you want to start your own Instagram Engagement Pod and manage it with your own mindset, plans, and strategies, here is a simple process to do so:
- Find and select a small group of like-minded Instagram users
- Send Direct Messages to the selected Instagrammers about your idea of creating a pod
- After getting approval, create an engagement pod and name it properly
- Send a professional welcome message, rules, and guidelines for the pod and how the pod will work
- Engage in informal conversations outside the pod to know your pod members and build long-lasting connections.
How to Find and Join Engagement Pods?
It’s simple to find and join Instagram pods. Search for “Instagram Engagement Pods” on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and Reddit, and get tons of results. However, finding normal pods is easy, but finding a quality engagement pod requires more effort. Quality engagement pods consist of 10-15 like-minded people engaging in a single niche. To find such engagement pods related to your niche, networking with others in your niche and proper invitations are mandatory. You can find such quality pods in Facebook groups, Instagram hashtags, online communities, and dedicated Reddit pages.
When you find such pods, message the admins of that group, explain your brand and requirements to them, and wait for their reply. Niche-based pods mostly have some criteria and requirements that are compulsory to fulfill to become a member. If you fulfill those requirements and agree to their rules and guidelines, they will accept your invitation and let you join the pod. However, another way to join the pods is threads in online communities where you just have to drop a link to your Instagram post and let people visit and engage. In return, you must also like and comment on others’ posts.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Instagram pods are a give-and-take strategy to boost engagement and increase reach and visibility. Although the engagement is from real accounts, it’s still not the real engagement. The people who engage do not care about your content; they do it just to increase engagement on their own profile. The chances of getting loyal followers are low with this approach. However, if you want short-term engagement to increase reach and give an initial boost to your profile, this approach may work well for you. Besides all that, it allows you to connect and collaborate with like-minded people, which ultimately increases your brand awareness.
