Comments From Engaged Followers Are Too Easily Buried In Notifications
Anyone using Instagram seriously for their business has been faced with a perplexing dilemma.
You see, when you post a great image to Instagram, it will garner all kinds of likes and comments. Continue to post great images and those likes and comments will pile up gloriously. It’s great when you begin to really see interest and results from a platform like Instagram!
The problem is that Instagram’s notification tab displays all interactions with you and your posts in a single, reverse-chronological order. That means that tags and comments are listed alongside likes and follows. Comments are effectively buried!
That’s a serious issue. While many comments on Instagram are short and may not even need much of a response, what about the serious comments from interested followers? Prospects who have now given your brand a direct invitation and opportunity to engage with them. Pass that up, and you might as well not be on social media!
Do you even know if you’ve been missing comments? Scary thought.
While you can carefully scroll though all of those notifications, looking for the stray comment, there are better, alternative solutions.
You might go to your profile tab, then tap on each of your most recent images. You’ll see the comments right under your caption and reply to them there. But that, too, introduces waste and inefficiency. You’ll need to keep checking the same images over and over, and will no doubt miss any comment left on a post more than a few days old.
You might use a tool like Iconosquare which includes a tab for Comment Tracker. There you can view unread comments, regardless of the age of the comment or post, and reply to them. But that means using a third-party tool just to respond to comments, and as Alton Brown says, never have a unipurpose tool.
Instead, I’ve found a tool that has given me the freedom to step up my game in Instagram and still keep up with the increased volume of comments and engagement. A tool that does far more, and that’s AgoraPulse. (Here’s my full Agorapulse Review.)
With AgoraPulse, you get an Instagram “Inbox” that collects all comments together, regardless of the post, so that you can quickly respond to or dismiss them.
Once you reply to a comment or mark it as reviewed, it gets a green background and will disappear as soon as you refresh your stream. This keeps you focused on only the new comments (though you can easily see past-reviewed comments in the All stream).
The AgoraPulse Instagram monitoring includes all posts, not just the most recent ones, so you’ll see comments on images even if you posted them to Instagram months ago.
What’s more, AgoraPulse has just added the extremely convenient feature of support for Instagram Ads!
Currently, when creating an ad within Facebook Ads Manager, you can choose to display that ad to targeted Instagram users, which ends up being an extremely effective ad. With brands reporting 4% or greater engagement on Instagram, those ads results in a great many comments.
Comments you cannot see!
Since the ad is not a post in your normal feed (sometimes referred to as a dark post), you won’t get notifications within Instagram, and you won’t see the post on your profile.
The only way to see comments on an unpublished Instagram post is by using AgoraPulse. You can read more about the solution, and how to add your Facebook Ads account here.
Of course there’s a lot more that AgoraPulse does. In addition to monitoring Instagram activity, you can post to Twitter, Facebook Pages, Google+ Pages and LinkedIn Company Pages. You can monitor Twitter and Facebook, and get detailed reports from your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.
So you’ll be able to manage all of your key social profiles, while ensuring that you are always on top of important Instagram comments.
AgoraPulse is a powerful tool for social media management that’s perfect for individual bloggers and social media agencies alike. Check it out for yourself! Start a free trial and see if you’ve got Instagram comments you’ve never seen before.