Three Ways to Get Human Connection on Instagram

Businesses, the time to use direct messaging to connect with your online community is now.

So you know the basics for DMs, and maybe you’ve even sent a few. You’ve felt the thrill of getting a response and feeling connected to your audience.

It feels good and you want more.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we are going to break down some specific times you can send DMs.

Reach out to New Followers

We LOOOOVE getting new followers. We also love hearing from them and finding out how we can better serve them with our social media content.

Often on Friday afternoons, Rachel will take a few minutes to send all of our new followers a quick voice message DM. In it, she thanks them for following us and asks if there is any content they’d like to see in our feed.

Some of our best posts have come from those interactions.

Look at Your Notifications

Go into your notifications (that’s the heart icon on the bottom of the screen) and look at the people who have recently engaged with you. Is there a colourful ring around any of their profile pictures? The ring means that they have recently posted an Instagram story.

Click on their picture and it will take you directly to their story. Does their story resonate with you? Comment on it. The comment will go directly to their DMs.

Use Polls in Your Stories

Use your stories to generate conversation starters. Use a poll to ask something like, “Do you want this behind the scenes (insert your thing here)?” Then send it to them through DMs.

We did this last week to offer up a Checklist for Optimizing Google My Business. People DM’ed us and we sent them the document, along with a friendly, personalized message.

This can be used for retail, too. Let’s say you are a restaurant looking to increase your take-out orders and get the conversation going with your customers. You could do a story thanking your followers for the outpouring of support and then post a poll that says “Do you want a coupon for 10% off our take-out menu?” Your follower reaches out. You give them what you promised. And you start a genuine interaction.

Conclusion

The bottom line? People will not go looking for you. You have to put yourself out there if you want to get noticed. DMs are one great strategy to do that. Here's a checklist you can reference.

Want a few more ideas on how to connect with your audience? Check out our post about How to Grow your Online Community During Covid 19.