For brand account managers, views on Instagram aren’t just a nice-to-have, but an important indicator of whether your current marketing strategy is working. On Instagram, views are not just another KPI to report to your boss; they play a much bigger role in your overall performance. Views are essential because they act as a key signal to the Instagram algorithm, indicating whether your content is worth showing to a wider audience.

We know there’s no universal formula for getting views on Instagram, but there are ways to adapt your strategy to your brand and target audience that help optimize your content for higher view counts. In this article, we’ll show you how to get more views on Instagram by walking you through 12 key steps that help increase your content visibility and reach on the platform. 

What are Views on Instagram? 

First, it is important to clarify what the views metric on Instagram actually measures. Until April 2025, Instagram reported impressions, plays, and video views as separate metrics. These three KPIs have since been merged into a single metric. Views measure how many times in total content was seen and are thus different from the metric of reach, which tracks how many unique accounts saw the content.

Under the new definition of the metric, a view is counted whenever content is displayed or played. You can now track views across the following platform areas:

• Reels
• Stories
• Static posts
• Carousels
• Live videos
• Ads
• Profile visits

Beyond visibility, views also function as an important ranking signal. They help Instagram understand which audiences respond to your content and influence how the platform distributes and ranks your posts. Envision a distribution spiral where lower view rates early on cause Instagram to interpret this as a weak signal of interest, which limits the chances of your content getting more views on Instagram. 

12 Tips on How to Increase Views on Instagram

At first glance, getting more views on Instagram can feel unpredictable. You post content, test formats, follow trends, and still don’t always see consistent results. But there’s a method to the madness. Visibility on Instagram isn’t based on luck, it’s shaped by patterns you can understand and influence.

Instead of throwing content out and hoping something sticks, successful brands focus on specific strategic levers that impact how their content is distributed. These include how your audience interacts with your posts, how relevant your content is to them, and how consistently you build on what works.

This is where data comes in. While performance data can feel overwhelming at first, it’s one of your most valuable tools. It helps you move from guesswork to informed decisions and gives you clarity on what actually drives views over time.

In the following, we’ll walk you through 12 key steps on how to get more views on Instagram, showing you how to apply these insights in a structured, data-driven way:

1. Optimize Your Profile
2. Write Engaging Hooks
3. Use the Right Hashtags
4. Understand what your Audience is Interested In
5. Find the Best Posting Times
6. Form a Bond with your Followers
7. Encourage People to Share your Content
8. Create and Promote your own Contests and Giveaways
9. Cooperate with an Influencer
10. Develop Partnerships with Other Content Creators
11. Use Trending Music
12. Investigate Account History 

1. Optimize Your Profile

The structure of your Instagram account forms the foundation of your success on the platform. Small steps such as verifying your account or regularly updating your bio can already make a difference to your view count, as your profile is often the first point of contact for any new viewer. If your account appears outdated, inconsistent, or unclear, users will be less likely to return to your content or watch more.

. Show that your account is actively being maintained by:

• updating links or link trees
• keeping branding consistent across platforms
• keeping Story Highlights organized and visually consistent
• pinning important posts / best-performing content
• ensuring accuracy of contact information 

Using keywords in your profile is another effective way to make your account more searchable and increase Instagram views. It gives users a clear entry point when they search for specific topics and helps the Instagram algorithm understand what your content is about. As a result, the platform can more easily connect your account with the right niche and audience.

2. Write Engaging Hooks and Captions

Even if a topic interests a potential viewer, why should they click on it? Social media moves fast, and interest in your account or content is gained and lost within seconds. To get people to click or stay, you need a hook that grabs attention immediately.

Hooks are indispensable when asking how to get more views on Instagram Reels because they encourage viewers to start watching and stay until the end. The goal is not just a view, but to keep your audience engaged long enough to deliver your message, brand vision, product, service, or the purpose of your Reel.

With some guidance, you can learn how to write hooks that reel your audience in. It may take some trial and error to discover which style works best for your brand and audience. Since attention is currency on social media, learning how to write engaging content for social media is an important skill.

If you struggle to come up with hooks or captions, AI tools can speed up the creative process by helping you write engaging captions that match your tone and niche. They allow you to experiment with different opening lines and styles to find what attracts the most views. 

3. Use the Right Hashtags

Hashtags may not be the first thing that comes to mind when pondering how to get more views on Instagram posts. But don’t be fooled, they are important. Using the right hashtags can be an important element in getting your content discovered. Instagram has adopted a rigorous 5 hashtags limit which means that you can no longer throw hashtags into the caption and hope that one will stick. So, the question is how to get more views on Instagram posts by using hashtags.

Taking a deep dive into what hashtags have historically done well for you or your industry competitors can help you predict what is likely to perform highly in the future as well. Hashtag research gives you data-based insights, drawing on real data from Instagram accounts in your niche. Social media tools can help your Instagram get more views through a breakdown of correlation patterns between hashtag usage and the engagement associated with posts with the hashtag. To illustrate this, we’ve provided an overview of such an analysis for the book and publishing market below.

If none of the hashtags in the overview are a good fit for your new post, you can use a hashtag generator to help you find hashtags related to your topic. The overview shows suggested hashtags along with indicators of their popularity and relevance. These visual cues help you quickly assess which hashtags may be most useful to increase views on Instagram Reels, carousels, or static posts.

• Bars behind each hashtag show how frequently the hashtag is used. More bars generally indicate higher usage and stronger competition.
  
• Color differences help distinguish between hashtags with different levels of popularity or relevance, making it easier to identify widely used tags and more niche options.

4. Understand what your Audience is Engaging With

Another useful tip when concerned with how to get Instagram Reels views or how to get more views on Instagram posts, is to conduct content analyses on what your viewership actually engages with. Instagram brand accounts tend to be more successful if the content has a clear focus. 

One effective way to uncover these patterns is through a tagging analysis. This involves reviewing a set of posts from a specific timeframe, either from your own profile or including competitor accounts, and assigning tags based on content characteristics. This helps you identify which themes, formats, or approaches consistently drive higher views. Based on these insights, you can deduce what is likely to perform well in the future and refine your strategy around how to get more views on Instagram by learning from past audience behavior.

You’re not limited in what you can tag, but there are some common categories marketers use to evaluate content performance across formats:

• Content type: product or person focus, behind the scenes, announcements, educational content, entertainment
• Tone of brand voice: humorous, inspirational, informative, promotional, casual, storytelling
• Topic or theme: new release, sale, industry news, tips 
• Campaign or season: holiday or festivity campaigns, special promotions
• CTA: encouragement to comment, watch until the end, save this post, click on link

We conducted an exemplary analysis using data from the last 28 days from several well-known dental care brands (@colgateus, @oralb, @hismile, @marvis, @helloproducts, @burstoralcare, and @crest). Posts from these accounts were tagged based on whether the content was person-focused or product-focused.

The results show that the brands posted more product-focused content (63.6%) overall. A closer look at engagement also revealed that product-centered posts generated higher interaction, suggesting that showcasing the product itself tends to resonate more strongly with audiences in this industry.

Understanding what kind of content resonates with your audience can also help you learn how to get more views on Instagram posts. When you analyze which posts people interact with most, you gain valuable insights into what captures attention and drives engagement. These insights can then guide your future content decisions, helping you create posts that are more likely to perform well over time.

5. Find the Best Posting Times

Another important factor when considering how to get more views on Instagram Reels is posting at the right time. Your content is more likely to perform well if it gains traction early on. A best-time-to-post analysis is a key strategic lever to align your posting schedule with when your audience is actually active.

Best-time-to-post analyses review posts from a defined timeframe and correlate publish times with interaction rates. This helps you identify peak activity windows and predict when new content is most likely to gain immediate traction, which is crucial knowledge for how to get more views on Instagram, as early engagement signals push your content further in the algorithm. To ensure your data is reliable, you need a sufficiently large dataset. This is where competitor data becomes invaluable: by tracking relevant accounts, you gain deeper insights into when your shared target audience is most active.

While there is no universal best time to post, the optimal timing can vary depending on:

• industry
• region
• seasonality 
• holidays
• main customer base
• content format 
• audience activity patterns

By analyzing historical performance data, you can identify patterns in audience behavior and optimize your posting time to increase views on Instagram Reels, static posts, or Carousels.

We conducted a best times to post analysis using the Instagram accounts of the dental care brands mentioned in the earlier example, based on data from the past 28 days. The results of this analysis are shown below. The visualization combines posting frequency and engagement performance to make patterns easier to identify.

• Circle size indicates posting volume at that time. Larger circles mean more posts were published during that time slot.
  
• Circle color represents interaction rates. Greener circles indicate higher engagement on the posts published at that time.
  

When identifying ideal posting windows, it is helpful to focus on smaller green circles. These indicate times with strong interaction but lower posting volume, which increases the chances that your content is seen and engaged with quickly after publishing, which is an important factor in how to get more views on Instagram posts.

Our exemplary analysis of dental care brands showed the following results:

Low Competition: Tuesday late afternoon (around 16:00) stands out with fewer posts but relatively high interaction, indicating an opportunity to capture attention

Prime slots for visibility: Midweek afternoons (especially Wednesday and Friday around 14:00–18:00) consistently combine high posting activity with strong engagement, making them

6. Form a Bond with your Followers

If you are looking into how to get more views on Instagram videos, consider how and how often you interact with your followers. You are not just posting content, you are actively shaping a community around your brand. Stronger relationships lead to repeat engagement, meaning users are more likely to come back to your content, which directly increases your views over time. Instagram, like many other platforms, evaluates content based on deeper engagement signals, where saves and shares carry more weight than likes.

Community and user activation are key for visibility. For example, Instagram no longer orders stories purely by how recently they were posted, but by how often a user interacts with an account. This means that building consistent interaction through features like polls, questions, or stickers can help you increase Instagram Story views by keeping your content top of mind. So, using interactive features in Stories is an effective way to learn how to get more Instagram story views by encouraging ongoing engagement with your audience.

One way of establishing a bond with your community is to be active and interact with your followers through comments, likes, etc. In other words, show them that you care and that they matter! This takes time and effort, but it can pay off in the end with more views and higher engagement rates. There are community management tools available that can help make this more efficient and easier to manage, which is especially important as your audience grows.

The key functions of community management tools include:

• Centralized inbox that lets you monitor and reply to messages, comments, and mentions across all connected social media accounts in one workspace.
• Clear workflows for teams, allowing multiple users to collaborate efficiently when managing community interactions.
• Task assignment and responsibility distribution so team members know exactly which conversations they are handling.
• Complete overview of all interactions, including open, pending, and already processed messages or comments.
• Automated sentiment / hate speech detection that flags negatively loaded or offensive comments, messages, or responses.
• Comment moderation and filtering tools to quickly prioritize relevant conversations and remove spam.
• Community management performance insights to understand how quickly and effectively your team responds to your audience.

7. Create and Promote your own Contests and Giveaways

If you’re exploring how to get more views on Instagram Reels, contests and giveaways can be a powerful way to spark interest and encourage participation. People enjoy interactive content, and the chance to win something often motivates them to watch, engage, and share.

To make a giveaway effective, focus on the following key elements:

• Start with a strong hook that immediately explains why someone should participate in the giveaway
• Make interaction a giveaway rule; tell users to tag others, comment on the post or share it to their Instagram story. 
• Highlight the prize

Contests can also expand your reach beyond your existing followers. When participants comment, share, or tag others to enter, your content gains additional visibility, helping you increase views on Instagram and introduce new audiences to your profile. 

8. Encourage People to Save and Share your Content

A simple but effective tactic when thinking about how to get more views on Instagram is to directly encourage your audience to share or save your content. If your goal is to generate more views, don’t hesitate to ask your community for support. Building an active relationship with your followers increases the likelihood that they will interact with and help distribute your posts.

Encouraging users to share or save your content can boost post performance, especially under the current Instagram algorithm, which prioritizes deeper engagement signals. Saves and shares indicate that content is valuable enough to revisit or pass along, making them particularly effective for relatable, useful, or educational posts.

You can ask your audience to share or save through some of the following methods marketers use frequently:

• direct caption prompts like “save this post for later”
• CTA in the Reel with text like “don’t forget to save this tip” or “share this with a friend”
• educational content framing “share this so you don’t forget”
• Relatable content frames such as “tag a friend who can relate”
• Use final slides on Carousels with CTAs

9. Cooperate with an Influencer

If you’re thinking about how to get views on Instagram Reels and Stories, consider collaborating with creators who already have strong reach and credibility within their community. Influencers often have established audiences that regularly engage with their content, making them valuable partners for expanding your visibility.

Collaborations allow you to tap into an influencer’s existing audience, which can help increase your Instagram views. At the same time, these partnerships can benefit the creator as well by giving them new content opportunities and access to your brand’s audience.

However, choosing the right influencer for your brand is just as important as the collaboration itself. Beyond financial considerations, brands should evaluate whether the influencer truly fits their brand and audience. Key factors include:

• Alignment between brand values and the influencer’s image
• Overlap between the influencer’s audience and the brand’s target audience
• Authenticity and credibility within the influencer’s community
• Engagement quality, not just follower numbers
• Content style and tone matching the brand’s communication style
• Past brand collaborations and whether they fit your industry
• Consistency and reliability in posting and interacting with followers
• Audience trust and community loyalty

Considering these factors helps ensure that collaborations feel natural and credible, increasing the chances that the partnership will help increase your Instagram views. The structure of the collaboration also plays an important role, and there are several ways brands can work with influencers to increase views on Instagram Reels and other content formats:

• product demonstrations
• reviews 
• tutorials or how-to content
• lifestyle integration
• giveaways and contests
• co-created content
• long-term partnerships

This approach can be expensive, especially if the influencer you are working with demands a high fee. However, this can also be an approach that accelerates your view count since new people will be introduced to your content. Be sure that you follow an established process to help you find the right influencer who will help you reach your goals. 

A research tool can help you quickly identify suitable profiles within a specific niche. We used the sports influencers in the niche of yoga for the following example. In Fanpage Karma Discovery, you can find relevant influencers in just a few steps:

1. Open the Discovery section in Fanpage Karma.
   
2. Enter a keyword or niche (e.g., “yoga”) to search for relevant profiles.
3. Filter the results by platform, follower size, or engagement metrics.
4. Analyze profile analytics to review engagement rates, audience interactions, and content performance.
5. Create an AI-powered report to evaluate which influencers are the best fit for your brand.

10. Develop Partnerships with other Content Creators

If you’re wondering how to get more views on instagram story, or how to get more views on Instagram Reels alike, remember that many other creators face the same challenge. Instead of competing for attention alone, it can be effective to collaborate with accounts that target a similar audience. Partnerships with other creators allow both sides to benefit from shared reach, for example by cross-posting content, appearing in each other’s Stories, or promoting the same campaign.

The key is to treat collaborations strategically so that both sides gain visibility and the partnership feels natural to the audience.

To make collaborations effective:

• Find the right collaborators – look for profiles that target a similar audience and share related topics or values.
• Align on goals and messaging – agree on what the collaboration should achieve and ensure the communication style fits both brands.
• Plan the content together – decide how the collaboration will appear (e.g., joint Reels, Story mentions, shared campaigns).
• Focus on expanding reach – structure the collaboration so both audiences discover the other account.
• Promote each other’s content – cross-share posts, tag each other, and encourage followers to explore the partner profile.

When done well, collaborations can introduce your account to new audiences and help increase engagement, making them a practical tactic for how to get more views on Instagram.

11. Use Trending Music

As a brand, you can put yourself on the map by participating in social media trends and putting your own twist on things. The use of trending sounds or songs is one algorithmically meaningful way of how to get more reel views on Instagram. That is because the Instagram algorithm favors trending music, increasing the visibility of your content by ranking your content more highly. 

Participating in trends and adapting them to your brand strategy is not just a creative content idea. It can also help place your content in front of users who have already interacted with the trend, the music, or the sound. Using trending sounds offers several additional advantages:

• Relatability: Trends often reference shared internet culture. By participating, you signal that your brand understands the context and language of the platform.
  
• Condensed storytelling: Trend formats are usually short and recognizable, so the concept explains itself and viewers immediately understand the joke, message, or format.
  
• Higher retention and engagement: Because users are already familiar with the sound or format, they are more likely to watch longer and interact, even if they don’t follow your account yet.

12. Investigate Account History

The data attached to your own account is the key to understanding how it has developed over time. It shows which strategies or campaigns performed well and which approaches you may not want to repeat. These insights are highly specific to your audience, making them especially valuable when figuring out how to get more Story views on Instagram or how to get views on Instagram Reels.

Historical data can help you identify patterns such as:

• Seasonal performance trends: understand when your audience is most active throughout the year
• Content formats that consistently perform well: for example, Reels, Stories, carousels, or specific video styles
• Topics that drive the most engagement with your audience
• Posting frequency and timing patterns that correlate with higher reach
• Campaign performance over time, including what worked and what did not
• Audience growth trends and which content triggered spikes in followers
• Changes in engagement behavior, such as shifts in comments, shares, or saves
• Long-term performance of recurring content formats or series
  

However, native analytics tools often provide only limited historical data. They rarely allow you to analyze performance across longer timeframes or isolate specific periods such as seasonal campaigns or promotions. This can distort your interpretation of results, particularly if campaign activity overlaps with your regular content. Without the ability to separate those datasets, it becomes difficult to clearly understand what actually drove performance.

Conclusion: How to Get More Views on Instagram Reels and Stories

We have highlighted 12 actionable tips that can help you understand how to get more Reel views on Instagram and how to get more Instagram story views alike. While some of these tips are easier to implement than others, always remember that growing on Instagram takes some patience and strategic thought. 

As we mentioned a few times above, the right social media tool can be helpful in taking your Instagram activities to the next level. This is especially true of “all-in-one” social media tools that provide advanced benchmarking and analytical insights, as well as research and community management functions. If you want to see how Fanpage Karma can help you with your social media strategy, you can now use Fanpage Karma’s publishing feature for free. Additionally, Fanpage Karma offers a free 14-day trial of its industry-leading “all-in-one” social media tool. 

There is also a free weekly webinar where you can see for yourself how to use the Fanpage Karma tool.