6 Tips to Increase Your Instagram Reach in 2026

6 Tips on How to Increase Your Reach on Instagram in 2026

What company doesn’t want their posts on Instagram to be more visible? Greater visibility means that new users will find you, follow you, and build a relationship with you. Ultimately, this can also mean making a purchase from you. The key to greater visibility is expanding your Instagram reach.

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Engagement on Instagram is somewhat more isolated than on other platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, where interactions from all our friends are publicly listed.

If someone from our friends comments on a brand’s post on Instagram, we won’t see it unless we also follow that brand or they mention us. This factor alone makes it harder to organically improve your reach on Instagram.

However, there are 5 solid strategies and techniques you can use to improve your reach in no time and get more views from both your own audience and new members of your target group that you are not yet connected with.

Related post: How to reach your audience? For more information: 5 Best Ways to Get Instagram Followers for Your Business

1. Use new hashtags

Using new, relevant hashtags is the number one way to organically and quickly increase your reach on Instagram.

By using new and diverse hashtags that are still relevant to your audience, you will be able to keep getting your posts in front of new viewers.

Example of Instagram hashtags
newportFILM uses targeted hashtags on their posts to attract relevant viewers.

The key is to use the right hashtags. Using a combination of trending hashtags, general hashtags that appeal to a broad audience, and industry-specific hashtags alongside your brand’s unique hashtags will give you the best results.

Since Instagram posts with a large number of hashtags (around 8) have the most engagement, this can work in your favor; you can add several different types of hashtags to one post to achieve maximum reach.

Related post: Another article: What follows on Instagram mean (and don’t mean) for social media managers

2. Post content aimed at engagement

After Instagram adopted a Facebook-like algorithm last year, it became harder to get views.

If you want to improve your reach within your own audience, which is what matters, you need to make sure your content makes it to the top of the feed.

To achieve this, you need to create posts aimed at engagement.

how to get more comments on Instagram
This clothing brand uses a simple question to encourage engagement.

Many brands on Instagram focus solely on sales. While sales and product awareness are fantastic goals on Instagram and should remain important, you want to achieve these goals while also ensuring that the copy of at least some of your posts prioritizes engagement.

Ask users which of your two products they prefer, or have them write a comment with their favorite way to use your product.

Small local businesses can also gain a lot of engagement through questions like „which community events do you want to see us at this year?“.

You’ll get strong feedback and plenty of engagement in one, which keeps you at the top of the feed and looks great thanks to social proof.

3. Post at multiple peak times

There’s no doubt that publishing at peak times when your followers are most likely to see your posts and engage with them will help increase your reach both among your followers and among anyone who might discover you in Instagram’s Explore section.

However, you don’t want to find just one peak time, but several different peak times.

Not all of your followers will always be online at the same time. If your peaks are Monday at 3 AM, Tuesday at noon, and Friday at 9 PM, you may have a different audience at each of these times.

By ensuring you post at different peak times, you’ll get more eyes on your content regardless of how users find it.

Agorapulse will help you find which posting times help your business get the most engagement, and then allow you to schedule automatic posting at those times.

overview of the best times on Instagram
Agorapulse makes it easy to evaluate which posts get the most engagement and what your best posting times are.

See which posts have the most engagement on the Content tab in the analytics in the Agorapulse app.

Instagram content overview

With these two pieces of data, you’ll likely notice a trend over time with peak posting times and with your most successful posts.

Then you can simply enable direct publishing and order your posts to be fired at these times! You can even create publishing queues based on categories of your best-performing content.

multiple Instagram accounts

4. Use live stories

Live stories are a huge benefit when it comes to extending your reach on Instagram.

Live broadcasts are exciting and extremely popular; the fact that they’re happening right now can be enough to get users to click.

Not only will some of your users receive a notification that you’re live, but live videos on public accounts also have increased visibility in Instagram’s Explore section.

It’s a fantastic way to extend your reach and find new users and attract them.

instagram explore video
Although we don’t have analytics available in Instagram live stories (yet), we’ve just gained the ability to save live videos to the camera roll after broadcasting ends, which allows us to upload the video to our Instagram and/or Facebook for continued and more lasting results, which can then be tracked at this point.

5. Launching Ads on Instagram

If you are committed to truly quickly increasing your reach on Instagram, you cannot go wrong with Instagram Ads.

Instagram Ads leverage Facebook’s incredible targeting system and we have a range of diverse ad formats to choose from, including for example:

• Single image ads
• Video ads
• Mobile app download ads
• Carousel ads
• Instagram story ads
• Conversions from Instagram ads

On Instagram Ads there is literally a target called „Reach“ that can be used to deliver great ads to members of your target audience with whom you have not yet connected.

How to increase your reach on Instagram
To expand your reach to a completely new audience, add „Exclude people who like your page“ as a targeting criterion.

How Instagram ads can improve your reach on Instagram

7. How to Evaluate Your Reach on Instagram

Engagement is not the same as reach and apart from these practical video view counters it is difficult to track what our actual reach on Instagram is on our own.

Instagram’s native Insights service will actually tell you exactly how many views (or impressions) you have gained. You will see impressions on each of your posts as well as overall. This will tell you your reach.

To find this information, you must have your account converted to a business profile on Instagram. Once you do, click on the bars in the top right corner next to your username on the home page.
Find out your reach using Instagram Insights
You will immediately see the total number of views of your profile.

Improve your reach on Instagram through analytics
If you click on individual posts, you will also see how many impressions each one has gained individually.

Improve your reach on Instagram

Conclusion

Instagram is an incredibly valuable social media platform for businesses and brands of all types and extending your reach means more followers and more results.

Fortunately, Agorapulse’s reporting tools are a powerful resource to help you determine your current reach; you can also find out where there is room for improvement.

By using the Agorapulse tool to track new strategies designed to improve your reach, you will find what works.

What do you think about it? How do you improve your reach on Instagram? Which techniques do you use? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!