Are you all set to build your brand presence on Instagram? You are probably aware that the key to creating the perfect business account for your company is to ensure your content drives up your organic engagement rates. This, for most, means creating posts that attract likes, comments, and followers. However, to keep yourself ahead of the competition, you must also ensure that your content encourages Instagram post saves. Saved posts signalize to the platform algorithm that users value your content and make it rank higher. Therefore, if you want to grow your presence on Instagram, you have to concentrate on getting people to save your posts.

What is Instagram Post Saves?

Instagram introduced its “saved posts” feature in 2017. Simply put, it is a feature that allows your visitors to pin your post into a separate list of “saved posts” by tapping on a bookmark icon that appears under your post. This list is personal to each user and curates content that the user chooses to save for viewing again later.

illustration by Daniel Michniak

An underused and often overlooked feature, Instagram Post Saves works much like the personal boards of Pinterest. Nevertheless, when you navigate the “Saved” section of your profile, you can also arrange your bookmarked posts into personalized Collections. In other words, you are free to organize the content you save into categories and labels of your choice. Instagram saves, in other words, geared towards users who like to collect and ponder upon ideas and visuals and are not on the platform just for the sake of following friends and businesses for numbers. At first glance, it seems to benefit Instagrammers who consume rather than Instagrammers who sell.

The critical thing to note here is as a content creator, and you have no access to the organizational pattern used by your viewers for your posts. In other words, if you post a story about a cake, and it gets saved by Instagrammers, you have no way of knowing if they have saved it as a “recipe”, a “cake decoration idea” or a “great cake photo”. You, viewers, have total agency on this. So, if you have no way of knowing how your content is saved as a creative specialist, why must you concentrate on creating savable posts? When Saves was first introduced, you had no way of knowing if your post was saved at all. Now, although you may not be able to check who exactly has saved your post, you can still find out how many saves your post has earned, and this count can be a crucial determiner for your brand’s success story on Instagram.

Top Reasons why your Content Strategy should focus on Instagram Post Saves

Although Instagram Save is a little-known feature of the social media platform, it has a value that cannot be ignored. Whether you are a B2B or a B2C business, whether you are a large enterprise or a tiny cloud shop, whether you are an established name in your field or just starting out, creating savable posts can be of immense benefit to your Instagram marketing strategy. Here are a few reasons:

1. Instagram algorithms favor Saves

Instagram has already begun testing the removal of “likes” from its success metrics calculations in certain demographics. In the light of the new calculations for boosting visibility and measuring engagement rates for content, “saves” are an important participant.

In other words:

• Instagram’s saves are a key contributor to your ROI calculations.
• The more your post gets saved, the more visibility it gains on individual home feeds, as per the workings of Instagram’s algorithms.
• The more saved your content gets, the higher it climbs on the search results on Instagram’s Explore tab.

In fact, Saves have been seen to boost content visibility so much that many brands have time and again resorted to buying Instagram Saves to tilt the platform’s algorithms in their favor and to boost their impression.

2. Instagram saves are a measure for your content quality

Like likes and shares, saves send a powerful signal in favor of your Post’s quality to Instagram’s algorithms. It is currently one of seven determining aspects of a post’s overall performance on the social media site. The faster your post collects saved, the higher it climbs on Instagram’s metrics for engagement.

3. Instagram Saves are a great strategy for creating long term engagement rates on your content

If you consider the post from the consumer viewpoint, if someone has saved your post, it means they want to:

• Re-read what you have written in your caption;
• Revisit your photo/video or your content as a whole for a more detailed and leisurely perusal;
• Use your content as a template for creating their own;
• Re-engage with the post later at their convenience.

Doing any of these would bring the post back to visibility and restart conversations on it as every time the user(s) revisits it, your post will collect views.

In other words, your audience has saved your content because you managed to connect with them through it. A “like” only implies that your viewer saw your post and approved of it. A “save” indicates that not only doc your audience like the post, but they also found something here that resonates with them. They have found value in your content that they would wish to keep coming back to. For most brands looking to find real-time clients among their followers, this is an indicator of true engagement, which has a higher potential of bringing conversions to their business.

4. Instagram Saves is a way to assess what type of post works for your audience

Yes, you can self-evaluate your performance as a creative specialist by your Instagram saves. Even if you do not know what category or collection your posts are getting saved into, your business insights let you know how many saves your post has received. If you observe the trends in your content, you will be able to analyze what type of posts record the most saves. This will give you a fair indication of what content you should focus on creating and in what format to be able to connect most with your target audience. Instagram Insights also lets you understand the time when your posts receive the highest engagement and the demographic reach of your posts. Using these indexes of your reach and impression, you can further plan your content strategy to bring maximum visibility and to increase your engagement on the platform organically. Experiment with different types of content. Create Stories and Highlights to spread awareness about your post, IGTV video, or reel. Engage with consumers and analyze what works best for you. If your posts can bring you leads and sales, aside from getting saved for later, you have nailed your content-creating strategy for Instagram.

5. Instagram Saves are a cost-effective way of promoting your brand

You do not need a big budget to create savable posts. All you need is some time and effort in determining what you put into your content. Whether you are creating your posts on your own or hiring content specialists for the job, whether you team up with Influencers or allied businesses, getting a higher number of saves should feature among your micro-goals as you generate fresh content for your business profile.

illustration by zara magumyan

Keep in mind that what works for another profile may not work for you. At the same time, certain identifiable traits are common to most savable posts. For instance, several brands micro-blog use Instagram these days to add value to their content. This is because thought-provoking and discussion-enabling content are saved more than posts that have only aesthetically pleasing value. Shoppable posts are also favored among savable content among users who directly shop through Facebook or Instagram. Many users are also found to save infographic posts. Some posts are saved because of a trending topic, while some others get saved for their educational value – be it a tutorial or a fact and figures post. Yet others get saved because they are worth quoting and sharing.

Think long-term when you plan your content creation. Ask yourself if the content will bring you more followers, more consumers, and collaborators, or will it be a temporal post that will disappear from your audience’s feeds and memory as swiftly as it appeared on their scrolling feeds. Aim to create keyword-rich and thought-provoking captions for any content you create. Ensure you have used relevant hashtags tags and call to action. If your content has an evergreen touch, it will likely have a higher appeal and get saved by your audience. Be unique and market yourself better by creating savable posts. Remember, you can simply increase your savable quotient by using a call to action asking your audience directly to save your post!

Bottom line

With Instagram already testing a strategy of “hiding likes” in select countries like Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Japan, among others, Instagram Saves are now a crucial metric for engagement calculations. The ongoing experiment suggests that the importance of “likes” will soon be less and might even disappear from engagement-rate estimates. Hence, it is prudent to plan and focus on other factors that establish the overall engagement of your posts. This includes the number of saves it receives. Whether the experiment is on in your country or not, and irrespective of what Instagram’s ultimate decision is on the “likes”, it is worth making adjustments to your content creation strategy to boost saves. Even if likes are retained as a key player of Instagram algorithms, savable content can only be a good thing for your brand’s overall business. You have nothing to lose by counting on Instagram Saves. It is a win-win for you!