Our top tips on how to get more comments on Instagram.

Run a contest or give away.

Run a contest or giveaway, either on Instagram directly or on any of your other social media accounts and promote it on Instagram. People love nothing more than getting something for free so this method is guaranteed to increase your Instagram engagement.

Simply choose a suitable prize (your audience must find it highly desirable), then announce your competition and encourage people to enter by leaving a comment. This is a great social media strategy that has proven to be very effective for many of our clients to increase the number of comments they receive.

To take it one step further, encourage the submission of user-generated content as part of your contest.

Directly ask users to engage.

If you want more comments, why not try asking for them! This may sound simple, but so many people forget to do it and the number of comments they receive suffers as a result.

To get the most comments, post direct questions that are easy to answer or ask your followers to share their opinion on a topic of interest. Controversial topics work particularly well for this.

You could also ask your audience to share their experiences or give advice.

Use trending hashtags to increase visibility.

Find out what the most popular hashtags are in your niche and include them in your posts. If you do this your posts will appear in more searches and therefore your engagement, including the number of comments you receive, is likely to increase.

Also if users see that you are continuously talking about the topics that they are most interested in, they may decide to leave an organic comment or share your content in the future.

Post your comments when your audience is most active.

The timing of your post can have a huge impact on the number of comments you receive.

The optimum time to post will be different for every niche, so it's important to do your research in this respect. As many of our clients can tell you, it really pays to find out when your specific audience is most active and post during the most lucrative times.

Post pictures of human faces or animals.

Research that was carried out by Yahoo Labs & the Georgia Institute of Technology has shown that posts with pictures of people's faces in them receive, on average, 32% more comments.

Try filling your feed with plenty of selfies, group shots and/or photos of your team and you should see a significant increase in the number of comments you get on those posts.

Unsurprisingly, posts with pictures of animals in them also do incredibly well on Instagram. Even if your business isn't directly animal related, with a little creativity, you can find a way to include animal pictures and take advantage of the power that animal images have to bring in the comments on Instagram.