12 tips to help you grow your Instagram following
With more than one billion users on Instagram, it has quickly grown to the top amongst the several social media platforms that exist today. The platform also has a sky-high user engagement, which is making it a perfect choice for every marketer or influencers willing to make a name and build their brand.
Whether you are looking to grow your own personal account or you are working on behalf of a company or business, these below tips will give you the best strategies to grow your account; gathering a bigger and more relevant audience on the platform.
#1: Publish Your Best Photos
To guarantee an adequate penetration of your presence, you must always try to select a good photo album to get the attention of the instagrammers (Instagram fan users). Not all the images that you capture will be interesting for others, so you have to make sure to choose what is really important.
If you have a large photo bank in your file, it is time to start choosing what is useful and attractive according to what you want to communicate.
#2: Avoid Becoming A Spammer
For more impetus that we have to promote ourselves, it is essential to dose the publication of photos. Uploading and sharing 5, 10, 20 or more at once would generate a spam effect among your followers and potential followers. So, don’t do that. It is also advisable to classify them and publish them by categories to generate more variety.
#3: Promote yourself on other social media to gain followers
If you have a blog or are on Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat, you will want to convey and expand the fact that you are also on Instagram. The image below shows the account of Watch Sue as she talks about her Instagram account on her other social networks. She does it in a casual tone – and sometimes in a comical tone rather than using the regular cold and mechanical Follow us on Instagram too! You can also use Instagram bot to do this to save time and bring a touch of perfection too.
#4: Focus on niche account
Instagram accounts that were able to make some success are those that focus on one or two specific niches and only make their content around these topics. So find the area that you are passionate about or have a very good understanding of and only publish about it. For example, tourist accounts can be very useful if you are interested in travel. Another interesting area is the healthy lifestyle or fitness. If you stick to your niche and show authenticity and love in your publications, you will start to have followers.
#5: Publish Content in A Spaced Way
If you complied with selecting the best photos, do not publish them all when you have free time. Remember that not all your followers participate in the community at a standard time. So, try to spread your messages at least 2 hours apart. After staggering your posts for some time, you will begin to know the frequency and habits of your Instagram followers.
#6: Analyze the Times to Post
When you’re starting out, try different times to measure how often your followers appear. When they comment, they give more “Like”, etc. It is recommended to always publish at the moments of greatest interaction because the level of exposure is high and you can get more followers with interesting content.
Remember: on Instagram, as on all networks, it’s all about experimenting with your audience.
If you’ve been active on the platform for a while, you can analyze your data to determine what your audience prefers.
If not, here’s a general idea (based on research) of optimal times broken down by industry:
- B2C: The best time for businesses selling consumer products to publish their posts is usually before work, during lunch time, and late at night when people are relaxing at home. That is 8 am, 1 pm, and 9 pm.
- B2B: The times for B2B are similar, as they also have the most activity happen around lunch and after work. 12 pm-1 pm, 5 pm-6 pm, 8 pm-9pm.
- Software Services: the best time for this niche is right before and right after lunch. So consider 11 am, 1 pm, 5 pm.
- Healthcare: Healthcare businesses seem to do best in mid-morning, at off-peak hours and early afternoon. 10 am and 2 pm.
- Media: even though driving traffic from Instagram could be tough, it’s valuable for brand-building, especially for media publishers. The best times for this category of people is when they are just getting into work, looking for an afternoon break or taking their lunch break. 9 am, 12 pm, and 3 pm.
- Higher Education: here, catching people after work seems to be the most effective. Check in at around 5 pm – 6 pm
#7: Cleverly use hashtags
When publishing a photo and sharing it with the Instagram community, a formidable requirement to achieve greater exposure and interaction is to use the hashtag, labeling each of your images with keywords related to the subject.
Remember that the use of hashtag allows instagrammers from other places to find interesting topics and follow the owner of the account. However, you can only include a maximum of 30 labels per photo so it is necessary to use them wisely.
You can publish your photos using a hashtag with the name of your brand to promote it or place hashtags of relevant words in the description of your image. Many brands use hashtags to promote their own contests, events and campaigns. This will not only help your account gain more exposure to a wider audience, but it also helps to attract your audience and boost the content generated.
#8: Have a public or private profile?
If you have your profile closed and you have to authorize people to see your content, you are preventing your followers from being able to see you directly. Therefore, you should bet on having a public profile if you want to open the doors to new users.
You also have to know that if you have a company profile, a basic condition to be able to use this type of profile is that it is public.
Therefore, if you choose to use a private profile, with a good strategy, you will make people stay with the intrigue of seeing your content and encourage them to ask you for access.
Think your tactics well and try both options. Each account is different and only you and your experience will make it possible to get more followers.
#9: Use Location Tagging
Instagram offers its users the opportunity to geo-tag a photo where it was taken. When the place is labeled, other instagrammers who are geographically close or have visited the same place at a later date will be able to see your photos. The most likely thing is that they will want to keep up with what they are doing, that is the importance of this option.
This can help you expose your brand (and Instagram account) to more people. For example, Marvin magazine did it during their coverage of the Primavera Sound festival:
#10: Follow More People
Because it is a social network, reciprocity prevails in most cases, so following other people is one of the best ways to get followers. Search for references in your topic or segment of interest, review their images, comment on them, interact and the followers will flow.
#11: Provides meaningful feedback and comments
Whenever you find something interesting, it also offers attractive comments. Leave comments that require answers such as “I loved the landscape, where exactly did you take it?” Or “Impressive, what filter effect did you use to achieve it?” Most instagrammers take the time to respond and are likely to visit your gallery to learn more about you. If the images are good, the chances of them becoming your followers are high.
#12: Always Be Active
Through the use of hashtags, always look for communities in which you are interested in participating, observe its theme, provide “I like it”, comment, keep the feedback updated with your followers and thank the people who have left comments on their photos.
Instagram is a social medium that is gradually becoming more and more numerous and forming a legion of highly participative users. Every day we must experiment and find the best way to position ourselves in our market niches.