Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world right now. It has become an incredibly useful tool for businesses and brands looking to increase awareness and influence consumers.
The key to getting the most out of Instagram is ensuring you have a large following. This means thousands of people see your posts, and you can use this to your advantage. So, read on to find the ten tried & tested methods that are proven to help you gain more followers on any Instagram account.
Hashtags are one of the most critical features on Instagram. If your posts have hashtags in the description, then other users can easily find your page and choose to follow you.
What do you need to consider here? Well, there are two main things to think about when using hashtags:
You need to use hashtags that are relevant to your individual posts and your account in general. There are plenty of tools out there you can use to help you pick out the best and most popular hashtags that are relevant to your posts. What’s more, using more than one hashtag will be beneficial. You can technically have up to 30, but you don’t really need more than 10 to see the desired results.
Trying to grow a following all by yourself is tough, so it pays when you can call on others to help you out. It makes sense to seek out partnerships with people/companies that you can collaborate with.
For a business, looking for Instagram influencers is such an effective way of growing your following. Sponsor them to post about your company, and they essentially send direct their followers to your page. If you choose the right partner, then you should be tapping into the same target demographic and will see your follower count rise.
Posting at the peak time can lead to way more engagement on your posts. The question is, when is the best time to post? Contrary to what many believe, it all depends on your specific audience. You can actually use Instagram to help you out here. Navigate to Instagram Insights (click on your profile, and then you’ll see the insights icon) and find information on your followers.
From here, you’ll see when they’re most active, which shows you the best time to post as you will likely receive more engagement and get noticed by your target demographic.
No one wants to follow an account that posts once every month. It’s a waste of time; people like Instagram accounts that provide regular content. One post per day can help you get more likes and grow a more substantial following. Just make sure you’re posting at that peak time for the best results!
The concept of user-generated-content is massive on Instagram. By sharing posts from other people, and giving them credit, you will see many things happen. On the one hand, the user whose content you posted is likely to notice and may follow you. Furthermore, people who follow that user could end up following you as well. Thirdly, you have a way of generating content during periods where you may have none of your own. So, you keep up that all important consistency as well.
We mentioned Instagram Insights in a previous point, and it’s genuinely one of the best tools you can use to grow a following. Use it to look at your posts and view the analytics for each one. This helps you see what content is receiving the most engagement and yielding positive results. It’s possible you spot a trend where a certain type of post gets the most likes and results in the newest followers. As such, posting more content like that will help you gain a larger following.
One of the beautiful things about Instagram is that you can very easily share a post on other social networks. As a consequence, this gives you a brilliant opportunity to try and gain some new followers. A lot of people may have a more significant following on Facebook or Twitter than they do on Instagram. So, by sharing your Instagram posts on these platforms, a wider following can see them, realize you’re on Instagram, and possibly follow you.
Posting a photo isn’t the only thing you can do on this platform. Many features allow you to produce the following content:
Stories are particularly useful as they allow you to show very short video clips in succession to your followers. It leads to lots of engagement and your story can also be shown on the ‘Discover’ page if you use good hashtags. Therefore, people who don’t follow you can stumble upon it, love what they see, and give you a follow.
Videos and Live Streams are also great ways of offering different forms of content to keep everyone entertained and bring in new followers.
Regardless of the type of content you produce, it must be engaging. The more likes and comments you receive, the more likely it is that more and more people will view your post. We spoke about hashtags earlier, and the posts with the most likes for a hashtag are likely to feature as the ‘top posts’ that people see when they search for the specific hashtag.
Finally, you can give your follower count a massive boost by running competitions. It’s a simple format:
You will see massive engagement in competition posts as everyone likes the chance of winning things for free.
Try all of these ten methods if you want to grow your Instagram following right now. All of these ideas pretty much boil down into two main things; increasing your exposure on the platform, and boosting post engagement.
A strong Instagram following can put you in a very commanding position, so start gaining followers today!
At Bright Vessel, we can help and assess you on how to increase the number of followers on Instagram as well as Facebook to improve your business. Contact us for more information; we are willing to help you.
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