12 Reliable Ways to Grow Your Instagram Account
12 Reliable Ways to Grow Your Instagram Account
When used correctly, the Instagram app is one of the best platforms for brands to connect with and grow a dedicated audience. Home to over half a billion daily users, Instagram is a highly profitable marketing channel that also houses numerous brands and audiences. Your Instagram account can be the best thing to happen to your business if you learn to use it the right way.
This article will give you surefire tips on how to organically boost growth and engagement on your profile.
We will be looking at these 12 tricks;
1. Hashtags
2. Great Filters
3. Scheduled Posting
4. Competition
5. Sponsored Posts and Reviews
6. Geotags
7. Stories and Highlights
8. Asking for Followers
9. Giveaways
10. User-Generated Content
11. Instagram Live
12. Follower Growth Monitoring
Now, let’s go in-depth.
1. Using Hashtags
Hashtags on your media and stories help people looking for your posts or similar content to find them. The great news is that Instagram has trendy hashtags for every niche. You can find tailored hashtags for fashion, food, music, travel, beauty, tech, and a lot more. Use the
hashtags relevant to your posts to build your account. You may have to take time out to research these tags. Try to merge tags that tell a lot about your brand or business, location-specific tags, and tags that are popular in your niche.
For starters, you can pick hashtags from your competitors’ Instagram pages. Over time, you will have to stop picking and find hashtags that represent your brand better. Free web tools like Webstagram and IconoSquare are extremely helpful in finding relevant hashtags. Remember that generated or trendy hashtags are always changing, so never stop checking and updating your hashtags for the best results.
2. Great Filters
Filters are great tools in Instagram growth. Like hashtags, they come and go in trends. Making use of popular filters will affect your engagements positively.
Iconosquare, another free online tool, shows users the best audience-friendly filters to drive interaction on their Instagram accounts. The tool also shows a performance analysis of what filters work best for your page.
3. Scheduled Posting
Asides using filters and hashtags, knowing when to post is equally important in account growth. Many Instagram users focused on building an interactive online audience to make use of post scheduling tools to upload media at times when engagement is at its peak.
These timings differ across niches and audiences. You might need to take out time to analyze what works best for you, or just optimize your old posts to see which ones had the most engagement. Then you can highlight the peak times and work with them.
A scheduling tool automatically posts when you set it to. This helps you engage your audience at peak times.
4. Competition
An easy way to build your page is by interacting with the audience of a brand that’s similar to yours. You can interact by following users or liking and commenting on their posts.
This growth tip is input-intensive. You have to keep following, and liking and commenting to see optimal results.
5. Sponsored Posts and Reviews
For that extra boost to your page’s growth, invest in sponsored posts. Unlike all the other growth tips, sponsored posts are not free.
Sponsoring your Instagram posts exposes your brand to a larger audience. You can also pay Instagram to advertise your posts to a tailored audience, or you can pay influencers to advertise your brand on their page or stories. Make sure to look for influencers with high engagements rather than a large following.
6. Geotags
Location (or geotags) make your posts visible to Instagram users in your location. Like hashtags, you can also add geotags to your posts.
To get the best out of geotags on posts and stories, engage with the audience in the tagged vicinity. Most of your prospective customers are already in your location.
7. Stories and Highlights
Organizing highlights is one of the best things a business can do on Instagram. After your profile description, your highlights are the next thing a user sees when they visit your page.
Highlights are created by saving and grouping stories. Pick a theme and organize your stories into catchy highlights to promote your brand.
8. Asking for Followers
Always ask your audience to follow your page if they enjoy your content. You may show up on someone’s feed or explore page all the time without them even following you, so they might need a reminder to follow you.
You can add this reminder in your captions, towards the end, or before you hint at the content they should anticipate.
9. Giveaways
Running giveaways on your Instagram page is one of the catchiest ways to build an audience. Apart from boosting engagement, every single tag from a user brings at least one new viewer and prospective customer to your page.
You can also get this by asking viewers to tag their friends in posts that show relatable content but the best way is when an incentive is attached – like freebies in a giveaway.
Always ensure to stick to Instagram’s terms and conditions for running online contests in your location.
10. User-Generated Content
All media generated from your followers is tagged as User-Generated Content (UGC). These posts by real-life fans and customers add a human side to your business, allowing viewers to see how your product or service works in real life.
Research by Olapic proves that 56% of all first-time customers will become returning customers after a post of themselves using your product or service goes up on the brand’s official pages.
You can get UGC by asking your followers to share media, creating a hashtag for them to use, running giveaways, or by contacting influencers. No matter the resolution of the UGC, always remember that the aim is to show your products in use, so post away!
11. Instagram Live
Like UGCs, live videos on IG add a human touch to your brand. Followers can interact and ask questions in real-time. These followers are alerted whenever you go live. They also get to watch the stream over and over again if you save it as a post on your page.
On a live video, you can host a Q&A or AMA session, launch a new product, give tutorials on product use, host a talk show, or give general brand updates. You can get an in-house rep or an influencer to take over your page for the live stream.
12. Follower Growth Monitoring
Growing your Instagram audience is not the end. You have to work to keep those followers. This goes beyond creating engaging content. It entails intentional monitoring, to see how much and how well your online presence is growing.
With tools like Social Blade and IG Analytics, you get to see the traffic to your page over a specific period. This includes how many follow