Growing Your Instagram Audience: Advice on How to Get More Followers

From being simply an entertaining application for capturing and sharing photos, Instagram has risen up to be an essential advertising tool for companies and marketers. Currently boasting over 1 billion monthly active users, it provides a great chance to advertise your business, products or yourself and attract potential consumers or followers. But to gain that recognition and nurturing an active community of followers, it requires careful planning and perseverance. Below are some of the best tips that you can follow in order to promote your Instagram profile and get more followers.

Optimize Your Profile
The first measure is to make sure that there are no gaps between your profile and the brand identity you wish to portray. Select a distinctive and easy-to-remember name and create a brief but descriptive profile statement that tells people what you are all about. A profile photo should be original and professional; the theme can be chosen using templates in the preferred color range. Add your website and contact details to your profile as well as hashtags and keywords that followers can use to find you. An optimized profile helps the visitor understand what you are about and prompts them to follow you for more.

Leverage Relevant Hashtags
An important aspect of using Instagram is the use of hashtags, which are important for finding accounts, posts, and stories. This way, when a user who is interested in your niche is scrolling through the feed or searching for those specific tags, he is likely to come across your captions with those tags. Post 10-20+ general tags that are relevant to your industry, products, and brand and minor tags associated with particular pictures and promotions. Including as many as 30 hashtags in the post will reach many more people, as it is allowed according to the rules. Only ensure they are well chosen and not just added for the sake of it.

Post High-Quality, Valuable Content
Frequency and quality which means encouraging your followers to engage with the content that also provides them with a certain degree of value is the way to go in order to grow your following. Regardless of how frequently you post, daily, several times a week or based on your specialty, make certain that each post is consistent with your branding, good looking and contains the kind of information that people expect from your feed. Content Marketing must offer value – entertain, inspire, inform, or educate. Sharing posts created by other users that would be of interest to your audience and backfilling – creating new content to fill in the gaps between two pieces of fresh material are also effective solutions.

Run Giveaways & Contests
Most businesses use giveaways and contests on Instagram for a reason – they work very well in terms of gaining followers, interaction, and exposure. Make it mandatory for the entrants to follow your page, like the giveaway post and tag friends as a way of additional entries. It is also possible to have smaller contests on a period less frequent and this will help to make the current followers more active more often. For vital contests and for when you reach major follower number milestones, you should award high-value incentives that are relevant to your target audience – not only for motivation, but also to generate interest from outsiders through sharing. Platforms like Soc-Promotion are useful to launch large and professional contests that will significantly increase the number of followers.

Leverage Instagram Ads
The advertises of Instagram allow you to make special ad campaigns to promote posts, gain more followers, and interact with your audience of interest. If you are introducing a new product, running a promotion or an event or simply looking to increase your target audience – take advantage of the visually-oriented, interactive features of Instagram ads. Summarize what sets you apart briefly and select an assertive CTA such as ‘Follow’ or ‘More Info’. Instagram ads are useful because they enable you to target new prospects all at once. Using low budget, it is an effective way to experiment on images, copy, targeting, and other options before going large scale.

Collaborate & Guest Post
Identifying similar or allied brands or performers in your line of business and working together on joint content and marketing can reach out to wider audiences. Sharing – divide the work where you work on images and captions and then share the posts to your followers separately. Tag each other on posts to reach more of each other’s audience through celebrating your relationship. Furthermore, well-liked industry blogs that are relevant to your brand are often open to articles written by industry experts in exchange for a bio containing your Instagram handle, which offers a way to present your area of specialization to the blog’s audience.

Engage With Hashtag Communities
Engage in following hashtags related to the topics you post rather than following specific accounts. This allows you to access and interact with the ‘river of latest images’ through these tags. Engage in other people’s posts – using your niche hashtags – by liking and commenting on their posts. This makes people more aware of your brand and most of the time, people will follow you back if they also enjoyed the interaction. It also helps you stay inspired with the suggestions of user generated content to like and repost as well.

Engage and Build Relationships With Your Target Market
Engaging with your audience on a daily basis fosters trust and customers’ loyalty. Invest time into it and do not just share posts but actively participate in conversations. Engage with all the followers, and also reciprocate following those users who follow you; additionally, like and comment on posts within the niche community. Relate user generated content that is relevant to your brand. Be sure to pose interesting questions in your captions and also be quick to respond to the comments that you receive in your images. Responding to follower’s posts themselves on a daily basis is more influential as it predicts higher response rates regarding the new campaigns – as people feel that ‘this person is really interested in me and my life,’ or ‘I know this brand and I trust it,’ whereas, interacting only as a content provider does not create a similar effect.

Smart Timing Of Posts
Be particular when to post your content on Instagram and ensure that you post most of your content when many people are likely to be online. It is very important to be consistent with the posting times since this will help in making the audience familiar with your schedule, and therefore they will be prepared for any new post you will be posting. Of course, every IG audience is unique, but overall, IG experiences increased activity in the mornings during the commuting hours and in the afternoon during lunchtime. A little later in the evening after people get off work and on Sundays are typically good as well. The second is to utilize Instagram’s insights analytics to research your followers’ behavior on the Web and identify your best hours.

Link Your Instagram to Facebook
It is crucial to have followers that you can directly drive from external sources to your IG profile. Friends of your friends are your followers on Facebook and the number of friends is in millions, thus making it an ideal platform to create awareness of your Instagram account. In your Facbeook business page or personal profile include the link to the Instagram profile in the “about me” tab so people know where to find you. Also post your Instagram posts or story highlights as link natively on Facebook to gain followers as Instagram allows this with just one click. Hashtag cross-posting brightens the feed of your FB friends with the best posts and familiarizes your IG brand.

Frequency and interactivity combined with additional promotion strategies such as contests, collaborations, hashtags, and cross promotions will help ensure that more audiences that your brand’s content, content that has a high likelihood of appealing to potential new followers. Be focused on the performance indicators for each kind of activity and maximize the efforts on what works best in your niche. With purposeful and intelligent promotion plan you will observe your followers increase week by week – thereby gaining all the branding, leads and sales generation opportunities in the platform that Instagram provides.