Summary
Read this blog to learn the best tactics and tools that could help grow your business on Instagram and a more engaging audience.
What Will I Learn?
- The best tactics to help grow your Instagram account.
- How to post consistently.
- Creating content your audience will interact with.
Instagram has become an essential pillar for businesses to drive traffic to landing pages, build an audience and make more sales.
If your Instagram isn’t up to the highest standard, then it’s now time to get on top of it with these 15 tactics to help grow your Instagram organically. The chances are that if you develop a more significant following, then the more opportunity you have to drive traffic to your website and increase revenue.
Doing all this organically can be a challenge, but it’s essential. It could be easy to buy some Instagram followers or pay for likes. But at the end of the day, this will not give you any engagement nor customers interested in your business. You could also end up getting penalised if Instagram finds out. They also remove low-quality accounts, and those they think are bots, so Instagram will delete fake followers.
It’s not about having thousands or millions of followers, but about having engaged fans who will buy your products and share them with friends and family.
There’s no definitive step-by-step guide to grow your Instagram. But we feel if you use these tactics that they are sure to increase your followers. Each tactic will have a different outcome, so see what works well and what doesn’t and note it.
18 Tactics To Increase Instagram Followers
1. Optimise Your Instagram Profile
Before starting to gain followers, one of the first steps is to optimise your account entirely. Think of your Instagram profile as the homepage of your website. You need to share all the vital information about your brand.
To start this, you need to write an Instagram bio in 150 characters. Your bio needs to inform followers and potential followers about who your business is. Followers need to understand what action to take on your profile, whether to watch a video, visit your shop or visit your website.
Your Instagram bio should include a description of what you do, a touch of your brand’s personality, a call to action (contact us, shop) and a link to another social media or your website. An example of a brand’s Instagram profile is Oreo.
As you can see, they have a short bio, but it’s a bit of their playful personality. Oreo also has a link that redirects you to a Pride page on their website. This link is their call to action; they want you to visit this page and learn their stance on Pride.
Another critical point is to keep your username search-friendly. It needs to be close to your brand name. Keeping it close to your other social media usernames is crucial, as someone from Twitter may want to follow you on Instagram, and you want them to find you easily. Don’t use special characters or numbers.
2. Find Your Best Time To Post
There is no straightforward answer for when to post on Instagram. There are some ways you can use to find out the best times to post for your followers.
Instagram insights is an excellent start to find out when your audience is online. It will tell you here what time your audience is most active on each day, so you can strategically post at those times to maximise your chances of likes and shares.
3. Schedule Instagram posts
If you want to post outside of business hours, it would be great to schedule these posts in advance. Sometimes it’s also better to create lots of content on a day or over a few days for the next few weeks or months. These can then be scheduled to be posted, so you don’t have to worry about your content. Of course, you should post content that is up to date to give your audience a nice balance.
There are several websites where you can do this, one of which we use is canva.com.
4. Post Consistently
Posting consistently is a crucial factor to growing your followers on Instagram. We recommend at least posting once a day. When posting daily, you have more chances to gain followers and gain engaged fans to your profile.
Instagram’s algorithm rewards consistency. If you post regularly and get good engagement, Instagram will most likely put you at the top of your followers feeds. Regularly posting will maximise the chance of your post being seen.
5. Learn How Instagram Works
Instagram’s algorithm had a significant shake up a few years ago. Initially, posts were displayed in chronological order in the feed. Now it is more sporadic, but since the change, the average post has been seen by 50% more followers than before.
There are many factors to determine what shows up in each users timeline.
Those are the following:
- Interest: This is how Instagram feels the person will like the post based on their previous activity.
- Timeliness: This is how recent the post was.
- Relationship: This is which accounts a user engages with regularly.
- Frequency: This is how often someone uses Instagram.
- Following: These are posts from accounts a person follows.
- Usage: This is how much time a user spends on Instagram.
While there are 6 of these factors to consider, the most important thing to do is to create high-quality content consistently.
6. Share Your Instagram
When your website is launched online, make sure that your Instagram account is displayed along with your other social networks. Add social media buttons to your website. Adding your social buttons will help promote your social media channels.
Another idea is to cross-promote your social media. Many businesses spread the word about their Instagram through Twitter. You should have unique content if you want users to follow your Instagram, too, such as Reels, IGTV and Stories.
7. Post Content Your Followers Want
When starting, you should post varying content to see which performs better. When you notice certain content is working better, then you should keep posting it. It could be as simple as having a great caption, posting at a particular time or more, but it’s all tests you can perform.
8. Post Different Content Types
Instagram has changed so much from just posting photos. In recent years they have introduced new ways to share content on the platform. Mixing different content types is a great way to gain more followers. It gives you the chance to connect with a broader range of people.
Each type of content has different advantages. For example, Reels are the newest type of content, and Instagram always pushes for their latest features. Since they launched Reels, they have moved it to the centre tab, showing how essential Reels is to their business. They are trying to join the hype of the TikTok trend.
Instagram Stories are a great way of interacting with followers you already have. You can post polls or let them ask questions, and it builds up a relationship between you and your followers. Also, if you have over 10,000 followers, you can add a swipe up link to drive traffic to a website or a shop.
9. Find Your Brand Voice
Your followers don’t just follow you because they see sales pitches. They follow you because they like the personality of your brand and the content you create. What works well for a brand like Netflix who have a witty and young personality, will not work for a serious business like the Bank of Ireland, for example.
It would be best if you considered what you want the tone of your business to be. Is it Funny? Informative? It should reflect on how you want people to see your business. Posts that you make on your Instagram account should show off your brand’s style, personality and beliefs.
10. Write Compelling Captions
High-quality photos and graphics are great to catch attention. But Instagram captions are a chance to provide more information about the content you are sharing.
Instagram captions can be up to 2,200 characters, but of course, you don’t need to use all of these as this is far too long. It all depends on your brand and what your posting. Emojis are always a great way to add fun to your posts, and people like them when brands use them.
11. Research Hashtags
Hashtags can be essential to share your content with a large and targeted audience. Some websites can help you find the right hashtags that would attract your target audience. Leetags is a great app to generate relevant hashtags.
Using hashtags is key to gaining more followers on Instagram. People can now follow a specific hashtag that will show up on their feed. Your post will be more discoverable if people are searching through a particular hashtag.
Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags on a post, but after research, we conducted online, nine seems to be the perfect number for maximum engagement. Just make sure you don’t use the same nine hashtags time after time.
12. Get Featured
Many accounts on Instagram are feature accounts which are Instagram accounts that reshare other users’ content based on a specific hashtag or tagging. Some of these accounts may have thousands or millions of followers. Having one of these accounts share your Instagram posts can bring a new audience to your profile.
Feature accounts exist for most niches. If you research some hashtags, you will find them. For example, in Cork, an account called @ig_cork shares the best photos of Cork every day. To have a chance of featuring on their profile, you must include the hashtag #ig_cork on your posts.
Using these hashtags from feature accounts is a great way to share your content. You have the chance to reach a new audience and the potential to be reshared to thousand or millions of followers.
13. Engage With Your Followers
Engaging with your audience is a vital way to create loyal fans. Many brands only focus on likes and comments without taking into account engaging with your fans in a conversation.
Just because someone commented on your new post doesn’t mean they follow you. It would be best if you interacted with every comment in the hope of gaining potential followers.
A great way to engage with your followers is to use Instagram stories. Put up questions or polls for followers to interact with. You could encourage them to tag a friend for more exposure to your profile.
14. Use Instagram Stories Highlights
Using Instagram stories highlights is a great way to introduce your profile to potential followers. Make sure you have a cover photo for your highlights to label them correctly.
Netflix does a great job of using Instagram stories highlights. They use it for different topics such as quizzes, learning, play, and so on. To make them stand out, they use icons for cover photos and other colours.
15. Post Instagram Reels
Another avenue to explore is Instagram Reels. These are short formed videos similar to TikTok’s. Users can add music, text and effects to their videos.
Once you have found your niche, you should post content related to that niche on your Reels. Reels have a good chance of getting thousands of views because they’re so new, and people love short videos. It’s a way of finding more potential followers. We discuss this more in our article Instagram Marketing Guide.
16. Run a Competition
If you are a new business and looking for an engaging way to gain followers, then setting up a competition could be a great idea. Often brands run a contest for a voucher, for example, and the steps to enter it are to tag two friends, follow the account and share the post on their story. Running a competition effectively grows your followers fast as a new audience base will see these posts.
17. Advertise On Instagram
Of course, this way isn’t free to get followers on Instagram. But Instagram ads can be a great way to reach new followers fast by showing your content to people who would otherwise not see it. It is a legitimate way of finding your target audience, which will take a small investment. We would recommend starting low and doing some tests. If it works, then you scale up. If it doesn’t, then change the audience or content you’re promoting.
The audience can be targetted by demographic, location, behaviours and more. You can even create an audience based on the people who already interact with your business.
Ads on Instagram can be located in the feed, Stories and the Explore feed. Each location you place the ad can have a different outcome for your ad campaign.
18. Analyse Your Results
After you have used many of these tactics, see what worked well and what didn’t. You can view your Instagram metrics in the app with Instagram Insights.
Don’t just focus on likes and comments. But look at what the metrics say about what you have posted or your profile. If you were testing out some new hashtags or caption format, you could see here if they worked or not. Is there a specific content type that generates more engagement or likes? Keep creating more content for that topic.
We hope these tactics will help you in your pursuit to conquer Instagram.