Creative Ways To Grow Your Instagram Profile

Instagram is the most popular photo-sharing app in the world. Launched in 2010 as just another free app, Instagram did something different and hit the sweet spot. This allowed it to grow so quickly that Facebook bought them for $1 billion in 2012.

Instagram is a rapidly growing channel that lets businesses expand their social media reach and engage with new and existing customers. When it was first launched, it skyrocketed to over 1 million users in the first 3 months. Over time, it evolved to have more capabilities, power, and adaptive perfection for its users. It is the perfect place to humanise your brand, showcase your product, nurture customers, and get new business. It quickly outgrew the competition and became a powerful content marketing and networking tool for businesses and individuals. Instagram is one of the most popular social networking sites at the moment, with over 700 million active monthly users who are sharing more than 60 million images per day.

Statistics show that the average engagement rates for brands are less than 0.1% on most social networks, but the reports show that Instagram engagement rate is at least 58 times higher than on Facebook. No one can argue with numbers like that and keep in mind that that is just average (you can do even better). Even if you think that your target audience doesn’t really hang out on Instagram, you’d be short-sighted to not test the platform.

There is plenty of potential followers for a business of any size. Instagram followers are worth pursuing since it’s known that they are ready to engage with your business within and outside of Instagram. If you are not constantly working to get more followers on Instagram than you are missing out on a huge customer base that wants to connect with you. Every month over 120 million people on Instagram engage with brands in several ways – from getting directions to a business location, or getting in touch with phone and direct message, to visiting their website.

Instagram Features

At the beginning, Instagram was a very basic app where you could just take a picture and apply some basic filters to it. Later on, Instagram evolved and is now packed with features like advanced filters, automation, and editing with drawing, text, and other effects. Instagram also introduced stories which appear at the top of the feeds for only 24 hours. You can also make your Instagram stories discrete and send them only to select people. There’s also a Live Video feature which is a bit different than other live video platforms in a way that the video disappears when you stop streaming. All of this is just something to keep in mind when you are creating your strategy to grow your account.

How To Get Followers On Instagram

Growing your Instagram following will take some time and daily work for small to medium size businesses. There are a few tricks and tactics that you can use to get your first 1,000 followers and it’s all about knowing how and where to invest your effort. There’s no magic formula or a shortcut to get followers on Instagram. Yes, there are services out there that will get you many followers quickly with dodgy tactics like using bots, but there’s no point in doing that. You want to connect with real people who will actually engage with your content and develop a loyalty to your business and bot followers can’t do that.

Never purchase followers from any website just so you can make your account look better and more popular. These bot followers are fake and don’t add any value. These fake followers also can’t spend real money and engage with your business.

When you are just starting out with a fresh Instagram profile, it can be discouraging to get only a few likes when you post a new photo. But this should bother you because you’ll find success with your initiative and reap the benefits of Instagram marketing. The focus will almost always be on increasing engagement because lasting engagement leads to loyal followers. No matter what tactic you use for growing your account, know that there is no substitute for regular posting and engaging with your followers.

We will show you how to connect with real customers who are within your ideal audience so you can create amazing content that will get you real Instagram followers. Getting more followers on Instagram requires you to be consistent with posting images, be authentic and also have clear goals in mind. Tell your followers a relatable story that will delight them and also compel new people to follow you.

Follow up to 50 users per hour

No one knows the exact number of how many people you can follow each day and this is a kept secret of Instagram. There are some restrictions in place that keep people from spamming. This limit for how many people you can follow is about 7,500. Since that is a big number, it is safe to start following 50 users per hour. If you do it any quicker, Instagram will not allow you to follow people any longer.

When you start following users on a daily basis, many will also follow you back, thus growing your Instagram account. Combine that with consistent posting and engaging with your followers and you’ll start to attract a real following.

Get More Engagement On Your Posts

There are many effective ways to increase the engagement on your Instagram posts. One of them is to simply repurpose content while giving credit to the authors. This way you don’t even need to create your own content and you can use other people’s images and videos. Another way is to mention other Instagram handles in your caption. According to research, mentioning another handle will increase your engagement up to 56%. Also, by doing this, you will appear in the explore feed for those people when someone is searching their name.

Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are probably the most important thing on Instagram. Without them, it’s very difficult to grow your account. They give you visibility because people on Instagram browse hashtags all day long. When they are browsing, they are also checking out interesting profiles and following them.

It is important to use the right kind of hashtags which will then attract the right kind of people. Hashtags are like a catalogue system that describes your content. People can find your content by searching for relevant hashtags so they basically serve as navigation. Hashtags can be based on a product, brand, lifestyle, location, event, community, etc. Keep in mind that there is a limit of 30 hashtags per post and be sure to vary them to get the maximum exposure. If you filled out your image caption and you are out of the character limit, then you can also post your hashtags in a comment which also looks very clean.

Be very specific with hashtags and avoid general and popular hashtags like #happy and #selfie which have a large reach but won’t get you much (if any) engagement. Specific hashtags will appeal to a targeted audience which will get you much more engagement. Pictures with over 11 hashtags have more engagement and if you use a lot of them, be sure to have a good balance of words and hashtags.

The first you need to do is to find some relevant hashtags for your posts. We recommend that you keep them in a spreadsheet or a text file and to spend a couple of hours putting together a list of hashtags for your business that you can use over and over. Simply start by typing a general hashtag in the search bar that is somewhat related to your industry and you will see a list of popular hashtags. The number on the right-hand side indicates its popularity.

The second way to find hashtags is by checking out your competitors. They basically have the same audience as you so feel free to copy the hashtags that they are using since it’s obviously working well for them. Like always, you’ll have to test which hashtags will get you the best results. Take down the notes on the performance of each post and look for metrics such as likes, comments, follows, and shares.

Run Instagram Contests

Contests on Instagram are great not only to grow your audience but also to get more engagement and traffic. You can set it up however you like, but the usual way is to ask people to follow you, use a specific hashtag, like and comment on one of your photos, or simply repost one of your photos.

This is a great way to get more engagement for companies of all sizes. You can also encourage users to create content as well which you can then use for your posts to inspire engagement. You will need to set up rules for each contest to avoid any disputes after it’s done. You should set the contest duration, the method of entry, the prize and how you will choose the winner.

CONCLUSION

Every business should take advantage of social media. Instagram is one of the best places where you can build your brand and generate new leads and sales. There is no reason why you can’t make it on Instagram if you put in the work and apply the right strategies.

Building social media following can be challenging and it may be overwhelming at times. But if you put your mind to it, you can build a huge loyal following that will support your business for many years to come. If you apply the things that we talked about in this article, you’ll get the most loyal followers that will engage with your social media posts and communicate with your brand. They will keep getting back for more and you can also expect that they will spread the word to others.

At one point you won’t have to put in the work of actively trying to follow others as much because people will organically start following you. At that point, you’ll have an influx of new followers and customers on a regular basis so you can just focus on posting great content and engaging with your followers.