Instagram is a competitive place where you can grow your business and even can boost your followers. Instagram has an ultra-smart and a massive collection of smart and creative accounts, with over 1 billion monthly users.
Instagram has become a significant cornerstone for many brands’ social presence and is used to grow conversions, drive profitable traffic into landing pages, and enhance an engaged audience.
As the platform keeps growing and developing more interactive features, i.e. Instagram Stories and Live, many businesses regularly use it to humanize brands, showcase the company culture and products, and generate new business.
Unless you’re famous in some way or are a celebrity, it is tough to amass a massive following on Instagram without hard work. For the average person or any business, growing followers takes more time and attention daily.
Basically, the number of your Instagram following means nothing if it cannot represent an engaged fan following which makes purchases and advocates for your brands with friends and followers.
Why is Instagram important?
Every internet marketer, including ordinary people, consider Instagram as the sweetheart of social media. The main reason Instagram is the sweetheart of social media is that it registers 1 billion active users monthly, among which half of the following businesses.
Few reasons why Instagram is important:
- Instagram is great because of its mobile-exclusive status; this helps you bring your mobile-based customer closer.
- People’s engagement on Instagram for brands is much higher than any other platforms, i.e., Twitter by 84 times, Pinterest by 54 times, and Facebook by ten times.
- The businesses incorporating images into their posts on Instagram receive 90 percent more shares than companies that don’t.
- Over 1/3 of Instagram users have utilized this app to purchase an online product, making them 70% more likely to do so than non-Instagram users.
- Instagram’s ad platform provides the most advanced advertising of social media with the target options.
Some ways to increase your Instagram followers
- Optimize your Instagram account
One of the most important steps is to have your account fully optimized before setting out how to gain followers on Instagram. It would help if you had your brand’s Instagram bio as the “Homepage” to your account.
Unless you update your Instagram bio, captions of an image, and a meaningful and proper username or profile image, people will not be able to know the account that belongs to your brand.
Your bio and image help form the foundations of your brand identity. The link available in your bio is the one spot to drive Instagram traffic to your site.
Use specific keywords, hashtags, or campaigns on your Instagram account. Furthermore, try to keep your username as search-friendly as possible. This means keep sticking close to your actual brand name.
Make the business name short so that your followers can easily recognize it. Try not to add any numbers or special characters to your username. Also, make sure to keep it in-line with other social media handles you already have.
- Be More Inclusive and Diverse
Only having a diverse, accessible, and inclusive Instagram account is not the right thing to do. Still, it’s also a way to improve your engagement, follower count, content and strengthen your community.
You can make your Instagram account more accessible and inclusive in many different ways. The first and simple step is to begin including subtitles to your Instagram video content as many people watch a video without audio.
Those subtitles are excellent for followers who watch the video without sound, as well as those people having hearing difficulties too can manage it easily.
More than 74% of people expect the brands they love to take a stand on important issues. If you can do this, it helps humanize your brand, increase brand loyalty, and necessarily helps to increase your followers.
- Keep a consistent content calendar
The primary thing you should keep in mind while trying to get followers on Instagram is not to post the content at random, haphazard times. If you can get people following you initially, you don’t want to make them forget they followed you in the first place either.
Keep to a regular posting schedule to combat the irregular timing. Moreover, you should not post the brands more than a few times a day. This behavior helps to avoid spamming your follower’s news feed. But make sure whatever your cadence, keep it consistent.
Posting to a schedule will help you build a steady experience for your followers and keep them in your brand’s know.
- Practice photography and editing
The quality of the post really matters when it comes to Instagram. One can ignore a few bad posts on Facebook, but a bad photo on Instagram cannot be ignored.
It’s not necessary to be a professional photographer, but you should be a good Instagram poster. You can practice for weeks before you start. You must be familiar with basic photography tips and photo editing apps.
Some key points:
- Find interesting perspectives
- Capture small details
- Focus on one subject at a time
- Make your followers happy
Instagram has many editing capabilities, but they are not sufficient to make a picture beautiful. You must go through at least one or two other photo editing apps before opening Instagram for the first time.
- Use relevant hashtags to reach new users
The text of your Instagram post isn’t searchable, but hashtags do appear in Instagram search. Using hashtags thoughtfully can be a better way to get followers on Instagram for free.
If you use the relevant hashtags, it will help people find your content after a search, or maybe after clicking on a hashtag from another relevant post. Users can also follow hashtags, which may appear in feeds of people who don’t yet follow your account.
Avoid meaningless hashtags like #likeforlike, #tagsforlikes, #followme, #followforfollowback or #followforlike. These hashtags may temporarily boost followers but it won’t help you build a meaningful community on Instagram.
Instead, focus on using highly targeted hashtags specific to your photo, business, or content.
Those are some ways to increase your followers. While building and growing your Instagram profile and fan following, it may be quite hard, but the benefits of Instagram are worth the effort in the end.
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