6 proven steps to grow your Instagram account
Instagram is on the verge of becoming the number one social media platform. Presently, it is the second most engaged network after Facebook. Though Facebook and YouTube have the largest online users — 1.9 billion and 2.4 billion users respectively — Instagram is fast catching up with a billion active users monthly and over 500 million users daily, this includes both individuals and businesses. Trying to grow your profile from amidst the million users can be a daunting task. Nevertheless, it is a major goal of many on the platform, especially business accounts.
Businesses with solid following are able to explore the potentials of the platform. While some have been known to buy users, such shortcuts only have short term benefits (massive followers) with a great disadvantage in the long run(fake or false followers). Real followers should be the target and these are people who truly value you, your brand, or product. They truly will engage with your brand.
Major steps to help boost your Instagram page
Below are steps which have the potential of improving your Instagram following:
1. Unique Bio and Profile
Effective bios help first time visitors to your page to understand what value they stand to gain by following. It also reminds return visitors as well as update them about new happenings.
2. Creative contents
Creative, educative, inspiring, and motivating content will always leave people flooding your IG handle to post comments and hitting the like button. Learning to spice up your posts will go a long way in gaining more followers. You could tell a story around your product or services instead of the regular direct product promotions. Instagram has upgraded in its qualities, it has numerous kinds of posts that you can create on the platform such as Instagram stories, photo posts, video posts even IGTV videos. The quality of content you post determines the level of engagement you get.
3. Be consistent when making posts
Tailwind carried a research study on more than 100,000 Instagram profiles in the year 2017 to know how posting frequency affected followers’ growth and their engagement rate. They found out that the more someone makes a post the more likes and followers they get. According to their case study, profiles that posted 7 and more posts a week (it could once or more a day for seven days) got more likes and increased the number of followers than those that posted less. Be reminded that the reason your existing followers followed you is to get content from you. Formulate the habit of posting consistently to get more followers, likes, and comments.
Posting daily could be stressful sometimes but trust today’s world in making things less stressful and tiring. There are apps like Buffer, Hootsuite, and lots more that helps to make posting daily easy. All you need do is prepare your posts for the week or month, fix designated dates and time they should be posted in Buffer, Hootsuite, etc, then leave the rest to the app.
By scheduling posts, you can engage with your Instagram followers regularly, and this helps improve your follower growth over time.
4. Right Hashtag
Remember your goal is to engage your existing followers on a daily while trying to grow more real followers. The posts you make will engage the already existing audience. Hashtags are great ways to increase the growth of followers; hashtags make it easy for people searching for a particular brand, products, services, or whatever to find your photos. If you want to tag your posts properly you will need to search for relevant hashtags, this entails carrying out a proper research, making sure the hashtags are being searched for on Instagram.
Be reminded that Instagram permits a maximum of 30 hashtags per post but it’s usually advisable to use 9 hashtags. According to a study from Sprout Social, it says that posts with 9 hashtags got the highest engagement. The purpose of these hashtags is to reach out to those audiences that aren’t following you. That’s why it is important to use the right hashtags if you want to get attention from the right crowd.
5. Tag your location
Tagging your location alerts your followers about the location from where you made a particular photo. The purpose of geo-tagging is to let anyone looking for events, products, or photos from a particular region, reach your post. You could just include the name of your town, state or you could pin down the specific location that you are at.
6. Host Giveaways
Hosting giveaways is a great way to build your Instagram audience. Giveaways work faster at growing the number of followers, be aware that it won’t generate many sales if that is part of the plan. Be deliberate about the purpose of the giveaway, set terms and conditions for participants. These requirements could be them following the page, tagging friends to the post, sharing etc.
A viable social channel is a crucial asset for brands. By being strategic about growth principles, the chances of building loyal followers and increasing revenues are improved.
