7 ways to increase your Instagram followers!
From hashtags to Insta-stories, Instagram has taken over the world and has become one of the most trending social media of all time. Apart from celebrity accounts we see many with millions of followers and dream about having the same in our account. But to achieve this, we will need to follow some rules and take some serious steps. Getting millions followers is not a difficult job if:
- Your content is top notch
- You engage well
- Be genuine and help others with your posts
- Use the followings tips on daily basis
Engage
Engagement is very important to make people aware that you are not a robot. Especially when it comes to your followers, it’s very important to retain them. Take some time out for people who are making the effort to comment on your posts. Apart from engaging on your posts only, give time to leave good comments on other’s posts. This way they as well as their followers will know about you. The concept of engagement is very interesting and works only when you ‘give before you take’.
Consistency
Consistently posting is a good thing but if you think posting every hour of the day is going to bring you more followers then you are absolutely wrong. Imagine yourself as a follower, how would you feel if your feed is filled with posts from only one person? Pretty annoying I’d say. The best way to post is with a gap of at least 3–4 hours.
Hashtags
Many people use all the hashtags in the world because they think that will take their post to more people. But trust me when I say that people not only ignore irrelevant things but also develop a negative view towards it if seen repeatedly. Let me give you an example- Last night I was surfing for some recipes on Youtube. As I scrolled down I found an odd video which was about toys and appealing as the thumbnail looked, I found it odd and probably decided to label the channel as ‘desperate’.
Value
Yes, I know its cliché but its very important! The value of your post plays its roll when someone randomly stumbles upon your account. Think from that person’s perspective and decide if you’d want to follow an account which has valuable posts or the one which doesn’t have any original or valuable content. For a moment it may seem like you don’t care much but in the long run the value retain followers.
Free Instagram tools
Instagram has free tools! Yes! You wouldn’t image such a big platform having anything for free but fortunately it does. The ‘Business profile’ is one of the tools which brings with it the ‘Insights’ tool, email address tool and gives your profile a professional look. I changed my account to a business profile and I can easily track the impressions on my posts from which I can notice which posts do well. This not only allows me to follow the right format but also helps me experiment without any losses.
Do not spam celebrities
If you are a gram user then by now you have noticed the trolls that follow if you spam the celebrities. Make a habit to engage with accounts that have good number of followers but do not spam. It brings the negative audience towards you which can be really hard to get past. Also I have seen an account doing so and it did no good to her apart from the fact that her follower count raised to some millions but the engagement on her posts are poor. Suppose you are trying to use your gram for business then the engaging audience might help you as they can be potential customers. Few active followers are better than a large group of inactive followers.
Shoutouts
I recently came to know about ‘shoutouts’ on Instagram. Basically, you can ask your followers to follow someone’s account and in exchange they will do the same. This only works if you both have good number of followers so that the exchange is fair. Another point to be noted is that if the audience of both the accounts don’t have similar interests it won’t work. I don’t see much potential in it and I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve seen big bloggers do this and I always have wondered if this would be a good idea or not.
Apart from these free tools, Instagram also has paid forms of promotion like promotion of profile or boosting a post by paying a few bucks. Just like Facebook, Instagram allows this feature of paying for ads. But Instagram has something more than that which I think you all will prefer more- organic building of followers and I explained some of them above.
Some useful facts about Instagram:
- Instagram users have been buying products from businesses through the app
- The ad strategy of Instagram is very strong and effective as the same time
- It has the potential to gather as well as retain customer which will flourish the business
- Instagram has 800 million users which is a huge audience
- 80% users are young or mid age
Please let me know down in the comments if you have some other tips for Instagram.
