Instagram is no longer a simple social network where you can share your photos with hashtags: or rather, it’s not just that. Instagram has become an essential tool to increase the online visibility and turnover of your company, as well as a powerful tool in a growth hacking strategy.
Even if the number of followers is not directly proportional to success, being able to count on a quality “fanbase” is essential. That is why in this article we want tell you some tricks that will help you increase Instagram followers in 10 simple steps.
Before you begin, remember that an effective strategy does not involve shortcuts or magic formulas. If you want to get truly extraordinary results then you have to be patient and constant.
Here are the 10 steps (or tricks) to increase followers on Instagram.
1. Create your style
If you want to grow quickly on Instagram you must first design your brand, whether it be business or personal. You must make sure that your page has a clear and recognizable identity, differentiating yourself from your competitors and dealing with precise and well-defined topics.
Do you have a repertoire of photos and videos? Great, promote it by remembering to use a consistent style for all your multimedia files, for example using the same filters or – if you use a photo editing tool – always keeping the saturation, contrast, brightness, temperature levels in the same way, etc.
2. Define your goals
You cannot devise an effective growth strategy if you have not first outlined the objectives to be pursued.
- Do you want to increase the followers of your Instagram channel to sell your services or products?
- Do you want to offer the possibility of sponsorships on the page?
- Do you want to resell the page once you reach the 500k followers quota?
Whatever your goal, try to adapt your activities to achieve that result. And, consequently, define which are your KPIs (key performance indicators) to keep under control.
For example, if you sell shoes, an interesting metric is represented by the number of monthly visits to the web pages of your ecommerce from the Instagram channel, and the relative conversion rates (you can monitor these metrics using Google Analytics).
To monitor the growth of your Instagram page we recommend using an effective analysis tool that shows graphs relating to the growth in the number of followers, their involvement on your content and much more.
3. Take care of your account page
If you want to do business with Instagram you have to look professional. Before thinking about how to get lots of followers, you need to think about the best way to take care of your profile page. To do this, in addition to publish quality content, you can basically operate on two specific elements: the name and the bio.
The name is simply the title of your page:
- if you have a corporate brand, it must match the company name;
- if you have a personal brand, you can enter your name and surname, or your nickname possibly followed by a keyword that is extremely relevant to your page
The bio represents the descriptive text of your account and must be attractive in order to arouse interest in potential followers. You can use a list of terms that describe your specific industry, a quote relevant to your brand, or simple lines related to your business.
Also, if you have a website or a landing page, enter the URL in the specific field, just below the bio itself.
4. Quality content
Content Marketing is important both on the web and on platforms like Instagram. That’s why you always have to focus on content of value and excellent quality. Never consider low resolution photos, or blurry or grainy photos.
In addition to posting photos and videos to your wall, use the powerful Stories feature. Stories are nothing more than multimedia files played exclusively on the entire screen which, once published, remain stored for 24 hours, after which they are automatically removed from the system.
For example, if you are dealing with sports cars and you only post photos and videos dedicated to vehicles on your wall, you could publish Stories related to sports car events and fairs.
5. Post content regularly
This is definitely a fundamental aspect: you have to post frequently to increase the visibility of your account. On Instagram, the average time of maximum interaction (about 90% of interactions) is about 3 hours, so to get a constant flow of likes and comments on posts (as well as new followers), the ideal would be to publish a new post every 3 hours.
To avoid managing everything manually, you can use online tools to schedule the publication of your posts on Instagram.
6. Use hashtags appropriately
As you probably already know, hashtags are keywords preceded by the # symbol that are used to categorize multimedia content posted on Instagram. They are undoubtedly a fundamental tool for gaining many followers and being followed by people whose interests are in line with your business.
People interested in a particular topic will search through hashtags for the photos they like and – if intrigued – will visit the account that hosts these photos. Finally, if they find the account very interesting, they will not hesitate to follow it.
Since you can use a maximum of 30 hashtags per image or video, my advice is to use them all. Never insert hashtags in the captions, instead insert the list of 30 keywords in the first comment to the post.
Use your brand name as the first hashtag or the keyword that most identifies your Instagram page. Then remember to create as many hashtag lists as there are types of content to publish.
7. Interact with other users
Interaction on Instagram is crucial. You will never be able to increase your followers if you stop and think only of your page and your photos. You must be part of the community and search and browse other users’ profiles, “like” the photos you prefer and comment when you see fit.
The greater your activity, the more you will be rewarded because there are many people who, intrigued by a like or your comment, could visit your account and become your followers.
To increase your interactions automatically, we recommend that you also try the InstaBot PRO program, a professional Instagram Bot designed for those who want help in mass operations of follow / unfollow, like and comments.
8. Make new Partnerships
Creating partnerships and making agreements between Instagram accounts is one of the best tactics to quickly grow your business on this social network. There are real cases of pages that have increased their user base by hundreds of thousands of new followers in a few months through this method.
This technique is called S4S, which stands for Shout4Shout. Simply put, an account posts content that partner channels like, comment on, and mention. To put S4S strategies into practice and increase your followers, therefore, look for accounts in a sector similar to yours and with a similar number of followers, contact them, introduce yourself and offer your availability to do S4S with them.
In this way, the media coverage will be proportional to the number of pages in the group and the order of magnitude of each user base. The followers of the pages that have mentioned you, if also interested in your profile, will start following you.
9. Promote your page
There is another very similar technique but which differs from the previous one in that the latter provides for a reward from the page that requests the shout. This is the so-called P4S, i.e. Pay4Shout.
This usually happens when there is a substantial difference between the number of followers of one page compared to that of the other. The smaller one will require to be mentioned in a photo of the larger page, in order to be promoted to all followers of the latter. This is a similar technique to guest posting in SEO.
10. Interact with your followers
Having lots of followers on Instagram is important, but so is maintaining high levels of engagement with these followers. By engagement we mean the rate of engagement with its users, therefore the percentage of people who will carry out actions on the published content.
The best way to get lots of “likes” on Instagram lies in interacting with our followers. Communicating with them is as crucial as creating healthy and genuine relationships, without igniting unnecessary discussions and responding to all comments as much as possible.
If you want you can also use InstaBot Pro to send mass DM to your followers in one click!
500 followers