Instagram is by far one of the most active social media networks for the past decade. It has become an essential piece of your business to promote and get in front of your buyers and establish branding awareness. You need to be able to adapt your business to fit with today’s branding awareness strategies.
As a business you need to keep a steady account growth. Now you’re going to learn growth strategies using Instagram for followers organically. This mean’s no support from ads but if you have the budget for it then it’ll help greatly.
You want to grow your Instagram followers and increase engagement with your posts. So how do you get new followers? You have to use different strategies such as posting great and interesting content to get people to engage with your brand and even some new followers. Give them a reason to follow you. You should know what your audience is interested in and produce some content for them.
I’m sure you’ve already used Instagram for your business and tried to make some posts. By now you know that some work and some don’t. So you want to know what different strategies you can try to test with your company profile to gain new followers. Here you’re going to see different tools and strategies we use to grow Instagram profiles.
What a lot of businesses try to do is buy followers and purchase likes but that goes against Instagram service policies so you’ll only end up harming your account in the long run and can even get your page banned. All the purchased profiles that do end up liking your posts and followers will get deleted in a few days. So before we start getting Instagram followers organically, you need to understand you can’t just purchase likes and followers.
Consistency with your posts
Before we get started, you need to know your post is not going to go viral within your first attempt or maybe not ever but that’s OK. You need to understand your audience better, when they’re most active, age, and gender, anything that’ll help you know the time and days are best to publish your posts to its greatest effect. So after you understand your audience you’re going to want to make a posting schedule and gather quality content.
You want to publish your Instagram posts at the recommended times, which is Wednesday at 11:00 am and Friday between 10:00 am and 11:00 am. But for consistent engagement, Tuesday to Friday between 10 am and 3 pm are ideal times. You need to know your best times to post by navigating to your insight tab and read your reports. Here you’ll see the age, time, gender, and what days of the week are most successful for you to get the most engagement based on previous analytics. This will be a big time saver when looking to post consistently to grow your Instagram account.
By posting consistently sets you up to gain more followers and gain more interaction between your brand and your audience. Much bigger brand posts regularly and multiple times a day. Smaller businesses post a few times a week, but, whichever you decide to commit yourself to, make sure to do it at a consistent schedule.
Most important of all, you should be able to produce quality content consistently. A lot of people post so you need to have something that’ll help stand you out from the rest. Using generic content like stock images won’t help you on Instagram because it’s generic, you need to bring something more interesting content to Instagram.
Invest in content diversity
Feed posts aren’t the only way to promote yourself on social media, there are many other ways now including stories, IGTV episodes, and more. If you’ve only posted on your feed then you should also try out Instagram stories periodically every week to establish consistency and plan the content ahead of time. There’s a lot of opportunity with Instagram stories and you should keep a close eye with how your audience interacts with it.
Along with posting consistently, it’s important to create quality content. You may want to take up lessons on taking better photos and videos or hire a content agency or photographer/videographers to help you with this task.
Run promotions & contests
Sometimes you try to post from a marketers approach because you think this is what they’ll do but marketer goals aren’t always the same as your consumer goals. This means that you’re going to miss a lot of more important opportunities that’ll grow your Instagram organically.
If you want to increase your brand presence on Instagram, make contests, and promotions. Simply make requirements like they must follow your brand page and any other brand you’ve partnering with. And, if you’re consistent in your giveaways, like monthly or quarterly, your followers will stick around and look forward to your next one.
Cross-platform promotion
Don’t restrict yourself to Instagram alone. While you should target friends of current followers, remember that there are different crowds to take advantage of. How frequently do you talk about your Instagram account on your other social networks? Many people have various social accounts, and various specific qualities, so consider offering diverse content on Instagram than on Facebook and direct your followers on other social channels to your Instagram profile for exclusive offers or content. You can also utilize another visual-heavy social network like Pinterest to expand the compass of Instagram content that may some way or another have a short life expectancy on the platform’s active feed.
You can also ass your Instagram and other social network accounts to your email newsletters, website’s footer, and other digital ads. These are all good examples of cross-platform promotion. As well as adding your Instagram account to your promotions such as “Instagram followers receive 10% off!” to follow you on the spot. The idea of cross-platform promotion is to bring existing customers to your brand. These are easier to gain than pushing ads to people who don’t know you or your brand.
Utilizing influencers
What you can try to do is use influencers that match your niche. It’s true that influencers have grown a lot for the past couple of years and have an influence on your business growth. But a lot of them will charge you a lot of money to simply get a mention or have an individual post on their feed. You can get around this by using micro-influencers who line up with your brand values. Some actually have a more engaged audience than bigger influencers. If you collaborate with them you will gain more followers from their account and your account will organically grow.
Increase engagement
If you have the time, some of the most effective methods of growing your Instagram organically is by engaging with your audience. What this means is taking the time to leave comments on follower’s posts, answering questions, and reposting user-generated content.
If you’re able to get involved in small chat groups to connect followers with each other will help you gain loyal followers that extend beyond social media.
So why should you prioritize engagement and good content? We’ve found that when customers feel connected to the brand, they’re 68% more likely to recommend it to a friend and 76% more likely to buy it over any competitor.
There are a couple of things you want to test out such as liking and answering customer questions and showcasing the brand’s personality using content.
Increasing your engagement time is a long-term strategy that will help grow your Instagram account over time. The relationships built from this are far stronger than one-off interactions. It’s the same when you don’t feel connected to a stranger saying hi to you on the street, single interactions with brands don’t build relationships.
Our Conclusion
There are many ways to grow your Instagram following organically. We’ve gathered the most popular and highlighted them here. Such as running contests and cross-platform promotion. Some are designed for faster growth while others are more about investing time in engagement. A combination of all these strategies will put you in a good place to grow your Instagram account organically and steadily.
Remember, as you apply these strategies, check your analytics report to see how your account is growing. Check to see what certain days are you large peaks of likes and what you posted in that day and how people engaged with it. Using strategies like contests should match with your high peaks. And, in a few months of putting these strategies in action, you should see a much higher growth trend than previous months. If you need help getting Instagram followers organically you can contact us.