10 Ways To Increase Followers On Instagram
Find out how Instagram can help you grow your business
Instagram is no longer a simple social network where you can share your photos with hashtags: or rather, it’s not just that. In fact, Instagram has become an essential tool to increase your company’s online visibility and turnover, 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 I will tell you about some tricks that will help you increase free Instagram followers in 10 simple steps.
Before starting, remember that an effective strategy does not involve shortcuts or magic formulas – even the best mix of digital techniques and activities takes its time. If you want to get truly extraordinary results then you have to be patient and be constant. It also can help you gain more free Instagram likes.
Then discover the 10 tricks to increase followers on Instagram, let’s get started!
- 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. Simply put, find your niche and stick to it.
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.
For example, you could use Snapseed to edit and beautify your photos as you wish. It is a very valuable mobile app, developed by Google, which offers you many features for the photo post-production phase.
- Define your goals and measure the results
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, I recommend using Iconosquare, a very simple but effective analysis tool at the same time: it presents graphs relating to the growth in the number of followers, their involvement on your content and much more.
- Curate your account page
If you want to do business with Instagram you have to look professional. Before thinking about how to have many followers, you need to think about the best way to curate your profile page. To do this, in addition of course 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.
Remember to conclude the bio by entering your email at the end where you can be contacted for any business requests.
Furthermore, if you have a website or landing page where you can convey people to convert them into users or customers, enter the URL in the specific field, just below the bio itself.
- Focus on quality content
Content Marketing is important both on the web and on platforms like Instagram. That’s why you must always focus on high-quality, valuable content in your social publishing plan. 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 about sports car events and fairs.
Furthermore, being an event characterized by nature by a very specific period of time, the fact that these files are removed is a great way to keep your board timeless and not give it a semblance of old stuff.
- Post content on a regular basis
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, in fact.
To avoid managing everything manually, you can use online tools to schedule the publication of your posts on Instagram: if you are interested, I suggest you take a look at Later.
Also, if your page is aimed at a predominantly Italian audience, know that statistically the best hours to post on Instagram are during the afternoon (to be precise, at 3pm). As for the days of the week, Mondays and the two days of the weekend are the ones that reach the winners’ podium.
However, it is better to carry out some tests because what may be more effective in terms of publication timing for one account may not be so for one belonging to another sector. How do you check the best days and times when your followers are most receptive? Simple, Iconosquare helps you analyze even this type of information and graphically shows you the best performing time slots for your profile.
If, on the other hand, you have an international user base, any time can potentially be good: you will always find a percentage of followers awake and ready to interact with your post. That said, my advice is to always stick to the data Iconosquare shows you.
- 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 photos of their liking 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 all of them. Never insert hashtags in the captions, instead insert the list of 30 keywords in the first comment to the post.
Use the name of your brand as the first hashtag or in any case the keyword that most identifies your Instagram page. Then remember to create as many lists of hashtags as there are types of content to be published.
For example, if you post videos of exercises in the gym and photos of healthy foods, consider creating two separate lists: one containing hashtags related to fitness and the other relating to genuine nutrition. If you don’t have many hashtags come to mind, look for larger pages similar to yours and take a look at which hashtags are used in their posts.
If you really can’t find any interesting ones, download the TagsForLikes app, which offers you numerous lists of hashtags, divided into categories and subcategories. Finally, if you want to determine which hashtags are most effective for your business, there is a dedicated graphic section on Iconosquare that tells you which keywords are most engaging your audience.
- Tag referral accounts
Another interesting way to have many followers on Instagram and increase the visibility of your account is based on publishing content in which the most important pages in your sector are mentioned or tagged (i.e. accounts with 100k followers and upwards).
It is not so unlikely that these pages will interact with your posts, as a result it will happen that the Instagram algorithm makes sure that the content is highlighted on the Explore page, where millions of onlookers are waiting for you looking for new photos and accounts. to follow.
It goes without saying that in this case you will receive many more likes, comments and above all new followers.
- Forge 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 it. 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 they are also interested in your profile, will start following you.
- 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. It’s a similar technique to guest posting in SEO.
- 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 essential as creating healthy and genuine relationships, without igniting unnecessary discussions and responding to all comments as much as possible.
Increase followers on Instagram: the conclusions
As mentioned before, I repeat that, to ensure constant growth for your personal or business page, you will need to be patient and be persevering in applying the 10 tricks I have just explained to you.
In this article, you could learn what are the most effective tactics and techniques to increase your user base:
- Create your style and stand out
- Define goals and measure the results achieved
- Curate the Instagram page with professionalism
- Post regularly and at your best times
- Use hashtags appropriately and take advantage of Stories
- Tag pages that are similar and larger than yours
- Do S4S and possibly also think about P4S
- Create an active community on your Instagram page.
