How to Get More Instagram Followers (Without Buying Them)
8 min read
What would a million Instagram followers mean for your company? With more than 1 billion users on Instagram and growing steadily, Instagram has proven to be an amazing marketing tool for business owners looking to expand their company’s customer base. To be honest, it won’t be easy to achieve, but increasing your current Instagram followers by 200% should be a big step forward for your business. Increasing your Instagram followers not only improves your reach, but it would also make a huge difference to your business.
Although Instagram lags a little behind Facebook’s 1.4 billion users, it has a higher engagement rate than Facebook. According to a Forrester study, the engagement rate of brands on Instagram is 58 times higher than on Facebook. YouTube on the other hand get 5 billion users and has much higher engagement. For those starting out, you can buy YouTube subscribers to grow your channel faster.
All of this is great, but how can this be achieved?
In this post, we’re going to give you tips on how to grow your Instagram followers organically without having to buy them.
A social media strategy design
A social content strategy is a plan that will help you focus on the important things that would increase your Instagram followers while also making it easier to track your results.
This should always be the first thing you do, no matter what social media network or initiative you work with. With a social media strategy, you can easily organize your team workflow and internally help monitor content. Strategy aside, learn who your brand is.
What do you want to achieve?
What you are trying to achieve is not really increasing your number of Instagram followers; it’s what you want your Instagram followers to achieve.
Are your goals for increasing sales, service orders, or email subscribers? This would help you understand who the best people are that you want to target.
Know your target audience
When designing your social content marketing strategy, you also need to understand the demographics of your target audience . Are they mothers, students, or entrepreneurs etc staying at home?
Once you have gathered some sample people from the target audience, you will have a better understanding of the type of content that will resonate better with your target audience, which will result in the right type of followers following you.
Create an Amazing Bio and Profile
Your biography and profile on Instagram will show everyone what you stand for and how professional you are. Your bio and profile define your online reputation and that’s why big companies like Facebook, Twitter never stop improving their design.
Before you set out to get new followers, the first thing you need to do is look at your Instagram profile. Make sure your bio and profile represent your brand the way you want them to.
Link your social media profiles together
Do you have a strong social media presence on other social media platforms?
Do you already have a large number of followers on Facebook?
If so, then tell your followers from other platforms about your Instagram account and put your Instagram link in your bio or description on other social media platforms. You will find that this is a nice and easy quick way to get your Instagram follower numbers up.
This is a great way to use other social media channels for your own growth; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest are also included.
Cross-promote your content and brand hashtags
Keeping your other social media accounts up to date is already difficult, and adding an additional social media platform to this list can make it even more difficult.
To make it easier to manage these accounts, take advantage of cross-promoting your content across all of your social media accounts.
The best way to do this is to repurpose your content on the other social media channels. While infographics work best for Instagram, you can convert them into images for Facebook and short sentences for Twitter.
This is exactly what the repurposing of content is all about. And the interesting thing is that you can create a video from the content and still upload it to YouTube.
Essentially, you’re promoting your content across the board and creating identical brand stories across all of your channels.
Run a contest or give freebies
This is a great trick to get your Instagram followers growing in a matter of days.
If you’re running a contest or giving a giveaway, it doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t got it, but you do need a reward that appeals to the type of followers who want to follow you.
Do you remember the audience figures from before? What you need to do is offer something of value to your ideal follower who, in return, will give you their following.
If you’re a food blogger, you could offer a digital recipe book; if you’re an email marketer, you could offer a guide to increasing email subscribers or an online course.
Some options will cost you more time than money, but what you end up getting are real Instagram followers that will make a positive impact on your business.
One price to avoid in the beginning would be cash. Yes, you can get a lot of followers very quickly if you offer a price of 1,000 Swiss Francs, but these followers will most likely stop getting involved in the future and some will stop following once they find out they aren’t have won.
Remember, quality comes before quantity: 1,000 ultra-specific engaged followers will always be better than 10,000 random, non-engaged followers.
A great way to start is by learning from your previous followers what their pain points are and working on a solution that you could offer as a prize for a giveaway.
Take part in popular conversations
Constant participation in popular conversations is a great help for influencers towards greater reach. You can use this for your audience as well.
Add valuable comments to a trending conversation on Instagram and tag other people to join the conversation.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a conversation in your niche, you can also get involved in a general conversation such as politics, celebrity posts, to name a few,
If you keep your mind dropping on trending conversations, you’ll be out there expanding your organic reach. Always use the trending hashtags in your post to get more opinions.
Work with influencers
It can be easier to get followers when you partner with other influencers in your niche.
Following the influencers in your niche is a good start to working with them. Always deal with the individual influencers by constantly making valuable comments and also highlighting other influencers.
If you do all of these, you will land on influencers’ radar, but that doesn’t mean they are reaching out to you. So usually you have to take the first step and reach out to the influencers in your room and come up with a proposal that would be mutually beneficial.
Create consistent content
How often do you update your profile in a day? If you don’t update your Instagram profile with visual content, you won’t be helping your goal either.
This applies to any marketing channel. You need to be consistent and planned in updating your content on Instagram.
Create wonderful infographics and images that encourage users to leave a comment and tag friends. You need fascinating images and infographics, and tools like Canvas can help.
Plan your content
Let’s face it, it’s not easy to manually post on a daily basis. For this reason, it is best to take some time to create lots of content for your Instagram feed and use a social media scheduling tool (such as Later ) to schedule and post it automatically. You can also use an editorial calendar ( click here for the free template of our editorial calendar ) to plan your content in advance.
Write good captions
Captions are descriptions of what your visual content is about. They can be of different lengths, but the best signatures are always the ones that further explain the purpose of the picture.
For example, your picture could be looking out the window and watching the rain. In order for your caption to really intrigue and captivate the viewer, you would need a lot more than “I’m stuck inside because of the rain …” because that’s obvious, you don’t need a caption to tell you that.
You could focus on what your thoughts were at that moment or maybe on why you were looking out the window. Then, to make the whole thing more catchy, ask a question and encourage others to comment. For example: what do you do to pass the time when it rains? Let me know it…
Most of the images are likely to be self-explanatory, so use the caption to add context and questions and really encourage engagement from those who see your post.
To write better Instagram captioning, you need to add a call to action and inspirational emotion through your visual content.
Use location tags
If your visual content can be placed in a location, or if your business has a physical location, it would be best to place location tags on your visual content.
This helps make your visual content much more visible to an audience that is in a similar location. Audiences in the same or nearby location tend to convert better compared to audiences in distant locations.
Have you attended a conference / event or are you the host? Location tags work best in conjunction with other people who attended or may be interested in the event.
Interact with your current followers
Whether you have 100 Instagram followers or 10,000; remember they all count.
Anyone who likes your post or leaves a comment will respond to each and every one of them. Show your gratitude by liking their posts or by simply talking to them.
It takes time to dig into your current Instagram followers and as your following grows, it becomes more difficult to keep track of each one. But remember that in order to build a following or any type of fan base, you need to be present and socially available on social media.
Because every person you meet can talk to two other people about you, which leads to a lot more followers just by the power of word of mouth.
It’s worth the effort
Instagram is a great social media platform to present your company and to connect with other people.
However, to be successful in increasing the number of your Instagram followers, you need to focus on finding the ideal follower that will have a positive impact on your business.
Remember that quality comes before quantity. A smaller, dedicated fan base is more likely to generate more sales than a larger fan base with random followers who are not concerned with your business, purpose, or content.
It will take time and effort to implement all of the above into your social media strategy, but the results will be well worth the wait!
