7 Tips to Grow Instagram Followers
After the heat brought to businesses by Facebook, Instagram has started getting businesses attention. It is quite popular with young adults that around 90% of its users are younger than the age of 35. Its 300 million active daily users and high user engagement levels are the reasons that no business should miss out. Growing Instagram followers has become a subject as important as growing Facebook fans. Here are seven tips for businesses that want to increase their Instagram followers.
Post Regularly and Consistently
It’s always recommended for a social media account holder to post on a regular basis. By doing so, your followers will expect contents from you. Data from Buffer indicates those more successful accounts has a higher posting frequency which could be an angle to work on. Although generate a certain amount of content to post consistently is necessary, it’s important for you to know quality always comes first instead of quantity. Tools like Latergramme and Schedugram can be very helpful for scheduling posts.
Hashtag, Hashtag, and Hashtag
It’s so important that we have to repeat it 3 times! Using hashtags is essential for Instagram users, including businesses, to gain exposure and followers. In fact, hashtags might be best option for you to have a fast following on Instagram. Studies show that posts with at least one hashtag has an average 12.6% more engagement and a study from TrackMaven also found Instagram posts with 11+ hashtags have the highest interactions. The limit of using hashtags is 30 per post so you don’t need to be shy of using hashtags.
If want to know more about finding the right hashtags to grow followers, you can see 3 ways to find the right hashtags
Share UGC and Build Community
Sharing User Generated Content is more than just about sharing. It’s one of the many ways for a business to know what it is in customers’ mind and interact with them. It also poses an opportunity for businesses to design branded hashtags like #____Stories and #____Community to build an advocate community. Please bear in mind that sharing UGC and building community take time and a continuous effort. Feel free to put a Call to Action line in the post from time to time to keep the interactions flow.
Ask Users to Tag a Friend
Campaigns of tagging people work well on Facebook. They also work well with a similar mechanism on Instagram. Utilizing the ties between people can expose your business to a wider audience who is likely to share a similar interest, taste, and background, from your existing followers to the potential followers that know your existing followers. In other words, those tagged friends have a higher possibility to be someone interested in your brand that you have a better shot to converting them into real customers.
Host Photo Competitions
Photo competition never gets old. With incentives, the fun, and excitements, it’s hard for Instagram users to resist. Follow your Instagram would be the first requirement for join the competition. If the non-followers want to participate in, don’t forget to remind them to follow your Instagram account to be eligible to join the fun. The pros of hosting a photo competition don’t end here. It can increase the traffic to your digital assets, enhance followers’ engagement level, and allow you to acquire more UGC for their Instagram.
Promote Your Instagram on Each Digital Assets
It’s essential to cross promote your Instagram account on all the digital platforms you have, since your Facebook fans or followers from other platforms might not be your Instagram followers. Website, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and etc., are the opportunities that you can grab and use. Instagram has made it easy to share the images to other social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr that could help you gain more exposure. Statistics from Buzzsumo showed the engagement is 23 % more for images posted to Facebook via Instagram than the natively published ones. Apart from simply sharing the images on other digital platforms, you can also add your Instagram feed to your Facebook Page and embedded it in your website.
Be Social
Have you ever wondered why Social media is called SOCIAL MEDIA? At the end of the day, it’s all about building a relationship with your followers. Spend some time viewing followers posts to know what’s happening and try to leave some comments to interact with them. In addition, you can also invest some time to search other users in your target audience and like/comment on their photos to bring the brand to them and increase the odds for them to follow you.
These are just some tips for your Instagram practice. Feel free to contact us if you have any question.
