Instagram is a community that you should get involved with. Find people posting interesting photos, follow their accounts, and engage with their content. This is a natural way to draw attention to your profile, make yourself popular with the community, and be inspired by the content of others.
This gives you two advantages: First, people may look at your profile and follow you if they see that you've done the same. (That's why it's important to already have good posts on your profile before you start interacting with others.) Second, the latest posts from the people you follow appear on your newsfeed for you to like or comment on.
As you make your mark on Instagram, show appreciation to your followers by replying to their comments, following them, and engaging with their posts.
Cross-promote with other users with a target group similar to yours.
Once you've established a good relationship with the people behind the accounts who have a similar audience to yours, you can support each other by promoting each other. Try to keep the cross-promotional content—particularly captions—as natural as possible. It shouldn't be spam! Also, be selective: you don't have to support everyone!
Run contests on Instagram.
You can also increase your reach and the interaction rate with your photos with competitions. Post a photo that promotes a contest and encourage people to follow your account and like or comment on a photo to enter check now.
You can add a UGC (User-Generated Content) element to the contest. People have to post a photo themselves with a certain hashtag and follow your account. In this example, you can see a post from real estate company Next Step Reality promoting a UGC contest on the company's Instagram account.
Make your profile easy to find and easy to follow.
Place a "Follow" button on your home page, About Us page, and other places on your website. You can create a “badge” here that links to your Instagram account. Make sure you're signed in with the correct account when creating them. This is what one of the badge options looks like:
If your brand has actual, non-virtual locations, you can gain followers by handing out good old flyers and letting people know you have an Instagram account.
Also, you should promote your Instagram account on your other social media accounts. People who already follow you on Facebook and Twitter will also follow you on Instagram. Let these followers know that you are also active on Instagram and add a link to your Instagram profile to your profiles and posts on other social media accounts so they can easily follow you.
So try it: create a profile and start posting, experimenting, and promoting your account. You can only build a follower base on Instagram after some time. But the better your target group receives your Instagram account, the higher the quality of your followers.
Write great captions that people will love to share.
Photos and videos are the most important part of your posts on Instagram. But your captions also play an important role. They are integral to your contribution - the cherry on the cake. Consistently great captions can do wonders: they humanize your brand, get you more followers, your content gets shared, and you get more exposure.
My colleague Ryan Bonnici once told me he loves Frank Bod's Instagram because of the captions: "The funny captions are so addictive." The caption for a photo of a gold chain on the @frank_bod account reads: "Baby, I can't give you jewelry, but I can give you the nicest cleavage to wear." #letsbefranch."
That sounds individual and personal, and the cheeky hashtag #letsbefrank has now become the flagship of such posts. Fans of Frank Bod use the hashtag to post photos of themselves with the brand's products, a great way to engage and identify with the brand.
To get your photos shared more often and motivate your followers to engage, you can also ask questions in your captions or add some call-to-action. For example, write, "Double tap if you find this funny" or "Share your own story in the comments." In the example below, we posted a picture of a latte to our @Hubspot account and asked our followers to tag the colleague they like to have coffee with the most.
Use relevant hashtags to attract more followers.
Let's take a quick look at hashtags. Hashtags on Instagram combine posts from users who aren't already connected into a single stream. When you use relevant hashtags, your posts will be seen by a broader audience, not just people who already follow you and know your brand.
Hashtags are most effective when used as specifically and sparingly as possible. Try to use up to three hashtags per post. Don't use "a like for a like" hashtags like #like4like or #like4likes. It's a cheap strategy that will only get you low-quality followers anyway.
Research what hashtags are used in your niche or industry to determine which hashtags are used to engage your target audience. The best way to do this is to use the search field in the Instagram app (the magnifying glass icon). When you search for a hashtag, you'll see a list of related hashtags at the top of your screen. For example, if I search #inboundmarketing, I get relevant hashtags like #digitalmarketing, #internetmarketing, and so on.
Get more Instagram followers with the “Go live with a friend” feature
Live videos are pretty hot stuff in general. Whether on Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram.
However, a pretty awesome feature on Instagram allows you to go live with a friend. And this is completely independent of whether you are in the same place.
The Instagram Geotagging Hack – Use locations smarter to get more Instagram followers
Very interesting: the feature has been around for ages, and Instagram offers it to you with every upload. But far too few people use it.
Or they need to use it more cleverly!
No law on Instagram says you can only geotag the exact location you are in.
Of course, you can tag your Instagram post with any place imaginable. And that's where this hack comes in.
For geotagging, you must know that all places have a different search volume in the Instagram search. It's logical.
