7 Ways to Get Instagram Followers

How To Get Instagram Followers

Getting new followers on Instagram can be a daunting challenge, but in this blog, you will find out it is not as scary as it seems. Along the way, you will discover new tricks and tips you can use to grow your account and even business accounts. Instagram is a huge social site with tons of influencers and even more content to explore. But you will see what you can do to give yourself that advantage when it comes to getting your name out there. You’ll see what works, with advice from successful influencers that also had humble beginnings. Alright so strap in and let us get started on how to get you more Instagram followers in 7 steps.

1. Instagram Account

Before you venture forward, you must make sure that you have a fantastic Instagram bio. Like many other social media sites, your profile or bio is basically your home page. This is what most people will be exposed to when they discover you on Instagram.

First impressions are everything so let’s leave a good one. You want to have a great username, profile picture, and a brief description of yourself. A good idea for this would be listing your accolades, titles, and please include a link to your main website if you are a business. Or maybe include a link to a YouTube video of you showing off more of you. Could also include links to a sponsored products site.

So, when creating a username, try to stay away from numbers, lots of fake accounts have numbers in their names. The last thing you want when starting is to have potential new followers visiting you and noticing those numbers in your name.

That is a warning sign for most Instagram users. Stay away from special characters as well, you are not trying to have a hard-to-decrypt password as a username, now are you? You want it to be search-friendly, the name must be on point and has to make sense with your brand, this can be for both personal or business branding.

Lastly, if you have other social media accounts, try to keep the name universal between all your accounts, making it easier to discover you online.

Once you have established your Instagram bio, try to switch it up a little bit from time to time. Gives the appearance you are actively improving your homepage and try using new links to give followers something new to discover right from your homepage.

2. Consistent Style

You want to have a consistent theme with your Instagram account. What that means is the content you post now has to be similar to future posts. You are looking into the future on this one so for example if you are all about rocking the newest sneakers, and you constantly post pictures of clean sneakers, people will expect you to continue posting about sneakers in future posts. If you switch it upon them and say you start posting nothing but cat pictures, you just lost your followers and they have gone to someone else to scratch their sneaker itch.

If you keep your content in the same realm, such as the sneakers, you could say, start posting pictures of other footwear similar to sneakers or even different brands of sneakers. The point is to be consistent with your content that way you have set expectations for potential new followers.

By staying consistent you will increase your follower count even faster because you have now set a standard for yourself and set expectations for new and existing followers.

3. Cooperation

Try working with others that have a similar interest as you, the same niche. If it is a popular niche or an uncommon one, try to cooperate with others that are like-minded. Preferable with those that have a similar follower count as you or higher, since they have a larger fan base, it increases your chances of attracting new followers. Try commenting on someone else’s posts first, leave positive feedback on their content, they may take notice of you and reach out to you. The beginning of something beautiful.

This method can be applied to both personal and business accounts. Working with other businesses is mutually beneficial in increasing your follower counts and making your name known on Instagram.

You can also get an Instagram shoutout from an influencer doing an account takeover. Shoutouts are great because they almost always earn you additional followers.

Sometimes however when they give shoutouts you’ll see an increase in followers but sometimes they’ll actually “buy” followers to send your way. So be sure to write up a contract that stops them from sending fake traffic.

Furthermore, if you get a sudden increase in fake follower counts, you chance to get your Instagram account banned.

Instagram Engagement Groups

You can also join engagement groups also known as Instagram pods. This lets you find groups that have a similar niche as yours and is great to increase your followers count even faster, perfect for newer Instagram accounts. As you are browsing these pods, you will see ones that have lots of followers and be tempted to join that one, but you’ll actually get more followers by sticking with your niche group compared to one that is very general or generic.

Now there are a lot of different groups to join ranging from travel, beauty, sports, cars, and more. In these groups, it’s easier for you to get likes and followers due to people having the same interests.

For personal accounts, this can lead to an easy increase in followers and the same for business but maybe not result in sales immediately. But this will build credibility and begin to earn trust and familiarity with potential new clients.

Instagram engagement groups are great for getting likes and followers easily in the beginning and are not a long-term strategy but rather a short one, after about three weeks you will notice not as much growth in followers. But that is ok since this blog is about setting you up for both the short and long term.

Reposting Others Content

Reposting on Instagram can be an excellent way to add content to your page, National Geographics account reposts content from its users all the time to add flair to their account.

Reposting content from other users though is not so straightforward as hitting a button and adding to your account. If you want to repost something specific from another influencer you must have express consent to do so. Without it you may be hit with a copyright claim, also reposting without consent on Instagram is a violation of intellectual property.

Once you have the permission to repost someone else’s content, please give credit where credit is due. Acknowledge where you got that piece of content from and give them a shoutout. Any content you repost though has to make sense to you and your followers.

This also acts as extra security for you, giving credit to others keeps your hands clean, you do not want to do anything that will negatively impact your chances of attracting new followers.

Make sure it relates to the rest of your content and you are not asking to repost popular content for the sake of it.

Reposting On Instagram Manually

Take a screenshot of the image you want to repost.
The screenshot is then saved to your camera roll on your phone. Upload the screenshot on Instagram with the upload button.
You can then crop the image and resize it how you see fit, just don’t edit the image, you want to keep it original.
Add an attractive caption and make sure to give credit to the original content creator and to also tag them using the (@) mentions. Lastly, tap on share to repost the screenshot on Instagram

You can also ask your followers to post photos of their own onto your feed. If you have merchandise you sell, they can show off those items and it builds great credibility for you as an individual or a business.

4. Engage With Followers

Instagram, like all other social sites, is a place of interaction. You want to engage with all your followers constantly. Thank them for their support, reply to them in the comments section of posts.

Follow people who follow brands. Who is your biggest competition? By following them and interacting in their comment sections, you’ll learn what their fan base is like and learn some tips from them that way. Don’t aim for the big-time influencers, go for smaller influencers.

The reason for this is because a smaller base may not have as much brand loyalty compared to a larger one, easier for you to earn more followers. Don’t hit them with any crazy sales pitches though, this will scare them away.

If followers ask you questions try to respond promptly to them, and try not to give the same answers, give unique answers to that follower. Aim to respond to as many as humanly possible, this can make the difference between earning a new follower or none at all.

Doing so will also improve your relationship with them and it was also shown that 89% of consumers who followed them on their socials are likely to buy from that brand.

Start A Conversation

One of the best ways to get noticed on Instagram is through conversing with others. People are more drawn to visual content such as photos (68%) and video (50%) and 30% who want to engage with text photos according to research done on a 2020 Sprout Social Index.

As you engage with your followers you may even get interesting ideas from them you may not have thought of yourself.

And a good way to get engagement with others is using original, niche, and trending hashtags.

5. Hashtags To Attract Followers

As you are starting, try using tons of hashtags in the beginning. The current max number of hashtags you can include for a post on Instagram is 30. Try getting close to that number, experiment with different combinations to see which ones work and which ones do not.

Once you find ones that work for you, you can lower the number of hashtags you use, say like 5 or 10. But the best hashtags that are going to attract more followers are going to be the niche ones. The niche hashtags are going to draw that specific crowd you want to help grow your follower count. Try to stay away from generic hashtags such as #picoftheday and other ones that do not pertain to your content.

Try using all those hashtags in the first comment, your engagement will grow as well. Chances are most people will not notice it because they will be distracted tagging their friends in your post.

Include Instagram Posts In Your Blog

This applies to both personal and business blogs, you can embed your Instagram pictures into the blog posts.

If you are a make-up artist and you are giving tips on how to better apply makeup, you can include a picture from your Instagram account onto the blog to show off.

This is a good long-term plan because over time people will begin to discover both your blogs on your website and your Instagram account, netting you more followers.

Once you have a handful of followers on Instagram it’s smart to know more information about their activities.

6. Analytics

Instagram analytics is a great way to find out information about your following, things like how often they engage, new followers, unfollowers, and inactive accounts. With this information, you can shape and see how to get more followers on Instagram.

There are several Instagram analytical tools you can use out there such as Sprout Social and Socialbakers. These tools provide valid and super informative information to give you insight into your audience. And can also show the right content that could lead to more followers.

Now that you know how to check out the nitty-gritty of your Instagram traffic. This leads us to how Instagram’s algorithm works.

7. Instagram’s Algorithm

By understanding how Instagram’s algorithm works, can help earn you even more followers. So how does it work exactly?

What you see and what others see is not solely based on who you follow, but what type of accounts or posts you have liked in the past.
What you see and what they see on Instagram is a mixture of all your Instagram behaviors. Such as posts you interacted with, people you tagged in photos, and posts you liked and commented on.
Sending signals to the Instagram algorithm that gives your audience more chances to engage with your content.

Another factor is relationships, the algorithm will prioritize posts from your friends, family, and other accounts that you engaged with. Instagram will then try and calculate this relationship the moment you follow someone by showing you content and monitoring how you interact with it.

Instagram’s algorithm looks at timelines, it will look at the most recent postings you have done and show you other content creators or posts based on that as well. You can use this to your advantage to increase your reach to get more likes and followers.

If you post at peak hours when your followers are online and active, this gives you another chance of getting more likes.

Depending on how many people you follow, it will try to show you those followed accounts but not all, so try to remove any inactive accounts. If a large number of followers are inactive, this could hurt you and your account’s algorithmic ranking.

Improving Your Ranking With Instagram’s Algorithm

Use Instagram’s latest features, Instagram will give their latest features to help drive acceptance options, making it a good idea to join the latest trends.
Promote interactions with Instagram stories stickers, this encourages audience engagement, the more engagements you get the higher it will be boosted by Instagram’s algorithm.
Encourage conversations with engaging captions and comments, a painless way of doing this would be to ask your followers to share their thoughts, feelings, double-tap if they agree with something, or tag a friend in the comments section.

You know how to use Instagram’s algorithm to your advantage now, great! Let us hear some actual tips from other successful Instagram content creators.

Bonus Tips

Ladypreneur, who has over 16k followers, says if you want to increase your follower count to post as much as possible, the more users you have seen your content, the more familiar they will be with your brand, leading them to like, follow, and share.

Talia Koren, who has above 468k followers, says if you are starting with 0 followers getting to 1000 followers, which is the hardest, to not focus so much on the follower count. Instead to focus on ways you can connect with and help others to get them talking about you.

Gracie Parish, with over 41k followers, says the biggest impact on increasing her Instagram follower count was building authenticity on her blogs and creating a more authentic relationship with her followers. And to only promote brands and products she truly believed in.

These 7 steps to getting more Instagram followers plus the additional tips will put you in a powerful position to increase your influence on Instagram and to be a successful Influencer or business. It will be stressful earning new followers at first, but they will come to you in time, and please remember to have fun during your journey. Engage, be consistent, be true to yourself, and followers will come to you!