Instagram is home to more than 800 million users out of which over 500 million users access the app every single day. Instagram, being a highly targeted visual marketing channel, has become a platform of the world’s most engaged audience.
That being said, one of the biggest challenges of the day is to build real and authentic following on your social media channels. Roughly 48 million Instagram users are unauthentic. A follower base that mainly consists of fake inactive accounts is not beneficial for your business in any way. If used strategically, Instagram is a platform that could help you build a loyal audience that would absolutely aid in growing your business exponentially.
It is, therefore, extremely significant to focus on building real and organic audience. Here’s how you can increase engagement and gain a vast following:
1. Consistency is the Key
Posting frequently directly affects the follower growth and engagement rates. If you’ve users following you, the last thing you’d want to do is not post regularly. With the Instagram’s algorithmic timeline, posts having a good engagement rate have a higher chance of appearing on the top of your follower’s feed. Being consistent is the most efficient way to get likes and more followers and most importantly to be seen!
2. Active Hour equals Higher Engagement
Chances of engagement increase greatly when content is posted during the active hours. Keeping in mind your target audience and location; carry out a research on the best times to post. This could be done using Social Media Analytics tools or Instagram Analytics which are available for free on business accounts. Instagram Analytics provide insights which help significantly in planning your posting plan. Follow the schedule that best suits your business to drive higher engagement rates.
3. Videos, Live Videos & Stories
Increase video content on your account as the average engagement rate for videos is growing faster than that for the images. Use Live Video feature in order to engage your followers and appear at the front of their stories feed. More than 250 million users view Instagram Stories on a daily basis. Make use of Instagram Story features such as polls and sliders to up your engagement game and maximize your reach in the least possible time.
4. Quality Hashtags
Hashtags may be widely seen on other social media channels, but they hold a great relevance when it comes to Instagram specifically. Hashtag is a prominent feature of Instagram and due to its growing popularity, following a hashtag is now made possible. Using hashtags correctly prominently influences follower growth. Research must be carried out in order to use the most appropriate and targeted hashtags. Using the most-popular or trending hashtag is not necessarily equivalent to ‘’ the right hashtag’’ as your post gets lost and doesn’t gain the attention you aim for. Your hashtag must be relevant to the nature of your content, location and most importantly your target audience. Right hashtag always results in increasing your reach and helps you in being discovered!
Collaborating with the right influencers that match your brand’s personality and the ones who have a dedicated fan base helps extensively in growing your followers. It helps your message to reach to an audience that may not have direct access to your brand but are most likely to be influenced by it and fall in the category of potential buyers or buyers for that matter.
6. Run Contests
Hosting a contest is a definite way of increasing engagement and gaining more followers on Instagram. Audience always love the idea of giveaways. It makes them keener in following you to keep an eye for what more you have to offer. Having contests where people are asked to tag a friend helps you bring new audience to visit your page whom you could win over as a follower. It considerably helps in increasing engagement, reach and brand awareness.
7. User-Generated Content
Sharing user generated content is another way of growing your follower base. Sharing content that reflects your brand and giving a shout out to the original creator helps build a community and increase engagement. Users feel privileged to get featured and a relationship of trust and goodwill is instantly built.
8. Cross-Share
Share your Instagram posts on other channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr to redirect audience to your Instagram page. Posts shared on Facebook via Instagram receive more engagement than the ones published natively. You can add social media buttons to your blogs and websites to redirect traffic to your Instagram.
9. Be Visually Captivating
Having a distinct photo editing style and feed design helps to set your brand apart from others. Developing a visually strong brand helps your audience in identifying you and associating you with certain visual characteristics which makes your brand more memorable. If you carefully plan out what your page looks like, your followers would be interested to have an overall look of your feed and would visit your profile much more often if it’s made appealing.
10. Monitor your Account
It’s very important to keep an eye on the gain and loss of followers and how well your content is performing. To do so, you can use Social Media Analytics or Instagram Analytics for business profiles which provides valuable insights on how many people visit your profile, how many people does your content reach, what are your most engaging posts and statistics regarding your followers. It’s essential to test your content so that you may replicate similar nature of posts that do well and receive more engagement. Analyse what’s working for you and what’s not and strengthen your further strategies based on these results.
Last but not the least; keep your Instagram community happy by being authentic and posting content that fascinates your followers. Invest time in developing strategies keeping the aforementioned points in mind and build great audience and even better experiences!