Instagram is pretty much the unofficial home of influencers among all social media platforms – for over 10 years, this highly visual app has attracted brands and creators alike who are looking to promote themselves, promote their products, and otherwise share whatever their hearts desire to audiences all over the world.
Of course, for that to be viable, you need to build up a solid foundation of followers, but doing so isn’t always easy. As trends and algorithms change, it can be challenging to crack the code and figure out how to authentically build up a following of your own to make your influencer dream a reality. That’s why we’ve come up with this simple collection of tips, tricks, and things to avoid to help you learn how to get more Instagram followers and grow your social media account.
Why are followers so important on Instagram?
This might sound like a redundant topic to go over, but it’s important to understand exactly what value followers bring to your Instagram account to further understand the importance of why organically, and authentically establishing an audience is crucial to your growth.
Increased visibility: When you have more followers, your posts are more likely to be seen by a larger audience. In turn, this audience will often engage with and share your content either to stories or directly with friends and peers on the platform. This means that visibility grows exponentially based on active and engaged followers, which can greatly help you reach new people and grow your personal profile.
Influencer marketing: Brands often look to partner with influencers who have a large following on Instagram, or at the very least, one with a high ratio of engagement to follower count. If you have a significant number of followers, you’ll stand out more to brands and unlock the potential to monetize your account by partnering with various companies for sponsored posts or collaborations.
Social proof: In line with the above, having a large following on Instagram can help establish credibility and social proof – but that doesn’t mean just in a brand context. People are more likely to trust and follow someone who has a significant number of followers already, so in essence, growing your following can lead to a snowball effect in which others are more inclined to follow you as well.
Engagement: Followers will be directly shown your content in their timelines and can then engage with these posts by liking, commenting, and sharing them. This can help increase your reach and visibility on the platform, and further boost your metrics and analytics to make your account more appealing to brands and others looking to partner up.
Now that we’ve established just a few of the reasons growing an Instagram following is something you should consider prioritizing, we can go over some of the methods you can adopt to get you well on your way.
1. Get your bio on point
Your bio is the first thing that anyone will see when they click on your profile, so be sure to set it up wisely!
Pick a profile picture that accurately represents you, and use your limited character count to effectively communicate who you are and what you’re here for. Instagram profile categories make it easier to convey your specific field (i.e. Athlete, Gaming Video Creator, Personal Blog, etc.) so be sure to choose one that best fits you.
You can also use your bio to add relevant links and action buttons such as email, so use all the tools at your disposal to create a well-rounded bio that differentiates you from the crowd.
2. Make sure you’re not just focusing on the pictures
As we’ve mentioned, Instagram is a platform that relies heavily on visuals – from pictures to videos to stories, it’s all about what people see that keeps them coming back. Therefore, it’s vital that you make sure your Instagram feed is good on an array of fronts.
While it may be tempting to think that all you need is a really high-quality photo or video, the truth is that you should also ensure that you hit the mark in terms of your captions, especially as more and more creators find ways to cleverly utilize them to keep audiences engaged. Don’t be afraid to go all out and differentiate yourself with your words to get audiences interested in you and your content; they’re a great way to give more insight into yourself in a way that images or videos can’t, and can also be used to convey or communicate important messaging. Just remember that Instagram doesn’t show the entire caption all at once, so be sure to grab the reader’s attention right from the first or second line to ensure they stick around to read more.
3. Establish a niche and stick to it
On that note, understanding your particular audience or niche will be highly important to structuring your content, so ensure that you keep your posts focused on the audience you want to grow.
While some bigger creators can get away with switching up their approach with every post, most smaller creators will need to dig deep and focus on their particular niche to ensure that those audiences keep coming back for more and don’t lose interest when they see posts that don’t relate to them.
What some creators with multiple interests end up doing is creating multiple accounts to cater to different audiences – for example, you might have a fitness page, a personal/casual page, and one for your small business or venture that is separate from these. This way, you can cultivate dedicated audiences that are invested in each of your interests. It also means that engagement for each account will be higher as you won’t be diluting your content and only appealing to a small portion of your total followers with each post.
4. Take advantage of trending formats
Instagram has evolved from being just a picture-sharing platform, to one with videos, to 24-hour stories, and now TikTok-inspired Reels; what this means for creators is that audiences now have a greater variety of content to choose from, and will seek out those accounts that create content that appeals to them most. Algorithms also play a part here, as they will promote the content that Instagram wants audiences to see.
To keep yourself relevant to potential followers, you should adopt trending practices such as Reels, but be sure to keep creating different types of content to latch onto audiences who may prefer different formats. For example, you could ensure to post static images every now and then, create Reels in between, and update your audiences more casually and frequently in your stories to keep yourself consistently appearing in their timelines in different ways. This will also expose you to newer audiences who might be enjoying different content and who can discover you this way.
5. Maintain a solid posting schedule
Platforms such as Instagram aren’t too kind to creators who don’t post on a regular basis, so you should try to get content up on your grid regularly enough to stay on the timelines of your existing followers and make sure that your account doesn’t get deprioritized in the algorithm.
You could do this by posting at the right times to capitalize on when your followers are likely to be online (this will be highly timezone-dependent), or by building up a good backlog of content to ensure you always have something to post for times when you might be feeling a little low on ideas or creativity.
6. Use relevant hashtags to boost discoverability
A staple at this point, hashtags are key for discoverability and searching on social media platforms. Using the right hashtags for the job will aid your target audience in finding your content based on their interests, and can also help to associate you with content that might already be grabbing the attention of followers in your niche.
Specific hashtags are also very important when taking part in trends or challenges, as these are highly time-sensitive events that can push Instagram followers your way if you ensure to tag your content correctly.
7. Don’t be tempted to buy followers
With bots becoming more and more common on many social media platforms, they’ve also become increasingly cheap for users to purchase in the form of followers. This route is a no-no for a few reasons.
Firstly, Instagram actively purges and deprioritizes accounts that engage in fraudulent behavior, so you’ll be seen as a major red flag on their platform if you do this. Secondly, follower count isn’t the only metric that matters to brands nowadays, and having such a large proportion of your followers made up of bots will cause devastating harm to your engagement metrics as a proportionally low number of your followers will actually be commenting and liking your posts.
Even if you take part in or utilize engagement pods for fake likes and comments, this can easily be vetted out using modern online tools, so it will only further harm your potential with brands for collaborations, for example. Bottom line: being authentic is the best way to get free Instagram followers in the long run!
8. Try out paid advertising
Instagram has a host of advertising opportunities available for creators to use, so don’t neglect them if you want to expose yourself to new audiences. While advertising can often be thought of as an expensive route, the truth is that Instagram ads are flexible and can be tailored to a wide variety of budgets starting at just a few dollars – so if you have a great piece of content or something you feel will resonate with audiences, and you just need a way to reach them, don’t be afraid to give paid advertising a go.
9. Collaborate with other like-minded creators
Another organic method of reaching new audiences to garner a greater Instagram following is to work with other creators in your niche. This could be done in a few ways, but some popular methods include running joint giveaways or crossposting content to introduce your respective audiences to one another.
For example, some beauty and makeup influencers will do a challenge or trend and post looks by both themselves and the artist they collaborate with, and vice versa – this could encourage your audience to follow them, and thus their audiences to follow you.
This approach should not be done too often, as such collaborations or joint giveaways can be seen as spammy if conducted frequently, but doing it in an authentic manner only with influencers you truly like and believe in can grant great exposure for everyone involved.
Conclusion
Growing your social media account can be a tricky task, but it’s worth pursuing if you aim to reach a wide audience or potentially grow your account into an influencer-worthy platform to start working with brands on collaborations in the future. While it won’t necessarily make you the most followed person on Instagram, we hope that this article has given you some insight into how to get more followers on Instagram and that you’ll be able to use these tips to organically grow your platform.
