I've been experimenting with IG growth for around 4 years as a way to grow my various business pursuits prior to starting my growth agency and thought I'd share some basic tips that a lot of you may know, but if not hopefully you find these useful:
Buying fake followers DOES NOT work. All it does is artificially inflate your following and makes your posts look even worse because your apparent engagement rate will be extremely poor which makes your account appear less authentic.
Using hashtags is very important. Contrary to what most people think, I recently found out that putting the bulk of your hashtags in the comments actually increases your chances of being shadow banned.
Choose a niche. Unless you are building a personal brand encompassing all aspects of your life with the hope to be seen as more of a lifestyle influencer, don't clutter your feed with things that don't fit in the same sort of category.
BE ACTIVE IN YOUR COMMUNITY! Say your given niche is surfing, you should be spending time going through the relevant hashtags, finding posts and liking/commenting/following these people so that you become noticed by more people who could potentially visit your profile and give you a follow.
Find other people in your niche with a similar/slightly higher following than you and ask for some sort of collaboration where you both advertise each other to each other's following.
Post frequently in IG stories, once again, the more you engage, the more you will grow.
If you can switch to a business account so you can access your account analytics. Understanding optimal times to post can have a large effect on engagement rates
Lastly, put effort into your posts. Make sure you take decent quality photos/videos (most smartphones have great cameras these days, no excuse to upload things that look like they were shot with a potato). I hope this helps some of you, if anyone of you are seriously wanting to increase their following PM me and I can give you more tailored advice/suggestions etc
Social Media Growth
Growing on Instagram is a full time job, not kidding. Here are a few rules you can follow.
The first 60min after you post is vital to the reach you will generate.
Don't use overcrowded hashtags with 10million posts. Your post will go under. Use hashtag tools to find your best ones and then pick certain ones that are relevant to your content of the post.
What you need to do in the first 60min:
Like, comment and follow the top 9 post of each hashtag you used. Your comment should not be generic but fitted to the content
Reply to any comment you may get on your post
Engage with the audience of your fellow competitors (like comment & follow)
Use Geolocation and you guessed it like, comment and follow
Try to find an engagement group, mostly found on Facebook. This is a group of people that all post content in the same niche. There set times where everyone engages with each other posts, to get the highest engagement.
Post 2x times per day and post stories with hashtags.
Find 3 accounts that are doing the same thing you are and copy their strategy (hashtags, people they are following etc.) Join an engagement group so you get comments from accounts that have 10k + followers . It that way you will hit explore page and boost your engagement. When using hashtags, use low, medium and high hashtags so you rank on small hashtags, than medium and that high.
Final Review Instagram growth strategy.
In 2019, you can not grow a big following in Instagram with old and historical strategies like
Reposting Engaging content from Influencers of the Platforms
Putting in Beautiful Images on your IG Timeline
Following and Unfollowing people of your Niche
commenting on posts based on hashtags and Interest-based IG Profiles.
All these Strategies still help you to get your feet wet on IG, but because so many people are following them hence it can not help you to stand out from the crowd. One thing must be understood, to become an Influencer, one must build an Authority in such a way that people want to listen to you. In order to do that, you can try the following
Create Infographics about a DIY Crafts for your Niche and post them on your IG Profile. People in your niche would love to follow you to learn these Crafts.
Put yours behind the scenes stories in the form of images and videos on your IG Page Story Section. This will help people to connect with your lifestyle and help you in building trust about your authority.
Convert your Profile to IG Business Profile. Why? because having a Business profile will help you in many aspects like it will allow you to put your links for your stories once you cross 10K IG Followers, it will allow you to see the insights for each of your posts
From the Posts, Insights that you get from step 3, find out What kind of posts(Images, Infographics, Videos, Memes, etc.) are getting maximum engagement and what is the best time to post on your IG profile.
Leverage the Power of Videos in the Form of IG Timeline Videos, IG Story Videos, and IGTV Longform videos.
Leverage Proper Hashtags to make your posts searchable in the IG Platform.
Engage with your followers and spend some time on the platform. Do not try to Automate everything as the IG Algorithm is looking to Shadow ban profiles that are using automation bots.
Use Location Tagging and People Tagging so that your followers can connect with the relevance and the context of the post more easily.
Maintain Consistency in All your Content like Brand Logo, Brand Color, Time of Post, Number of Post in every week.
That should be it. Follow these steps and you should see momentum on your IG Profile in terms of followers, engagement, post reach, and overall profile growth.
Social Media
Join our Community, All Small Things Go Big, Starting With You.
