Your goal in building a brand whether it’s personal or a company is to have lots of followers and an audience that is ready to buy what you are selling. Having 10,000 followers on Instagram is a common social media milestone that a lot of people are trying to work towards when building a brand.
Once you have 10k followers, Instagram will make it easier for you to get people to your website via Stories with the swipe up to link feature.
However some are using a trick on their social media marketing strategy, they are purchasing potential followers in the hopes that they’ll get at least a portion of these people to pay attention to their account. But in some cases, doing so can lead to poor quality traffic being directed to your website, because not all of your purchased followers are actively engaging with your brand. Remember fake followers equal fake sales.
It is much safer to grow your followers organically. Engagement on your brand will be much higher because all of your followers are active, members of your target audience will be sharing your content, and you’ll have more opportunities to convert or nurture qualified leads that are interested in what you’re selling. But how can you gain followers organically? Below are some tips.
Create Engaging Content
People tend to keep on browsing without stopping on the content unless they found something interesting. To catch your audience’s attention on Instagram, the first rule is to create engaging content. The more engaging your content is, the more likely people will share it. Instagram users are engaged and love to share and comment on photos and videos that resonate with them.
Schedule Your Posts
You can always look for analytics to know what time it has high engagement. By doing this, you will know what’s the best time to post. The key is posting at the right time. After you’ve gathered fresh and engaging content, the next step is to schedule your posts for one week to one month—depending on how far out you like to plan. There are free tools you can use on scheduling posts; some of them are Hootsuite, Later, Sprout Social, Tailwind, and many others.
Follow Your Competitors’ Followers
It’s ok to follow your competitors’ followers. Those people are your target market because they already follow your competitors which means that they’re interested in your industry and likely what you’re sharing as well. You can also leave likes and comment on them to have more engagements. Ideally, many of these followers will like you what you’re sharing and follow you back—making it a simple way to organically increase your Instagram followers.
Join an Engagement Group
“Instagram Engagement groups are group conversations within Instagram and also on other platforms. In a typical Instagram engagement group, each member lets the group know when they’ve published a new post to Instagram. This is usually done through a group of Instagram DM. Then, each member of the group must like and/or comment on that person’s post as soon as they can.
The bigger the group is, the faster you’ll grow your followers. Groups are most effective if accounts are in the same niche and preferably have a huge following. What’s best about this engagement groups is that they can easily like and comment immediately after the new post is uploaded. This makes it easier to get featured on the Instagram Explore Page, giving making it easier to organically increase your Instagram followers.
They say “Magic happens when you get to 10k followers on Instagram”.
People take you seriously and recognize your expertise. Instagram unlocks special features for your account and paid opportunities are within your grasp
There are plenty of tips on the Internet on how to grow an Instagram account. However, many of them work with bigger accounts and won’t work well with a few hundreds of followers.
The first thousand followers on any social media are usually the hardest ones because people are barely paying attention to the small accounts.
How you will get your first 1000 engaged followers on Instagram? Here are some additional tips.
- Complete your BIO
There are two parts what you can take advantage of when you create your profile:
- Your Username.
- Your Name.
They both can appear in the Instagram search result. In this case, if you create a brand around your name, then your Username should be your name.
The rest of your BIO isn’t searchable. However, give the introduction to who you are and what you do, so people will get to know you more through it.
- Connect to your friends
Follow people who you know. Search through your Facebook and Contact list. They will get the notification about your follow and may follow you back. They are your first followers.
- Look for your audience
Look for other accounts, which serve your audience. Not your only your competitors. But those who focused on their posts on people who you want to attract.
If you are a designer of kid’s clothes, then accounts for moms, kid’s training centers, kid’s events, or other kid’s fashion accounts may fit your audience criteria.
Find the accounts, which post on a regular basis and have a good engagement with their content.
Go to their profile. Comment on their posts. Follow their followers and interact with those new people. You need to get their attention and get connected before they will be willing to buy from you.
- Communication is the key
The more people engage with your post, the higher it appears in their feed.
Your posts are also competing with each other. This way, the post, which got more engagement, shows first than the one with less engagement.
- Post content that your audience resonates with
Treat your social media as a high-standard online edition. Every time before you tap the ‘Post’ button ask yourself if it fits your social media ‘magazine’ and would you engage with this post? Is this worth sharing? If the answer is ‘No’ or you doubt if you would engage with the post, then the post should be reconsidered.
- Be consistent
Be consistent in your posting even if it will be just a few times per week. Pick a comfortable schedule for yourself. Don’t try to run a marathon from the first day or you will get burned out fast. When you post regularly, you consistently get to your follower’s radar, so they always remember to check in on your account.
- Start a conversation
If you want people to start the communication on your feed, first goto their account and comment on their feed to get the conversation started.
- Use the right hashtags
Hashtags are what make your Instagram content discoverable.
Search for relevant hashtags for the topic(s) you post. Hashtags help you to be discovered by other people. Hashtags can be categorized as:
- low performing hashtags, (less than 100k)-
- medium performing, 10 (100k-999k posts),
- high performing hashtags 5-10(1m up posts).
Pick those, which have a number of images of about 500,000 or less. Those search results update is slower. You can also add 1-3 top hashtags to get the ‘quick’ engagement for the post for the first few minutes.
- Post videos and use Instagram Stories
There are two ways of using videos on Instagram: on the main feed or Instagram Stories
Share an update about a new blog post or the limited sales. Use the Instagram Stories Live feature to connect with your followers from everywhere. Vacation? Conference? Meeting? Stream it right from there.
Ready to take your Instagram account to the next level? Work with the experts at Social Sensei to help pair your business with the right growth plan to help you gain real Instagram followers, increase brand exposure, and boost your credibility. Dial 888-444-9144 to talk to one of our experts today or click here to schedule a FREE 15-minute consultation with us.
