5 top tips to grow your Instagram audience
Instagram is a pictorial-based social media platform that offers businesses opportunities to increase their website traffic, generate sales and grow an engaged audience.
If your business is new to Instagram and you’re finding it hard to increase your followers and grow your community, it could be time to start considering what you can do to engage more people and grow your followership. After all, the larger your audience, the greater your engagement score. And we all know, engagement is the holy grail of effective social media practice.
Growing your audience organically is the best way to create a lasting relationship with your followers. Some businesses buy their followers who are often fake, just for the vanity metrics they provide. But Instagram is on to this too, so it will quickly remove those profiles that include very little interaction with other profiles.
The issue of vanity is a big one where social media is concerned. Too often the worth of a social media manager is measured by how many likes and followers they can achieve for their client's social media accounts, but that is completely wrong. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have on a profile if your engagement is nil or you’re getting virtually no referred visits to your website or conversions such as enquiries or sales then what is the point in it all?
To help you grow your Instagram followers, here are five tips to help you:
1. Optimise your Instagram account
Before you even start to think about how you can grow your audience, the first thing you must consider is optimising your Instagram account. Does your profile have a bio? Your brand’s bio is effectively like your homepage. The next things to consider are as follows:
Image captions
Appropriate username
Relevant profile image [your brand’s logo is always a good start]
Homepage link in your bio
Without the above in check, how can visitors be sure this profile actually relates to your brand?
The last point of the link in your bio is super important as it can help re-direct visitors to your website. If you’re not sure which page to link to, why not create a dedicated Instagram landing page for visitors from this profile to land? Offering a cohesive experience where the visitor is shown relevant content that links back to your latest Instagram posts is a good idea.
Image Credit: https://www.brandwatch.com/
On the subject of usernames, you should try and keep your username as close to your brand name as possible. After all, if your Instagram account username does not align with your brand name or indeed the username you might use on other social media accounts, it could make finding your Instagram profile tricky. Avoid using special characters, hyphens and underscores if you can help it.
2. Organise your content with a content calendar
One of the best ways to increase your followership is to post consistently and frequently. Posting random content at different times will create confusion and may even put people off following your page. Give them what they want! That’s a great motto for social media use. Look at your brand’s past posts, find out which ones are getting the most engagement and publish more posts that offer a similar vibe.
Image Credit:https://blog.hubspot.com/
But how often should I post? That’s a question I often get asked by my clients. At most, you should post once a day, but I think posting every other day is probably the best frequency. And don’t forget to look at your Insights to work out the best times to post. By posting at consistent times, followers will get to know your brand as they will encounter your profile when they are online.
3. Schedule your content using a social media scheduler
To help ensure you post on time, use a social media scheduling tool. There are lots of tools on the market, but here are a few you might like to review for your own profiles:
SocialBee – Best social media scheduling tool overall. Uses content libraries and post recycling to keep things organized and save time.
Agorapulse – Best all-in-one social media management tool with publishing & scheduling functionality. Includes a free plan.
Missinglettr – Best for automating social media scheduling. Generates campaigns based on blog posts pulled from RSS feeds.
PromoRepublic – Best social media scheduling tool with a built-in content library and social calendar. Includes social inbox on higher plans.
Pallyy – Best social media scheduler for Instagram. Includes analytics and IG bio link tool. Supports other social networks for scheduling. Includes a free plan.
Image Credit: https://socialbee.io/
One of the greatest advantages of using a social media scheduler is that you can plan out content in advance. Simply create a draft post. Depending on the tool you’ve chosen to use, you might even be able to tag your draft posts by category.
You can also play around with the calendar, by dragging and dropping your posts into your preferred schedule and reviewing them collectively by the month. It’s a great way to achieve a high-level overview of your social media activity on a monthly or weekly basis.
4. Avoid fake followers
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, it’s tempting for businesses to consider buying fake followers to increase their perceived audience and value, but don’t do it! There’s a huge difference between having an audience comprising mostly of fake followers and one that you’ve taken time to nurture and grow organically.
Yes, it might look great to have a really big number of followers on your profile, but they are literally stagnant. They do not engage with your posts, they do not comment, like or share. It’s also tricking the genuine people who might be interested in your brand. If they were to find out that a lot of your audience was made up of fake followers, it could really damage your credibility and reputation.
What’s more fake followers don’t actually bring any value to your brand. They won’t talk about you and above all, they won’t buy from you. You’ll have inferior referral rates to your website and landing pages.
Image Credit: https://www.zendesk.com/
If there’s no one commenting on your posts [as your audience is made up for the most part by bots] how are you going to engage with your ideal customer base? How are you going to be able to show how helpful, caring and attentive you are, if have literally no one to talk to?
And there’s more to consider. While you’re busy responding to your customers and followers there is an additional audience reading your comments and replies and measuring up whether to buy from you in the future.
5. Encourage your colleagues to share your posts
Who better to share your company’s Instagram posts than your colleagues? They are the true advocates of your brand and know it far better than anyone else. By encouraging your people to re-share your posts, you are increasing the reach of your posts, which should help generate more followers.
If you have some budget, why not try sponsoring user-generated content to get your brand in customers’ feeds? You could also hold Instagram contests to get your brand noticed by a larger audience. These types of campaigns build social proof by showing your fans are invested enough to repost your content or create their own user-generated content.
Image Credit: https://www.instagram.com/
Another great way to increase your followership through advocate activity is to post content but tag either another company or individual [influencer] who might be interested in re-sharing your post. Don’t just tag other business profiles or individuals for the sake of it, as that can be perceived as annoying and desperate. Make sure the value of your posts counts and could be of real interest to the person or entity you are tagging.
Try out these five tips to see your Instagram followers slowly grow. We’ve got five more top tips to share with you in our next marketing masterclass series, so make sure to check in to Channel Eye on 13 October to find out what they are.
Like what you’ve read?
Jo Buchanan, the author of this blog, is the Founder and Director of TwitTwooYou Limited, a business growth strategic consultancy centred on getting brands noticed. TwitTwooYou offers a range of smart services to help businesses grow and achieve their aspirations and goals. Want to get your brand noticed? Get in touch for a free, no-obligation chat.
