Instagram has become more than just a social media platform that lets you connect with friends and family, share vacation photos, or upload pet videos. It has grown to become a powerhouse of digital marketing for brands and businesses alike.
Meanwhile, this seemingly non-influential social platform has spearheaded the careers of countless creators who choose to take hold of their content, account followers, and monetize it. These Instagram users are putting this into action in a variety of ways. Some open businesses online, some become influencers, some gain traction through user-generated content and much more. Whichever way you monetize your account, you must be Instagram famous, be seen, and get lots of followers – the more, the better. However, you must also capture customer loyalty and retain followers.
For more on this, keep reading.
3 Key Strategies to Get Instagram Success & More Followers
Before we head into teeny tiny details of how to increase your followers, this blog post is all about building the count with quality and organically. Why? Because it will enable you to capture an audience that matters to your brand value while providing benefits in return to your customers/audiences. Growing your audience authentically yields better results for your business’s brand awareness, revenue, and loyal customer base. Let’s move on with the first strategy.
1. Optimize Your Account
The first step you need to know is, whether your business profile is in its optimal condition.
You should be asking some self-assessing questions, such as:
· Does your profile offer value?
· Can your audience find it?
· Is the username easy to search and read?
· Is the profile making the audience click?
So, how do you optimize your profile?
Choose a Professional Profile Picture: Your photo is your brand identity on Instagram, and that should count. It can be a picture for an influencer or a logo for a business, but it must resound with your brand image. Keyword Placement:
Secondly, your profile must be discovered. This can be done with the accurate placement of keywords in your username, handle, and bio. For a search-friendly username, keep it the same as your brand name. Don’t make it very long, and it should be recognizable. Your bio should have well-researched keywords according to your niche. This will make your account pop up when similar search terms are searched.
Lastly, it is important to make an optimal and informative bio. This should resonate with the value and brand perception that you want to give. You can add keywords related to your product, niche, services, and industry.
Optimize Story Highlights: It is important to make your profile attractive. For this, you can make story highlights and keep updating each specific one, catering to different things, for example, “Things to know”, “menu/pricing”, “Key features”, “About us”, or “Q&A”. You can also post about events, deals, discounts, and anything relevant to your business/ brand. Story highlights let stories posted live on in them, and people can refer back to them when they need to know something about your business, profile, and niche. Location & Relevant Links: To optimize your profile, it is important to add your location and relevant links. This pushes your profile higher on the search results. This will then show up to more people in the area.
This is important for your business to drive traffic to the physical store, the website, or other sales pages, such as Etsy. You can also add other links that will drive traffic to your other pages, social accounts, and website.
2. Develop Content Strategy
Instagram success does not happen overnight, it may take a while for traffic to be diverted to your main profile and other platforms (can be social media or your website). But the next step to optimize your account is to keep your content updated, fresh, and resonating with your audiences. When this is nailed, your engagement increases, and this improves your overall community and follower count.
Let’s dive into some ways this can be made possible:
Schedule Posting in Advance: The Instagram algorithm picks the latest and freshest content. This makes posting on time an important aspect of engagement. You can use tools that can help to schedule posts in advance, such as Buffer, Sprout Social, SocialPilot, SocialBee, and many more.
This also lets you be the first few who cover a specific topic or item and reach audiences faster than your competitors. You can aim to post 3-4 times a week and have at least 2 reels in a month.
For content management and posting schedules, you can rely on content calendars. With that, your content will provide the right value at the right time. Moreover, this will bring control, and your page will be managed better to drive results.
To keep your content from lagging with advance posting, your tools and socials need to be connected to high-speed internet. For this, you can depend on Verizon Internet to provide you with optimal internet speed and a lag-free experience.
This is done because not all providers work best or offer services in every area within a state or city. And, if you’re a creator, you must have an assured internet connection at all times. Some providers even offer hotspot connection with their services, which is great for when you’re on the go.
Build a Strong Brand Aesthetic: Keeping a consistent persona and image helps you resonate in the customer’s mind and remember you. Some key steps to build a brand persona and aesthetic are:
– To stand out, have a strong, distinguished persona and image
– Maintain profile colors, aesthetics, and posting style
– Branding is an important element, not to be taken lightly
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Bonus Other Methods to Optimize Content: v Short-form video Content (e.g., reels) v Engage with Present Followers (Carousels, Reels, going live, be talkative, be present, and take positive feedback of what your followers say) v Go Live on Instagram (e.g., host virtual events, Q&A sessions, etc.) |
3. Collaborate with Fellow Influencers & Brands
This third key strategy lets you gain more reach and thus more followers. You can team up with fellow influencers for your reels, videos, and other content. For example, teaming up with a fellow makeup artist to follow a theme for Halloween with both taking an equal screen time. Or, you can collaborate with other brands that match your niche or complement your products/services. For instance, you can find brands that compliment what you’re selling or branding on, such as creating user-generated content because you make amazing reels that resonate with a wide audience.
When you add this strategy to your mix, do understand that your partnership is a fit and would not offend anyone for their class, ethnicity, and race, among other social upkeeps.
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Bonus Other Strategies to Implement: v Engage with the audience and build relationships: You can create highlights that talk about your brand persona and storytelling elements, make meaningful conversations, and bring on brand advocates (UGC creators or true-to-face reviews). v Utilize Tags and hashtags: Dumping tags won’t count anymore, so make them short, meaningful, and keyword terms. v Use geo-tagging to attract locals: helps search for top posts and stories in specific locations. |
The better your target audience is able to relate with your content, the more you will be seen, appreciated, and followed – who knows, you might get a boost on word of mouth. This is all for the 3 key strategies, and while there is so much to account for, it is a step-by-step process. But with these basics fulfilled, you will achieve a greater audience reach and follower count, and that matters.
