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Instagram is a great platform, but if you don’t have followers, your efforts will be futile. The more followers you have, the better your engagement will be, so if getting more followers isn’t a goal you already have, then you should make it one – ASAP.
If you’ve been working on getting more followers but aren’t seeing good results, you may feel frustrated and stuck; however, that is no reason to give up!
Here are a few strategies that you can – and should – execute to grow your following on Instagram:
Pick a Target Audience
Although you may wish that everyone would be interested in your product or service, or interested in your personal brand, the fact of the matter is, they won’t be. “Everyone” is not a target audience and trying to cater to everyone will actually cause you more trouble than it will help you. Although it can be difficult to find your target audience, taking the time to narrow your scope and start focusing on creating posts and content that a specific population will love and want to engage with will indefinitely help you grow your audience.
How? Well, when you focus on reaching a specific audience—a niche—your posts are more meaningful, more engaging, and more interesting to that audience as well as people who are just coming across you or are searching for someone like you or a business like yours.
Get to Know Them Extremely Well
Not only do you need to take the time to narrow down and hone in on your target audience, you will also need to spend the time it takes to get to know them extremely well—at least as well as you know yourself. You should know whether or not they prefer slang or professionalism, whether or not they like humor or are looking for posts that are more informative and educational. You should know where the majority likes to shop, what they like to do in their spare time, the thread count in their sheets (just kidding, but you get the idea!), and so on. Long story short, you should get to know your audience as well as you possibly can so that you can not only hit home with each post but can draw in more followers as well.
Establish a Theme
Humans are creatures of habit, and although change can be good, it seems that many of us tend to avoid it. Habit, routine, and predictability help us feel secure, and that idea can be applied on Instagram to help you get more followers as well. By establishing a theme on your Instagram account, you can help your followers know what to expect from you, and this often makes them more comfortable with you and your account – having a theme can also help you grab attention quickly!
Having a theme is important; however, It doesn’t mean that all of your photos need to be the same. What we mean by ‘theme’ is that the ideas and colors scheme are connected and recognizable. By establishing an Instagram theme, you will be able to catch the eye of more people and get more followers while simultaneously building your brand.
Get Comfortable with Hashtags
Believe it or not, hashtags can be one of the most effective tools you have on Instagram to help you grow your following. However, using hashtags ‘the right way’ isn’t always straightforward.
Instead of just throwing hashtags into your posts, take the time to consider them carefully and add not only branded hashtags but also those that are trending or relevant to the buzz happening within your industry or niche. This will help you bring more attention to your posts and pick up more followers in the process.
Get Active and Vocal
Social media is about being social, and that’s exactly what you should be doing if you want to grow your following. By actively posting, responding to questions and comments, joining threads, and adding your knowledge, and even opinions in some cases, to your own posts and other posts out there, you can help draw the attention of people who are looking for answers or are interested in what you’re sharing. As a result, you can end up growing your following bigger than you would have imagined.
Don’t just promote or talk about your brand, but really engage and get active and vocal.
Partner Up
There are over 1.5 million posts on Instagram that can be attributed to influencer marketing, and it’s estimated that sponsored posts are responsible for approximately one billion Instagram likes each year. Those metrics alone go to show just what kind of engagement partnering up can result in. Not only can partnering up increase engagement; it can also help you increase your following more dramatically than you might think. When you partner up with influencers or other brands out there, you can expand your brand and get attention from a whole new audience that you may not have had access to or may not have been able to access as easily before.
Invest in the Right Tools
The tools you use on Instagram can have quite a big impact on the number of followers you have. There are a variety of tools out there that you can use, and each tool impacts your following in some way or another. But if you really want to increase your number of followers, then investing in a tool like Magic Social is something you’ll want to consider. Services like Magic Social help you reach a targeted audience and take all of the stress and labor out of getting your numbers up; this goes to show that investing in the right tools really can make all the difference in helping you achieve your Instagram goals.
Final Thoughts
Growing your Instagram following can take a lot of work, but when you use the right tools and put in the effort, you will start seeing the results you want to see and can start enjoying the benefits that come with having a high number of followers.
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