While engagement might be the true measure of success for Instagram, high engagement from a large audience is still the ultimate goal. But for that to happen you need real followers, not followers brought to you by bots or dodgy fake accounts. So, how do you drum up those numbers naturally and effectively? Here are our top tips to increase Instagram followers and skyrocket your profile.
Your IG bio is to your IG account what a home page is to a website. It needs to be clean, presentable, and above all, clear in its communication.
Spend some time making sure your bio tells people everything they u do, and you do it well, that small space becomes super powerful.
A vague or incomplete bio is a sure way to dissuade people from bothering to connect with you. Get your profile picture, description, tagline and link on point. Get some Highlights going for people to dive into and quickly learn about you. Make it pretty, and they will come.
If you’re running a business IG account, you need a consistent upload schedule. You need to be posting a consistent number of times through the week and at a consistent time.
That means finding the right balance of how often to post and when to post. This is different for every account. Your minimum is usually once a day. Some accounts can post multiple times a day and not be considered spammy.
IG provides you the tools to check when your followers are most active; use this as a guide for when to post. If need be, schedule posts in advanced so you don’t need to worry about manually being on time every day.
As the name implies, social media is supposed to be social. It’s a two-way street with those you interact with. You talk about them, and they talk about you.
Finding influencers, partners, and brand advocates will help you get in front of more people and get more people talking about you. The more people who see your brand coming up, the more interested they’ll be to check you out and follow.
The balance here is to make sure you’re providing value. Don’t get too salesy — that’s the fastest method to drive people away from you. Again, people are here under the pretense of being social. To sell in that environment, you need to convince, not coerce.
We’re going to guess you’re not just on Instagram. You’re probably also on Facebook, maybe Twitter, most likely have a website — or even an online store.
You should be using all of these places to advertise your IG handle. Unless someone sees a paid promotion, or the IG algorithm gods smile upon you and show you to a completely new person with no prior connection to you, they have no way of knowing your IG account exists. Tell ‘em loud, and tell ‘em proud.
Much like getting brand advocates and partners, this is all about getting in front of eyeballs. The more people see you, the more they’ll want to check you out.
It’s like we said above — you’re here to be social, so socialize!
Image captions, stories, and IG Lives are perfect places for you to be able to reach out and interact with your followers. Ask them a question, start a poll, invite them to provide feedback. People are surprisingly willing to interact with brands on IG, and, in fact, they like doing it. What’s more, the more they see a brand talking to people, the more likely they are to follow.
You can take this a step further and share your follower’s content, or just leave comments below their posts. When people see that a brand is active and engaged on Instagram, it encourages them to follow.
After all, who would you rather follow — an account that’s basically a corporate bulletin board, or an account that might actually talkback?
This might be an obvious one, but it’s worth a reminder. These super simple and surprisingly effective acts can go a long way:
Write a nice comment under someone’s post. Upload a story or a post designed to put a smile on people’s faces. Do a giveaway. Give a shoutout.
Small acts of kindness can really go a long way to endearing you to people online. The world is miserable enough already — add a little sunshine and see how appreciative people can be.
Last, but not least, get someone else to do it.
All of the above tips are certainly actionable on your own. But as your account grows, it’ll be harder and harder to put in the time to do all of these things to scale. Eventually you’ll hit a wall where you can’t grow because you simply can’t keep up yourself.
That’s where IG growth agencies come in. People like FollowFox basically take all of the hard work away from you so you can concentrate on growing your brand.
Researching the posting schedule? They’ve got it. Keeping up to date with who to follow and unfollow? FollowFox will get right on it. Hashtag research? Replying to comments? Optimizing that bio? Consider it done.
Growth agencies in the past used to be bot account farms that would suddenly grow your follower account by thousands overnight. That’s dodgy, against TOS, and a waste of money.
Today, FollowFox and others are fully TOS compliant and grow your account naturally. You won’t see results overnight — but you will see them faster than you can make yourself. And as your account grows and momentum builds, they’ll be there to keep on top of it, so you never have to feel like you’re drowning.