3 Ways To Grow Your Instagram Following

Do you use Instagram for business?

Looking to grow your following and reach the 600 million users on the network?

Over 100 million Instagrammers have signed up in the last 6 months alone. With these top tips you’ll be able to get your content noticed and engaged with whilst also starting to build a targeted follower base.

Instagram Growth Tip #1: Research

In order to grow a targeted following on Instagram, you need to understand what is working well for influencers in your industry.

Once you’ve found out the above, you’ll then be able to formulate a more strategic approach to growing a target-market-based following.

To find these relevant influencers on Instagram, go ahead and use the search bar in Instagram to search for hashtags related to your industry. For example, lets say your brand is in the healthy food  industry, you can start by searching “#healthyfood” or “#fitfood”. WEBSTA and Hastagify are great tools you can use to find relevant hashtags.

If you were a small businesses, entrepreneur or start up you may search “#startups”, “#motivation”, “#entrepreneur”. Once you’ve searched, look at the “Top Posts” on the results page, click on the content and analyse that user’s account.

Make a note of content themes, styles, design, graphics, image descriptions, posting frequency etc.

For example, from Gary Vee‘s profile, you can see he uses a lot of high quality images and video of him with motivational, business and entrepreneurship quotes overlayed in a consistent text style. He also posts around 2 – 4 times a day.

Repeat this process for 5 – 10 relevant hashtags to build up a solid understanding of what works well in your industry on Instagram.

Don’t forget to also utilise Instagram’s “Related” feature for new hashtag search ideas. This appears when searching hashtags (as shown below).

Shopify share some additional Instagram research tips and more below!

Instagram Growth Tip #2: Create Engaging Content

Creating engaging content is an essential part of growing a targeted following on Instagram. Engaging content is media that stands out and grabs your audience’s attention. It makes your audience want to take action as soon as they see it.

For example, the below image stands out due to the white text and the darker background image. The yellow text makes the core message of the image pop. Who wouldn’t want to engage with this piece of content!?

Even if you have no design skills, you can still create and distribute lots of engaging and high quality content. There’s a ton of tools out there to help you create engaging images and videos including Canva, Wordswag, Ripl,  Adobe Spark Video, VidLab and more.

If you wanted to go a step further, you could even follow Daniel’s guide on creating a custom GIF, then use Giphy‘s Instagram share feature. It emails you a video version of your GIF to upload to Instagram!

Connor Franta shares more great content creation tips and tools below.

Instagram Growth Tip #3: Engage With Your Audience

Engaging with your audience will help build relationships which will in turn help you build a targeted and engaged following on Instagram.

This can be achieved by, replying to your comments, liking people’s comments, tagging users in posts, sharing user-generated content, liking your followers content (providing it’s suitable) etc.

There are many ways you can engage. You should engage on a daily basis to help build better relationships with your audience and add a human touch to your profile.

Miranda Gardley shares some more awesome engagement tips in this video.

Conclusion

Growing your Instagram following takes hard work and consistency. If you execute the strategies outlined in this article you will see results. What strategies have you used to grow your Instagram? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or tweet me @_GarethG!