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How do you Organically grow your Instagram Followers?
Is it even possible to build your Instagram account organically?
These are common questions that you see in most of the forums and QnA sites. You will find these questions being asked a lot on Quora and most answers point to buying Instagram followers.
To run a successful social media marketing campaign on Instagram, it is necessary that you have a significant number of followers. And it all boils down to the same question on “how to build your followers”.
While most people are interested in growing their follower count fast and consequently prefer buying followers, it is not always the best route to take.
Rather your should look at organically growing your Instagram presence.
How to Organically Grow Your Instagram Followers
Since the most talked about method is often the most followed methods, some of the simpler methods that might require a little more effort but are more effective are often ignored.
There are a lot of advantages in growing your Instagram followers organically including better engagement and a better ROI for your marketing efforts.
And there are many ways in which you can grow your Instagram presence, and there are many tactics to keep your followers active. Let us look at some of these.
Post Frequently
The most successful accounts on Instagram are those who post frequently and not just one post per day. Frequent posting means that you are engaging your users more and when you do that, you will start to get queries as well in the comment section.
Replying and responding to your comments further helps build engagement and this in turn helps build your followers because people like following accounts that are run and managed by real people.
Cross Promotion
One of the ways by which you can increase the number of followers is through cross promotion. If you do cross promotion, you will get more users from other sites. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr accounts with your Instagram.
When you share a post on Instagram, it will be displayed directly on your other social media profiles as well and you will receive more users from those sites.
You can also take a screenshot of your Instagram post, and you can post it on other social networking sites.
Create A Theme
Another way in which many companies and big brands increase their organic presence is by creating a theme for posting.
Post your pictures in such a way that it has some resemblance to the previous one. You can use the same theme, you can crop them in the same way, or you can add similar frames.
This helps create your identity and also helps in increasing followers as your Instagram account is now thematic and gives a more attractive look.
Use Hashtags
One of the major ways to increase your engagement is through hashtags. Hashtags are important and if you use the right hashtags, you will see a significant change in number of your daily users. Read my post on the Instagram Hashtags Best Practices to learn more about hashtags.
It is crucial to use the perfect hashtag, analyze the trends and then add hashtags according to it. Also, you need to make sure that your hashtag is not very long, is precise and relevant to what your post is.
Impressive Author Bio
Your author bio is what introduces you to your audience. If you bio doesn’t convey anything about you, then users might not be too inclined on following you.
In order to get more followers, write an impressive bio. Be creative when you write your bio and make sure you convey your message clearly. Ensure that you are conveying a benefit statement in your bio. Readers should know the benefit of associating with you.
Know Your Audience
You can also grow an organic presence on your Instagram by analyzing your audience and knowing what they actually want.
It is important that you keep analyzing your posts to see which posts are getting the best response and which is failing. Pick up your best posts, see their similarities and make sure that you create more posts like these.
If you post only what your audience wants to see, it will surely give you a boost and will help you build your followers count.
Share Quotes
You can also make quotations posts for your followers as it attracts people.
Share images with inspirational quotes on them. In fact almost all social media sites show good engagement on images that carry an inspirational quote. You can use a tool like Stencil to design such images and post directly to your social media accounts.
Create multiple such images and schedule them onto your Instagram accounts using a tool like Grum.
Hold a Contest
Instagram users love contest. Contests help engage your existing users and at the same time also help build and even stronger following because of the ways it goes viral.
Instagram contests are a lot of fun, and the people love it when you start giving away prizes. People start following your profile and visit it regularly to see if there’s a new giveaway.
Instagram contests are one of the best ways of engaging more users. You can hold an Instagram contest and ask people to share your post. Nobody likes to give things away for free, but in this case, it benefits your social media campaign.
Collaborate With Other Users
Collaboration has always been a good method to increase your reach and build your influence. It is no different with Instagram.
You can do shares for shares with any other successful Instagram business account, and it will help you to get some followers from their account.
Many people do not like the idea of sharing other business stuff on their account, but it is an excellent and easy way to engage more followers. If you can find a business that is relevant to yours, you can share their content on your page, and they will share yours for the better good.
Use The Best Captions
What you write in the captions for your pictures decides how much of engagement you get. When you are writing a caption for a picture make sure it is more than a caption.
Make the caption relevant to your business or product. Take out your creativity and write the best caption you can think of.
Buy Followers
While buying your followers is not always an option you should look to, in order to build a huge following, it is certainly an option that can give you a start.
There are some companies in the market that delivers high quality Instagram followers. These followers are good to give your Instagram account an initial boost.
If you are new to Instagram, I recommend you to start with buying some followers. So that your profile could look authoritative.
Follow Your Own Style
Uniqueness is what makes you stand out from the crowd. If you are going to do the same thing as others, you will just be at the bottom of the list.
You can try to create meaningful engagement with users by following your own unique style. Make your posts different from others, ask questions, tag people, and share posts from your consumers and fans to make them feel special.
By making your account unique, you can attract even more users for your account.
Use Emojis
Lastly, try to make everything perfect and pay focus to even the tiniest things. Use emojis as well. They are just like hashtags and are discoverable.
According to a study published in quintly blog, emojis can lead to higher interactions. Not only that, they look excellent as well. By adding emojis, you are making your profile look cheerful.
Final Words
To gain more followers on Instagram or any other social media site is not easy and it cannot be done without putting in a some effort. It all depends on how you engage your current users and potential users, how you treat them and how you make them feel special.
Meaningful engagement is the key to it, the more you do for your followers, the more followers you will get, and it is as simple as that.
By following these little details, you can organically grow your Instagram followers, and this in turn will help your social media marketing campaign succeed.
About the Author
Qurban Shah is a web content writer and strategist and writes for a lot of online publications.