Social media success has been measured with different types of yardsticks. One of the most popular has been the follower count. In this article we share 10 Strategies That Are Guaranteed To Get You Massive Follower Numbers On Instagram.
This follower count is a number that spans across all types of social media – Facebook, Google+ (quick prayer), Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the list goes on. While many people consider this one of the biggest ego messages of the new age, is there any value attached to this number? Well, the surprising answer to this is – yes, follower count is important.
Big brands still look at follower count as a metric to measure and reach out to potential influencers for their brand. There is a good reason why Cristiano Ronaldo sits atop the Instagram influencer throne – he has 175 million followers on his account. In fact, there is no popular brand or personality that has a low follower count.
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10 Ways You Can Get More Followers on Instagram
Now that we’ve established that follower count is more than just a vanity number, let’s take a look at a few strategies that can get the follower count up on your Instagram account.
Offer Value to Your Followers
The Rutgers research team found there are 2 distinct types of personalities when it comes to social media platforms – informers and merformers.
- Meformers – usually post about themselves
- Informers – share pertinent information
Interestingly, they found that out of the people posting on social media, meformers accounted for 80% and informers were the rest 20%.
Unsurprisingly, followers found informers more attractive. What is surprising though was the margin of difference – informers have 2x the number of followers meformers have.
The message here is clear – if you want more followers, you need to align yourself with the informers category more than the meformers category.
Decide What to Post
This might seem like a simple thing to start with, but it isn’t. When curating content for your Instagram feed, you need to make sure that you know what your feed consumes and verify if it is suitable to be published on the platform, in this case, Instagram.
Zero in on a content strategy that you think offers the best chance to showcase your brand and stick with it. To this end, you might need to carry out some A/B testing to determine what works best for you.
Being consistent and relatable can help people identify with your posts a lot better and encourage them to share it around with other people. If a brand can generate posts that are shareworthy, they give themselves the best chance to get more followers and even go viral.
Optimize Your Hashtags
Hashtags are an essential mechanic on Instagram. While Twitter might have come up with it first, it was on Instagram that hashtags blew into what it is now. Hashtags are where you can implement functionality with your brand’s Instagram feed as well as showcase your creativity.
Hashtags can help you categorize your post and make it easier for people to discover your content. This, in turn, leads to better engagement and follower numbers. Posts that have at least 1 hashtag increase likes by up to 70%.
You can also analyse how popular your hashtags are in your niche with Instagram Insights. This is only available on Instagram business profiles. Insights can show you how well your hashtags are performing with regards to likes and engagement as well.
Build Rapport with Followers
It’s safe to say people like social media platforms because it offers them a chance to connect with other people from all over the world. To this end, people are huge fans of brands that provide them the opportunity to interact with the brands themselves.
Engaging with your followers regularly in your comments helps foster a feeling of common ground. Doing some research to find out what other popular brands in your niche shares with its followers can give you more than a few ideas.
Many popular brands have a lot of followers and likes on their Instagram accounts. The only caveat is that it takes a long time to build these up. If you want a quick boost to these numbers, you can always buy Instagram followers or likes from legitimate vendors like iDigic. You’ll get prompt delivery of your orders and excellent support to back you up if you have questions.
Instagram Storytime
Stories on social media are short video clips that are only available for 2 hours. Snapchat pioneered it to good effect. However, when Instagram followed through with Stories on their platform, it became red hot popular with people instantly taking to it.
Instagram is known for its high engagement rates when compared to other social media, but Stories took those numbers even higher. On average, Stories have a 55% completion rate, which goes to show how engaging they can be.
People and brands found that Stories were a great way to elicit emotion from your audience. This was a great platform to showcase their creative ideas and the fact that it was only available for a day meant even more people would click on it for the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) factor.
Optimize Your Instagram Bio
If you are looking for prime real estate when it comes to Instagram, then your bio is it. It is a great place to advertise your brand personality as well as get your website URL added. This is the only place where you can add a URL to your profile so make use of it!
An Instagram bio should have a compelling CTA which should direct visitors to a specific action, most preferably to click the URL on display. It has a character count of about 150 characters, which means your CTA needs to be short and effective.
Also, there is no wrong approach to building an effective bio on Instagram, and it all depends on your brand. Nikerunning’s Instagram handle has “Just do it” versus Old Spice’s “MUSCLES. SMELLS. LAZERS. COUPONS. GIFS.”.
The Call to Action
This is an integral part of getting more people to your Instagram feed. You can ask people to follow or like your posts, and if they feel that your content is worthy, they will do so. Research shows that followers are 25% more likely to follow through on a CTA.
You can always work on a few things that can help with your CTA success. One thing you should keep in mind when it comes to CTAs in your captions, people respond better to unique content and a soft nudge rather than a command.
CTAs should be used as a reminder to your followers that they can interact with your post through a like or a share if they enjoy it. Also, CTAs that ask a question create interest and people reading it are more likely to respond to it.
Treat Your Audience Well
As follower counts keep increasing, brands have a tendency to dehumanize them into mere numbers. In the long run, brands need to “listen” to their audience and align their strategy according to them. Engagement numbers accurately reflect what your audience thinks of the content in your feed and this needs to be tracked.
You need to make sure that you do not lose sight of your brand’s core values because that is where your strength to attract more followers (and keep them) lies.
This is especially true, in part because of the Pareto principle, which states that 20% of your followers generate 80% of your results. So, you need to increase the number of followers to raise the odds of finding more people who are willing to engage with your brand regularly.
Building a Human Network
A big part of building your brand is reaching out to other people in your niche and those who aren’t as well. The human network is all-encompassing and getting in touch with people can deliver significant benefits to your Instagram handle like improved numbers throughout the board.
Reaching out to influencers can give a tremendous boost to your Instagram account. The obvious advantage of reaching out to influencers in your niche is that they can share your content on their feed. This lets you dip into their follower count, adding more people to your follower base in the process.
Another technique that you can use to connect is when you “Shoutout” to other brands in your genre. It basically works as a “share for share” method (S4S) – the influencer’s handle as well as yours will get a lot of mutual followers added.
Posting Times
This is a critical part of your strategy to get more people to follow your account. While earlier posts were sorted chronologically on your feed, Instagram has revamped its algorithm. Now Instagram delivers posts that are relevant and most engaged based on the user’s interest.
What this means is that the time to post on Instagram has become even more critical. Previously it was difficult to determine the best time to post, but Instagram has a native analytics tool, Instagram Insights, which can give you critical information so you can make a decision.
However, when it comes down to it, it depends on where you want to target. For example, if you are based in the US and want to target people from the UK, posting times can be a bit odd because of the difference in time zones.
Conclusion
As you can see, getting more followers is easy if you know what needs to be done, but it can take time. What you need to remember is that followers are people and if you build the right kind of brand image, they will want to get to know you better.
Following the above strategies can give you a good leg up with your follower numbers and keep it growing for quite some time. Always keep experimenting with fresh approaches and content so you’ll have something new to offer your followers.
We hope this article about 10 Strategies That Are Guaranteed To Get You Massive Follower Numbers on Instagram has been helpful and be sure to leave your comments below.
Author Bio
This article was contributed by Jason Dolman of iDigic