The Holy Grail of brand marketing right now is Instagram followers. The existence of products on the market such as Liketoknow.it and Shopsy helping bloggers and brands monetize their posts have helped Instagram become a powerful sales channel. Here are a few tips and tricks for boosting your follower count on the platform.
- Engaging with Potential Followers
Engaging with your potential followers is listed here as the first tip for a reason. It is the most important one. Social media is referred to as such because you must seriously talk to people. You can do that by looking up relevant hashtags in your niche. The next step is to find an image that you love, ‘like’ it and comment on it too. Ensure that you only leave a positive comment, compliment the poster or ask a question. You can also try an Instagram bot to gain more followers that way.
The idea of this is that your profile will come up in their activity feed, they will probably be curious, click through to your profile and hopefully follow you if they like what they see. Now you will need to do the same thing hundreds if not thousands of times more. It is a task that requires a great deal of effort, but it produces big results.
If your account is new, or if you haven’t had time to put in the effort before, you may benefit from auto likes. Auto likes can increase the reach you have. You can read more about auto likes IG on this site.
- Using Proper Hashtags
Clicking on a hashtag the best and most effective way to discover new profiles and images on Instagram is to. So, it does makes sense to only use popular and relevant hashtags on your own images to increase the chances of others actually finding you. Fortunately for you, others have already gone through the effort of discovering the most popular hashtags. #TagForLikes is a leading mobile app and website for doing this.
Instagram allows you to have up to a maximum of 30 hashtags per image, so #TagForLikes has created lists that can be copied and pasted onto your images. Just visit the website or download the mobile app, find the most suitable theme for your image, copy and paste in either the comments or description and you will be good to go.
- Putting a Widget on Your Website
You work hard driving traffic to your site and once readers get there, what they expect is a 360-degree view of your online presence so that they are able to interact with you on their terms. It is therefore a must to ensure that all your social links are visible.
You can also find several website plugins that let you display the images from your Instagram feed in a sidebar or banner – Instagram’s visual nature captures the eyes of the reader, which is why it is such a great idea to display images.
- Post at Appropriate Times
Studies have been conducted to determine the most suitable times for posting on social media. The mobile nature of Instagram makes it a 24/7 network, which means that there’s no wrong time to post. It has been shown, however, that Sundays and Mondays are actually the best and should thus not be excluded from your posting schedule.
It is also important to understand that there will also be a ‘best time’ depending on the followers you have. Iconosquare is an amazing analytics tools for Instagram that checks the engagement patterns of your followers and identifies the most suitable time for you to post too.
However, you should always think before posting the content whether that is something you would personally like if you saw it in a feed. Ensure that the content is both likeable and interesting. It is more preferable to post one less time a day and ensure it is right as opposed to posting constantly and of no interest to your followers.
- Follower Exchanges and Sponsored Posts
You require a budget for sponsored posts and they can produce mixed results. A sponsored post is where you pay money to a fellow Instagram user to promote your account. The cost varies depending on the number of followers the user has and how relevant your profile actually is to them.
It is advisable to select profiles in a niche similar to yours so that it sounds authentic when they promote you. If you are a brand with a physical product, you can gift samples to influencers on whose account you wish to be featured on as a great way to promote your brand without having to spend too much. Keep in mind, however, that samples still have value and if you have not agreed to a post before you send them out, there’s no guarantee that you will be featured.
Follower exchanges are somewhat similar to sponsored posts with the only difference being that rather than paying the user for promoting your profile, you return the favor and promote theirs. It can be a particularly effective strategy particularly when starting out.
Just remember to be choosy when picking profiles for engaging in follower exchanges with. Ideally, they need to have a similar aesthetic and theme to yours so that it appears organic to your followers. The last thing you would obviously like to do is promoting another profile and losing followers since they are unable to relate.
