Promoting a business without trying out the digital media options might be a slow route towards achieving your organizational goals. It’s like climbing a mountain without the essential gears. But don’t worry, if you are reading this blog then your journey to reach to the top is going to get easier.
Doing a business, retaining customers and ensuring revenue growth is a difficult task without the help of social media platforms. Moreover, your customers can shift their preferences to your competitors who are active online.
The reason for this is the developing and fast moving internet facilities, boom in social media marketing norms and everyone being online. So if you have not yet tried your hands on digital media for promoting your products/services, you are losing out a lot in the market.
With over 1 Billion monthly active users, Instagram is a popular place for brands and businesses. The social media platform supports some of the best influencers, content creators, change makers and brands which benefit the public following them in different ways.
Being a brand it is essential to design reliable Instagram growth strategy that would help grow followers, attract right customers and support the system of sales.
80% of accounts on Instagram follow a brand or business and this fact indicates the huge need of this particular social media platform to enhance growth of business.
Why are organic followers a crucial part of Instagram growth strategy?
Being a brand online often tempts owners into taking shortcuts for quicker benefits which may be short lived. Influencers, brands and creators have tried purchasing followers and expanding their reach for faster results. Many of them have got desired results but it really did not help take the business ahead.
Buying followers on Instagram would just increase the number of followers you have on the site. This mere number would in no way help increase engagements, sales or popularity.
The accounts that you buy to improve your number of followers would not like, share or comment on your posts, they will not buy your services/products. That is why growing organic followers is the key while preparing an Instagram growth strategy.
Often the number of followers on Instagram affects the way customers look at your brands. Business accounts with less followers are accepted to be less credible than the ones with more. This is why we tend to buy followers.
However, there is a way out of this trap. There are certain interesting and effective ways to grow real followers on Instagram.
Here are some fine tricks to help you build an effective Instagram growth strategy.
Successful tips for your Instagram growth strategy
-
Theme the feed!
Try to design an appropriate theme for your Instagram photos and videos. When people check out your profile after following the hashtags mentioned in your posts, give them something worth the follow.
Create content that are relatable, attractive and engaging. Your Instagram feed can be neat, classic and orderly placed or it can be colourful, chic and artistic. 
Learn the trends that are going viral in the industry that your business deals in and try to develop Instagram growth strategy depending on it. Once a theme is picked and followed try not deviating from the pattern. The posts can be appropriately tagged and the caption must be carefully written so as to not hurt any sentiments and create impact on the readers.
-
Be a regular creator
Instagram growth strategy is well complimented when creators post consistently. Instagram is the social media platform with the highest number of engagements and to grab that attention you must first give your audience content to respond on. People stay on the accounts that have regular updates and come up with good content on a regular basis.
Now keeping consistency is not just about posting everyday but also maintaining a timeline and keeping posts in a good frame. If you are a brand on Instagram, try to learn when your audience is coming online and what is the time that brings in a lot of engagement.
The insights can be easily taken from the app itself or you can use third party tools to do the tracking.
Understand the type of content that pleases or makes your followers active and post similar posts.
Keeping consistency and regularity is a major part of growing followers on Instagram because it builds trust and improves brand credibility.
-
Follow and be active on the same niche hashtag
There is a smart Instagram growth strategy that increases followers and helps get noticed. Do follow the top creators in your niche, engage in the trending hashtags related regularly. It is often helpful to like few posts of other users, leave a genuine comment and also follow them because this would make your account more discoverable. 
Other users may look at your content and follow back. This Instagram growth strategy works well when you are a beginner and are trying out ways to increase followers as well as engagement rates.
-
Instagram stories are magical sometimes
With over 500 Million Instagram account users using Instagram stories every single day, the feature has got its own charm in engaging followers.
It is no more a big surprise when we say that people are looking at stories more often than scrolling through endless feeds.
Creating engaging content for your stories can easily attract followers, keep them engaged and ensure that there is content on your account for all. 
You can either take your followers behind the scenes of what you post regularly, create a poll, do a quiz session and answer the questions, go live and be more fun out there.
There are many video making features like boomerangs, slo-mos and more to try making different types of videos as they are fun to create and more interesting for your followers.
Therefore, if you miss out on stories as a part of your Instagram growth strategy then there is a lot missed already.
-
Run a cool contest and giveaways
Running a contest is a brilliant idea that you can use to giveaway products, promote brand and increase your followers. We have a blog for you on creating some fine stories, it has all the wonderful tips and tricks which can help you engage with your followers. 
One thing that you must do is to make your followers repost, share and tag friends on the contest, run a loop contest to ensure more people involve in the contest. Running a contest would help increase followers, engagement rates and reach of posts. It is a very impactful trick to grow the overall Instagram account.
Learn some fine ideas on Instagram Giveaways to benefit out of these contests and ensure maximum audience engagement.
The existing followers help increase engagement and visibility while contests are a great way of tapping into newer markets.
-
Interlink Instagram account to other social media networks
Using the direct links to your Instagram account on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media channels helps people find you easily on the required platform.
A tweet encouraging users there to follow your post on Instagram can easily grow your followers and bring in right customers. Putting up a link on your blog post or vice versa can help increase the visitor number on both platforms. This is a necessary way to accumulate and re-direct followers to respective websites, blogs and social media sites.
Interlinking accounts is a helpful and successful way to drive traffic to desired sites and grow Instagram following.
-
Encourage user generated content from followers
People are more likely to buy a product or follow a brand when suggested by their peer groups. It is a smarter Instagram growth strategy to encourage existing followers to create content related to your product or services with the right hashtags and tags.
There are several ways to get people creating content for your brand and one way is to run a branded hashtag competition. It can be a caption contest or image contest, there are memes making round while competitions too.
Users can develop these for a shout-out or giveaway and help increase followers online.
Moreover, the winner of the contest can give your account a shout-out and help build trust around other social media partners and users.
-
Geo-tagging posts on Instagram
Instagram growth strategy must include geo-tags and proper hashtags for people to locate and connect with your account. When you visit a place or have brunch somewhere you can tag the location while posting it on Instagram.
This way, followers and other users can search your posts through the “explore” feature and communicate with your account. 
Keeping the locations tagged get you more followers from people who have visited the place or are looking ahead for the same.
Thus, make sure you have mentioned the café that you checked in at or the hill station you are trekking this weekend. This will definitely grow your followers.
-
Socialize well with existing followers
Many times users and brands forget the word “social” in social media marketing. All they concentrate on is posting, improving visibility and expanding reach.
Being a creator you must not miss out on engaging properly with your followers and potential customers.
Replying to comments, encouraging likes and asking them to tag relevant friends are a few ways to connect with them and build trust.
Socializing on the business account is a smart Instagram growth strategy because it develops loyal organic fan following. People want to be heard and respected therefore responding well and involving them in discussion encourages them to share your content and profile.
-
Create community with hashtags
People can be bonded together with relevant hashtags on your Instagram profile. Create a hashtag or trend a phrase which they would follow and create content that fits well with them.
When people create content for your theme or topic it becomes easy to connect with them by sharing their work. It makes the followers feel appreciated and encouraged for their work. Moreover, it helps save content for future use on your social media account. 
Instagram growth strategy must always include followers and their interests because that is the main motive behind developing Instagram growth strategy.
Trending hashtags will bring followers with similar interests together and grow the network further.
Instagram growth strategy for all creators
Now that we have discussed a few ways to grow Instagram family for brands and businesses, make sure that you try them before assuming results as most of the insights and analytics are always different from what we understand on social media.
If you have a brand or business never then miss out on the platforms like Instagram because they are not just popular but have the potential to make you go viral.
Growing followers on Instagram is not as easy as it looks or a blog makes it sound, but with right strategies, timing and content, everything is possible. ‘
Internet is a delicate place where one must keep check on what kind of content they are producing and who are being targeted. Therefore, be alert and informed about what you are posting about as that can affect the followers.
At the end, patience and keeping calm matters the most apart from being a genuine brand online.
Try out these methods and we wish you more followers on Instagram.
