In the last year my Instagram followers went from a thousand to almost 40K. Am I happy? Yes, I am because I can show my photography work to more people. It’s also an injection of self confidence in what I love to do, which is making photos around the world.
Does it mean that you need a high number of followers on Instagram, not really. You may have Instagram because you want to share the photos with your friends and that’s it, or your family or a group of people.
Table of Contents
My niece told me once that I was an important person because I have many followers, she was just pulling my leg obviously. She asked me if they were all real followers. I could only reply saying that I really hope so otherwise I am showing my work to myself basically, not really productive I must say.
I would like to share with you some of the effective ways of growing the Instagram following based on my past year experience,
Instagram content is very important
Content is important for any social environment, this may be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or any other one. Content is important if you run a blog or website. In saying that it’s a starting point, not the final goal.
Let me explain better
To increase your followers base you need first to attract them to your account (more on that later).
The second step is to show your work to them. If they like it they will most probably follow you. That is why content is so important.
If you have an Instagram account about travel photography, as I do, you need to be ready with some great shots that can create a dream . If you are into cats, you probably need funny photos about cats, not just simple portraits. If you have a love for trains, I would probably suggest some photos of train spaced out with close up on details. I hope it all makes sense
The idea is to have a content that stands out
All right, easy. Now an important question.
Is my photography work better than somebody else because I have more followers?
No, I do not believe so.
It just means that I worked harder on getting more real followers on Instagram.
I give you a great example. I just had an interview with Benjamin Earl Traylor, a photographer from Alaska. I love his work and I really suggest you to follow him on Instagram. His follow up, in Instagram numbers, is not that high however I consider his work at the same level or probably better than mine actually.
The hashtags are the easiest way to spread your message around. There is no magic formula here. The most important thing is to use hashtag that do match with the photo content, in a smart way though.
This is where I forged this new type:
Smart hashtags
What does it mean?
When I post a photo I use around 10-15 hashtags. Two or three of them are smart hashtags. These are hashtag related to a business or association that may be interested to report my work.
I do travel photography and my smart hashtags are usually the tourism boards. They have already a great follow up and people interested to my subject, travelling. They also continuously look around and they are happy to repost your work, if they like it. That’s their best way to show how beautiful is the area.
Does it work?
It works great. As an example I had few repost from the Amazing Thailand Tourism board that generated lots of interest and followers
Believe it or not, it does not matter in what industry you are, there are always smart hashtags to use. If you are into cats, for example, you could use smart hashtags created by cat food producers. They usually have a great follow up built through advertisement and they always look for content around to repost.
It also helps to create a connection that may go behind Instagram.
Other smart hashtags can be related to big websites, magazines or newspapers that run a re-post program
I talked about using 10-15 hashtags of which 2-3 smart hashtags. What are the remaining 12-13 hashtags? Have a read to the Top travel hashtags to use on Instagram. Some great suggestions there that can be applied to any Instagram subject
Stay within your subject
The content you have, beside being great, should be also consistent.
Attention span is down to single digit seconds in the internet world. You just have few seconds to convince, with your work, someone to follow you.
In my case, it all becomes quite messy if I start alternating private photos of the dog, my new bike and my travel photography. The feed is not any more able to capture that attention. It may be interesting for people that already follow me and I have created a connection with (more on this later) but it has the drawback to deteriorate the consistency of my feed
If you do it on a rare occasion I believe it is fine. But on a regular basis it could actually bore some of the followers that may be not interested to your private life. The last thing you want is to loose followers
Obviously the Hollywood stars are there to share the own life but that’s another kind of feeds all together. There are also social sensations that share the own private life and if you are into this kind of feeds this suggestion does not obviously apply
Plan ahead to grow you Instagram community
Getting more real followers on Instagram does not come overnight. Planning is part of the time you need to invest.
There are few reasons why you want to plan your work.
You want to be consistent with your daily posting. I would personally avoid any burst posting (7 posts today and none for a week)
You may want to be consistent with the timing. If your Instagram community is mostly in one country, or within 1 or 2 timezone it may be worth to plan you posts when there is more exposure.
I see more success in posting around 6-7pm local time, which makes somehow sense. People are going back home on tram and trains and they scroll through the own Instagram feed
New Instagram rules have been introduced and it’s better if you space out great content with good content.
What does it mean?
The Instagram new rules are quite similar to the Facebook original ones. If you are not familiar with them, this is how it works
Before the new rules, the feed of any person was sorted based on published time.
As an example, there is John that follows both me and you. If I publish a picture at 6pm and you do it at 7pm than John’s feed at 7:05pm will have your photo before mine. You may think it is not a big deal, however, if John follows 400 or more Instagram accounts, his feed moves quite quickly and your photo may not be seen at all by John.
Instagram had a democratic approach, first one first served, ops I mean posted, that’s it
Now Instagram is different . The first 10 minutes when you publish your photo are super important. If the engagement is high (likes and comments) it will stay on top of the feed of John for a while, it does not matter when the photo was posted.
If the engagement is high it will stay on top of most of your followers feed, which is great
If you have only great material to post, that’s awesome. But honestly, if I see myself, I have some photos which I think they are great and others that I am not really convinced of. It’s honestly hard to have only great material, we need to be realistic here.
My suggestion is not to post great material in a burst. Space out great material with good/average content.
What is the problem?
If you post great material in a burst you will be most probably on the top of the feed of your followers for a while but than comes the boost of average content and you will most likely disappear from any feed for a while.
Engage with your Instagram followers
I like to engage with people and that comes quite natural to me. In saying that I did few experiments and that’s what I found out.
First of all, what do I consider to be engagement?
Posting a great photo is awesome however adding a story, maybe a funny one as well, is paramount. It’s a clear signal to anyone visiting your feed that you have created a nice group. People are more likely to follow an engaged group than a feed that publishes images in a row.
Reply to your feedbacks on a regular basis. I personally also visit the feed of the person that post the comment to see his/her work and check his/her name. My reply, where I can, always includes the name of the person. It creates more of human interaction, I believe.
What did I do in my experiment?
For four weeks I spaced out days when I engaged with days when I did not. The difference in new followers was between 20% and 30% more during my engaging days.
That was enough to me to prove the engagement factor
Engage with any Instagram person
I was not sure if I should have added this point and I keep it short
I like photography and I like travelling. I use Instagram to check around, to see other people work and I leave comments, feedbacks and sometime direct messages.
It seems pretty normal to me. Of course this kind of engagement may influence someone to visit my feed and follow me.
Do I do it on purpose?
No, I do not add any kind of pressure in any comment, never. I am not a fan of “I follow you if you follow me”
It’s just that people may spend time on YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter or TV watching. My spare time is more on Instagram feeds, that’s it really.
If it does not come natural to you, than I would not really suggest it. It may not suit you
Bring followers from other platforms
Worthless to say that you need to sponsor your Instagram account on any platform that you have already.
Adding the link on your website or blog is the first step
If you have already another social platform with a good following you should link it to Instagram and talk about it. I do it with my Twitter community.
And it’s not like having duplicates. What I post on Instagram is completely different to what I post on Twitter
This is another potential snowball. I still need to experiment that in a bigger scale and once done I will update this post with more info.
How does it work?
In the simple form, it’s a 2 steps process
- contact other Instagram users that are in your niche and have a similar following community
- provided you need to like his/her content propose to repost his/her photos within your feed. In exchange, he/she will do the same on his/her feed
Very easy.
Does it work?
In my opinion, to make it working, you need to find peers that have good material, like yours, and a similar number of followers. If you think that the other Instagrammer content is not great, than probably I would not risk it as it can upset the own followers.
I would love to say it works, or it doesn’t, but I like to have a 1-2 months test period
I usually post once a day, with the repost I would have double content, mine and the repost
External tools I use with Instagram
Instagram is a fantastic app, however it lacks in few things.
As a consequence I adopted few tools to help me in the organic growth of my Instagram community
- Snapseed : Instagram is ok for some basic photo editing however it lacks lots of features. Snapseed is, in my opinion, the best app around. You can download the Android app or the Apple App
- Later (formally Latergram.me) : I use this website and app for my planning. It now posts photos automatically. With Later you have 30 free posts per month (payment required if you exceed this limit), however if you click on this Lategram link you will get another 10 free on top (and I will too ?)
- Appaction.io : you can use Instagram to sync your photo with Twitter and Facebook or Appaction.io. What you gain with the latest is that the photo is posted in full format (Twitter does post only a link otherwise) and with a link back to Instagram, something that both FB and TW remove. Moreover Appaction sends a daily email (if you select so) with the account stats, which is great
- IconSquare : a great website for your analytic. What is working and what is not. Take under control your Instagram growth
Buy followers on Instagram
I do not find very useful to buy followers. Many reasons for that. Most probably they are not interested to my work, just to my $$.
Other arguments I have
They may be not real, just accounts created to follow you and other buyers. No real people on the back, just bots
Instagram from time to time does a bit of house keeping. Last one was in November I think. Even some personalities got followers deleted. There was even a guy that went from 80,000 followers to less than 1,000.
In saying that if you want to have lots of followers, buying them is an option, however most probably they are not real Instagram followers.
My strategy on Instagram
When I started my account on Instagram my first question was: why do I want to do that?
The answer was that I wanted to give more visibility to my work. If this was not the case obviously I would have not been interested to increase the number of Instagram followers.
In saying that I built a strategy which I summarize here below in few points
- I started populating the feed with a good sample of images I liked (around 20). No much point to attract visitor to an empy house
- Engaged with other feeds on my niche. This has few advantages. I started new Internet relationships. I got my name around. I learnt from other people feeds
- Started using Smart Hashtags. I wish I did that before
- Consistent Daily Posts
- Improved my hashtag process as I explained in the the Top travel hashtags to use on Instagram.
- Inspected Analytics and back to point 2 with improved tecnique I explained in this post
And that is it for the moment. Please feel free to leave any comment and let me know what you think. If you have any suggestion which I have not covered, please add it in the comment section
Happy Instagram to everyone and remember to follow my Instagram feed 😉
Amazing post. Indeed, Content is the most imperative thing in increasing your followers. Content is king.No matter how many tips you take on board, if you are not providing engaging, fresh and informative content to your audience, then you are not going to gain many new followers. Content should be posted according to the needs of your audience.
Hashtags increase the discoverability of the content. The more your content is visible, the more followers you’ll gain. I do agree, try to add 10-15 hashtags. You can use hashtagify to generate relevant hashtags. I was not aware of smart hashtags. Thanks for explaining it.
I really enjoyed reading your post. It’s informative and interesting. I have learned so many new things from this post. work with a social peer is one of them. I would definitely recommend others trying out these tips. I have bookmarked this post for future references.
Thanks Michael for your feedback.
Cheers
Hi! Your article is great.This is a Helpful Tips for Grow Instagram Followers.
Thanks
In today’s world, people have a lot of things to do, they don’t have enough time to do everything. This happens in all areas. blogging or business is now the same thing. You should have time to do everything at once. I have my own manicure studio. I understood that I could not conduct Instagram personally. Without hesitation, I used the functions of instagram hashtags generators. They work great
I loved your article on Instagram and I must say that everything is well structured and explained. You went through all the important things straight-forward and it is really important for the people who just made up their Instagram accounts. When I started, I had a hard time going over all of those steps alone, but I must admit that it was not an easy task at all. It took me a lot of time and effort and in the end
Thank you for your time
No worries Mark, so glad you enjoyed it
Nice article ! Anyway Instagram has announced that they will punish the people who always use the same hashtags, so be careful and don’t use too much hashtags for the same post. To get more followers on instagram I’m also using Rocket Social, a cheap social media agency who does things well ! 😉
Thanks Valentina. I guess you are talking about the shadowban. I believe it is mostly used to deter users from toxic behavior. In saying that Instagram has also mentioned that using the same hashtags should not be done, although this comment was about using hashtags that are dodgy, commercial clearly spammy or sex related etc. Thanks for highlighting RS. For a business it may be a solution, as many other social marketing companies available (I prefer not to suggest any and be impartial). Always keep in mind that you leave your account, and possibly your main source of income, in someone else hands. I do not know RS however I still have to find one that would pay a compensation (I mean real $$) in case the account is banned or shadowban