Why do you need organic followers for your business when buying followers and bots are much easier and faster? (Note that I say faster but not more efficient) It’s best to think of your social media profile as a customer service window. Having a huge amount of followers on social media accounts may seem glamorous. However, under the current climate, audiences can often see through inauthenticity and develop a negative impression of the brand. So why spend money to buy followers when it will work to your disadvantage in the long run? Besides- you want to foster these early relationships and map the customer journey so you can scale that activity in the future.
Building a community around a brand can be time-consuming, but ultimately, organically growing followers is more effective if you're seeking genuine engagement with your audience. Making a real connection with your customers will allow you to promote your product to people that really care - leading to increased sales.
Now let's take a deeper look at the social media platform that is known to be crowded with fraudulent engagement - Instagram.
Visuals
As a platform that doesn't allow users to post without an image or video, having strong visuals is everything. The way that the platform is configured gives users room to express their aesthetic. Its grid format requires users to create content in an unconventional way relative to other major platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The advantage to this, though, is that it allows audiences to quickly view an account's vision in its entirety. Therefore, in favor of the algorithm of the platform, it is optimal to publish vertical images instead of horizontal ones. Additionally, you want to focus on the aesthetic of the grid on your profile using extensions such as Preview to envision curated content as a whole. Also, know that your image quality has to be exceptional to step up your game on Instagram since the channel has more than 100 million uploads per day.
Video
In 2019, video content has become one of the users’ favorite forms of content. Now, Instagram has made the one-hour video limit feature, IGTV, that can preview on your follower's feed. It is easy to watch and eye-catching by presenting a whole view of your content while increasing the time followers spend on your channel.
Story
When producing consistent content on your feed, consistent stories is also essential to increase impressions. You're probably wondering why this is the case as the feature is not necessarily affected by the platform's algorithm. However, according to TechCrunch, Instagram's story feature does manage to reach more than 500 million users per day. The reason for their popularity is that people are willing to display a more authentic form of content as the content is deleted after 24 hours. It updates faster than a traditional feed and allows the newest story to be pushed right in front of your followers' feed. So why not produce both traditional feed posts and story content to maximize your results?
Content
SEO
On a platform that values visual content as much as Instagram, it can be tempting to post content without meaningful captions. However, you should never slack off from crafting your bio, captions, and even location because it does advance your SEO on the platform. The more information you put in your bio the easier users are able to find you through their search engine and writing captions that connect with your audience is the key to spark meaningful conversations.
Hashtag
Everyone knows including hashtags is one way to increase your exposure, but do you know the technique behind using hashtags? Logically, we should mix hashtags with both wide and narrow audiences and rotate them from post to post. Using generic hashtags does risk your content being pushed back from other popular or newer posts. Rotating hashtags between posts is crucial to help you reach different audiences that are following the content of the specific hashtag. Hashtags are supposed to make exploring the platform fun so use diverse hashtags to draw in new followers!
Timing
When your post remains crucial though Instagram changed its algorithm so that the order of feed depends on the content you may engage with the most. The combination of high-grade content and timing will boost your post to the top of your audience’s feed. When different accounts have different groups of audiences, it is highly encouraged to study your data in order to know what time to post will help you reach the most audience. Always remember quantity over quality if your account is for business purposes. For those with more than 5000 followers, we recommend you post 2~3 times a day.
4. Engagement
Audience
Have you noticed that all of the techniques mentioned above are essential for the purpose of building engagement with the target audience? To increase sales, a business's social media account helps build brand originality and loyalty to attract customers through engagement. There are many ways to increase engagement with audiences such as holding contests and giveaways. Another technique is to use the polling feature on story, providing an even faster way for accounts to interact with users and gain their input.
Community
Ultimately, after gaining a certain amount of loyal followers, business accounts are looking to continue to build a powerful community around the brands. We recommend you to follow, like, and comment on relevant user accounts or 10 ~30 big accounts every day to increase your visibility.
Your audience is looking to interact with you on this platform. So be present, be social, be engaged. (And, if you can’t do that, hire someone who can do it in your style and tone. Not responding to customer queries is leaving money on the table and can lead your loyal fans to become dissatisfied.)
The Takeaway
It may seem like there is an overwhelming number of factors to be taken into account when it comes to gaining followers organically. However, in following these steps, the audiences you gain will be more stable and loyal, and the experiences you gain will inform your company’s strategy as you scale. Keep in mind that although it is good to have a profile of your business on every social media platform, you want to focus on the ones your target audience uses the most. Despite the fact that Instagram is one of the most influential social media platforms at the moment, the majority of the users of the platform are aged 13~ 29. Therefore, if your target audience is older than that demographic, focusing your marketing on Instagram is doomed to bear a limited result.
Has this article inspired you to work to build your organic Instagram following? Comment below to let us know your thoughts or tips that have worked well for you!