May 26, 20203 min read

Growing Your Instagram Audience

Instagram Now

As we continue to quarantine ourselves during this pandemic, who isn’t on Instagram nowadays? Whether it’s sharing your boredom at home, having photoshoots on your front porch, and even trying to start cooking, we can see how people around us are adapting to the life of social distancing.

Online presence is stronger than ever. Although COVID-19 has negatively impacted many industries across the world, social media continues to thrive. Particularly, Instagram has seen a consistent user base worldwide, with over 1 billion.

With this many users, the question remains unanswered: How can I expand followers on my Instagram? Whether it’s for a business or a personal account, here are a few tips and guidelines on how you can scale your Instagram audience to extraordinary levels. Regardless of the current pandemic, the potential to grow your Instagram is endless.

Authenticity

Be yourself. Be original. Make your presence be known as something that’s unique and not like any other. You want to instill this sense of authenticity so that your audience is more inclined to consistently engage with your content.

Hashtags

Use hashtags. In the beginning stages of your growth process, you want to utilize hashtags in your posts. It’s easy and better yet, free. An efficient way to use the right hashtags is to look up five big, ten middle-sized, and five small hashtags that pertain to your product/service that you are trying to grow. The goal is not to gain likes to impress anyone, but to grow your business profile!

Running Ads

Another simple way to grow your page is to run ads. By promoting your profile through Instagram advertising, you get to create your own audience by selecting a wide variety of interests. Essentially, running your profile as an ad post will allow you to increase your followers. Additionally, an alternate option you can utilize is to run an ad on every single one of your posts to boost engagement. Remember, you want to put out authentic content that will make your audience engage with your posts, whether it’s taking them to a landing page or having them like/comment on the post.

Consistency

Post consistently. Posting content on a regular basis is the key to growth. Depending on your niche, you should be posting anywhere between 3-4 times a week. Eventually, you’ll get to a point where you might have to post content every day, but again, depending on what kind of business you are trying to grow, you should always have a strong and updated social media presence.

Value

Not everything is about teaching or giving information to your followers. Mix it up a bit. Again, because you want to make your business or yourself sound authentic on Instagram, you need to feed the core reasons as to why your followers are following you. Keeping this in mind, questioning is a good way to maximize engagement levels within your audience. Asking things like:

“What do you prefer?”
“What do you think about this?”
“Tell us what you think!”

This method of “questioning” not only provides value to your product or service but more importantly strengthens your audience engagement by keeping it personal.

Activity

Be active. Make sure that you are up to date with every comment, share, and reposts that your audience leaves for you. By interacting with your audience, you create the most valuable asset: a group of true fans who will continue to go back to your content.

The Takeaway

Although some of these tips may seem overwhelming at first, it’s important to note that these guidelines are vital in boosting your follower base. After making the initial outreach to customers, you must consistently build upon that and look to expand.