In this guide on how to Increase Your Instagram Followers And Grow Organically, learn our top hacks that will help you gain real followers and drive engagement on your Instagram posts, stories, and reels.
The way we use Instagram has changed significantly in the past eight years with the introduction of features such as stories, reels and broadcast channels. This is no longer a picture-sharing platform.
In today’s fast-changing digital landscape, Instagram remains a powerhouse for businesses, influencers, and individuals to connect with their audience and grow their brand presence. However, gaining followers can be tricky with the ever-changing algorithms and increasing competition (1.4 billion users, actually!). That’s why we’ve compiled 14 effective strategies that can set you on the path to boost your Instagram following and drive engagement in 2024.
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Add Reels to your content mix
When Instagram first launched, it was a social media to share your best pictures. However, in 2016, it quickly moved to video with the introduction of stories and then reels in 2020. Stories are personal content that can only be viewed by followers and people who click on your page. On the other hand, Reels help you reach a wider audience, drive traffic, grow your brand awareness and help with the premise to Increase Your Instagram Followers And Grow Organically.
Some jaw-dropping statistics shown by DemandSage show that 2.35 billion people watch reels a month; they get 22% more interaction than standard videos, and it’s predicted that 2.5 billion people will engage with reels in the future. The rise of short-form content continues, and these stats demonstrate why you need to incorporate reels into your content strategy. Get involved in trends and challenges to capture your audience’s attention.
Optimise your Instagram profile
You’re probably thinking, what does this even mean? It’s an accumulation of a variety of things. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your username relevant to your business or personal brand?
- Are you posting at the correct times? (We cover this in the ‘find the right time to post’ section).
- Is it clear what you do?
- Are you creating engaging content?
The action you should take based on these questions is amending your username to fit your business or personal brand. This is a quick fix and can be updated if it doesn’t need to be reviewed. Find out more information on Instagram’s help page here. To ensure the audience you reach isn’t left wondering what you do, create a short, snappy and concise bio complete with links to your website. Click our ‘find the right time to post’ and our ‘diversify content’ sub-headers above to find the answers to the rest of the questions.
Create content for a feature account
What is a feature account? ‘A feature account is gallery created with a laser-focused niche.’ These accounts are community-driven and sometimes can have huge followings. Creating content aimed to be featured on these accounts could land you a significant boost in organic traffic. One of my favourites is the @earthpix account, which features fantastic imagery from wildlife and nature.
Do some research on feature accounts in your industry and the types of content they feature. Then, try to replicate this by creating content and using the appropriate hashtags to ensure you get featured.
Diversify Content
Ensuring you post a variety of content is critical to ensuring your audience remains engaged with your page. Below are some of the content types you could utilise on your page:
- Carousels: You can use these to display images and videos consecutively. These are best used to tell a cohesive story.
- Reels: These represent the best way to expand your reach in short-form video content on Instagram.
- GIFs: These are great for expressing emotions and demonstrating your reaction, best used with a killer caption.
- Stories: Show your current audience what you’re up to, and share a reel or a link to relevant content. Utilise story highlights to ensure your stories remain on your page past the 24-hour mark.
- Images: The classic. Share a created poster or a picture that your audience can relate to.
Keep your content unique, which will help gain traffic to keep and grow your page.
Engage regularly
Creating content is one key area, but engaging with your audience is essential. We all love to feel like we’re being listened to, so replying to Dave’s comment saying how amazing you are or dealing with Karen’s snarky reply can help show your audience you hear them.
Outside of the comments left on your posts why not reshare a funny reel relevant to your audience on your story or even share someone’s post on your story who’s tagged you. If you get a lot of funny replies and comments, you could make a short reel laughing and reacting to them, adding to the authenticity of your brand. After all, audiences love to follow people and brands who engage with them.
Collaborate with creators & influencers
Is there already a lot of competition in your industry or niche? First, why compete with them when you can help each other? This one might be a bit more difficult if you’re just starting; however, just find creators and influencers similar in stature to your page. By doing this, you can help promote yourself on their content.
You’re already working with someone in your industry, so you know you’re hitting the right audience. Ensure the content has a good call to action to follow your page so you get traffic to your page. This blog by the Influencer Marketing Hub shows how you can find influencers in your niche with whom to collaborate.
Host competitions
This one is simple. Host a giveaway or a competition to win a prize related to your audience. This will encourage others to enter the competition. One fantastic way to grow your audience by doing this is to make your audience follow you and tag three friends in the post to enter. This way, you’re opening yourself up to a new audience who would be interested in your giveaway. Check out this blog by Hootsuite, which gives 11 ideas for getting new followers.
Keep Consistent
Consistency is vital in building up your organic followers on Instagram. HootSuite recommends posting at least three times a week minimum on Instagram using varied content (reels, carousels and static posts). Doing this increases your chances of showing up on Instagram’s Explore feed, being mentioned by another account or appearing at the top of search results for keywords you commonly use.
Research Hashtags your audience is using
This is an easy one but will require some consistency (like mentioned above) and an understanding of where your audience is. Conducting hashtag research on Instagram is as easy as typing in ‘#nature’ on the search bar and seeing how many posts there are on this hashtag. It can also be a great tactic to Increase Your Instagram Followers And Grow Organically.
Let’s imagine we’re a forest walking club and want to reach our audience of other forest walkers. We use the hashtag ‘#nature’ I can see this has 805M people posting about it!
Okay, so now let’s look more into our niche of ‘#forestwalk’, which has around 1.1m posts and is a bit more targeted. We know people will be talking about forest walks within these posts.
We can also see ‘#forestwalks’, which has 250k posts, which is an even more targeted niche and means our post will stick around towards the top for longer if we use this hashtag. In contrast, if we use #nature, it will be buried by many posts that don’t have anything to do with what we’re targeting. This is how we optimise our hashtags. While we’re on the topic of optimising hashtags, you also want to aim for around 3-5 hashtags in a post to ensure your captions aren’t cluttered and spammy.
Organise Instagram Stories into Highlights
Highlights help to keep all of your content in order and looking sleek. An example of when you might use highlights is when you’re showing off a specific product. You can give highlights, a nice cover image and title it as the name of the product; see below.
This will mean your followers or people who come across your page for the first time will have constant access to these stories, and they’ll be readily available to view.
Find the right time to post
You can post as consistent, compelling content as much as you like, but it’s pointless if you’re not hitting the correct times when your audience is online. So, how do you know if your audience is online? Well, you don’t… Okay, that’s a lie; there are some fantastic resources like this one from HootSuite, which breaks down the best time to post different types of content and how they found the best time to post. In truth, it comes down to the kind of content you’re posting and trial and error.
It can vary depending on where your audience is, such as if you have a substantial USA-based audience but you’re in the UK. Conduct some research into your industry and look into scheduling your content to hit your audience at the right time. No one wants to get up at 1 am for an Instagram post.
Craft compelling captions
People are constantly scrolling through their feeds and fast. You need to capture their attention on Instagram; the content is crucial, but what about once you have their attention? Check out some quick tips below:
- Frontload your caption with the important stuff.
- Include a call to action. What do you want your audience to do?
- Use emojis.
- Keep it brief and concise.
By doing this, you’ll have your audience taking the required action in no time.
Cross-promote content
This one is simple. Cross-promote your content on your other social media channels. Post your reels on Facebook or TikTok and show off your Instagram content to your audience on other platforms. Cross-promotion will help to bring these audiences over to Instagram.
Review Analytics
This will help to understand if your content is successful. The analytics you view will vary depending on your objectives, but some good ones to follow are:
- Watch time (Reels and video content)
- Engagement rate
- Followers
- Profile Visits
Again, what you track will depend on your goals and objectives. Analytics will help guide your content and help you amend and tweak it to continue gaining traffic and followers on your page. Look at this blog for other metrics to track on Instagram in 2024.
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About the Author: Brandon Sadler
