How to Get more Instagram Followers
After sharing with you some tips to become a successful influencer, Influence4You has outlined the key steps for increasing your Instagram reach and gaining followers.
Find your niche and specialty
Let’s be honest here. Unless you were in a successful reality show and already have hundreds of thousands of fans like Charlotte Crosby or Amanda Stanton, taking selfies in front of the mirror isn’t going to cut it. You are going to need to find a real niche, something that sets you apart. Do you have a special skill? A passion? Something unique? That’s fantastic! This will help you find your audience, as you will need to bring real value.
Take for example the young @josephinewit. What makes her special? She is a young French woman living in Mexico, with a Mexican partner. She speaks Spanish with a exquisite French accent that Latin Americans love. She shares her everyday life as a French woman in a new country. Her approach was successful as she has over 110K followers on Instagram and more than 400K subscribers on her YouTube channel. Her video where she reacts to “Emily in Paris” has been viewed nearly 400K times.
Quality content with high value
To increase your number of subscribers you’ll have to upload content regularly. This is why Influence4You strongly recommends that you choose something you love before creating your account. If you don’t like cars, it’s going to be very difficult to post mechanical tests at least twice a week! Because consistency is the key. You’ll need to post at least 2 original and inspiring pieces of content per week:
- Your photos must be original. Don’t use stock photos, for example. Ideally, your photos should help people to connect with you. If they’ve never seen the photo before, they’re more likely to be surprised and like it.
- Write an inspiring caption, with a clear call to action to leave a comment. You can post an open-ended question, share your opinion and ask your community for instance. This will get people to talk in the comment section which means more engagement! To boost the interactions that your audience makes with your content, some social media specialists recommend posting “controversial” content once or twice a month. What does that mean? It means taking a stand on an issue related to your niche, something that people tend to debate about. You can then share your position and ask for people’s opinion.
Engagement is the key to the Instagram algorithm. The more likes and comments you get on your posts, the more your visibility will increase, especially with hashtags.
Partner with other accounts
If you have few followers, it may a good idea to collaborate with other influencers who share the same target audience, so you can benefit from their audience.
- Choose your collaborator: Ideally, choose collaborators who have 50% more or less subscribers than you. If you have 800 followers, your ideal collaborator should have between 400 and 1200 followers. Targeting an influencer with fewer followers than you makes you more likely not to be turned down. If after the collaboration you manage to gain even only 10% of your collaborator’s audience it’s still great. If the other influencer had 1200 followers, that means you made 120 new followers making up about 15% of your total audience. Not bad, right?
- Choose themes: Let’s say you are a beauty influencer and you’re used to doing beauty tutorials, product tests, etc. What themes would interest your audience? Cosmetic medicine, face care, holistic beauty, maybe even facial yoga? The idea is to entertain your audience with your collaborators and try to attract their audience with your content.
- Contact potential collaborators: do not choose a competitor but someone who is “complementary” to your activity. The goal is that they have the same target audience. Let’s carry on with our beauty influencer example. Collaborating with a cosmetic medicine practitioner who can talk about botox or other treatments could allow you to gain subscribers who are interested in this topic, and in beauty in general. They may also be interested in your beauty tutorials and your product reviews!
Types of collaborations
There are so many options here! You can share your collaborators’ stories and they can do the same for you. You can also mention them in a story and vice versa. The best being a “physical” collaboration, i.e. a post a photo together or a live interview. But this isn’t always possible in terms of organization. In any case, you should know that there are many possibilities and that you shouldn’t be shy contacting other influencers. It will also allow you to discuss with other Instagrammers, share your techniques and answer each other’s questions. It’s a win-win.
Use quality hashtags
To increase your visibility and therefore your follower count, you need to use relevant and quality hashtags. Remember, when people search topics on Instagram, it’s often through hashtags. Your hashtags should be in your target’s language (if you are targeting a local market). You can find them using hashtag generators. Check out hashtagify.me. It allows you to generate lots of hashtags related to a key word. You can choose to write your hashtags directly in your post or in your comment section, both options work well.
Should you buy followers on Instagram?
The answer is NO. Some tutorials or guides online will recommend you to do so, but Influence4You strongly advises against it. Why is that? Because the best way to be successful on Instagram and get deals with interesting brands is to have a good engagement rate! Buying followers allows you to increase your follower count very quickly, but these accounts aren’t run by humans. They are known as “bots” and will never engage with your posts. Having 1,000 followers but only 4 likes on your posts will not really help you and will instead arouse suspicion. Your credibility will then be seriously jeopardized and it will be difficult for you to recover from that.
Finally, note that most influence marketing platforms are equipped with fake profile and fake follower detectors as is the case at Influence4You!
Should I use automation tools?
Once again the answer is NO. There are many great tools for influencers. We share with you our favorite picks in our article 10 tools for influencers. But automation tools are not one of them. Many sites promise you wonders including organic growth, engagement and more followers. We are talking here automated likes, follow/unfollow and comments. Instagram has strengthened its security policy against such automated software and is really good at detecting them. You could end up being a blocked or even have your account deleted for using this kind of service. Nothing beats spending time on the platform, commenting, sharing, and liking posts yourself. It’s important that you interact with others yourself. It may seem time consuming at first, but your efforts will eventually pay off.
In short, exchange with other influencers, collaborate and engage! Consistency and frequency are key so don’t forget to regularly upload content and don’t give in to easy followers. Becoming an influencer takes time and is not a race! Put your heart and passion into the journey!
Feel free to check out our other articles and to sign up on the Influence4You platform to contact and find great collaborations with numerous brands.
