Instagram has become one of the fastest marketed social media platforms that have opened the gates to many digital career options and digital marketing jobs including an influencer, blogger, social media personality, online brands, meme pages and more. Instagram has reportedly over a billion monthly users who use Instagram on an hourly basis and keep creating and publishing content constantly. With so many users, comprehensive algorithms, creative brands and various marketing strategies, it is an extremely competitive place to shine out and attract more and more followers towards your content. 

Getting more followers on Instagram is not as easy as it seems, there are a few tips and tricks to reach out to a larger audience and get more followers on Instagram.

Update your profile

Keeping your Instagram feed on point is the first and probably the most important thing to be kept in mind if you are trying to make it big in the Instagram world. Start with updating the profile with all the relevant information and make the account business or switch the public visibility. For other Instagrammers, you feed is your portfolio and your first opportunity to make a good impression and entice people on hitting that follow button. On average, a person visits your profile and takes a few seconds to decide whether they want to follow you or not and your content aka your feed will be the ice breaker for that. 

A good feed not only includes the edited pictures that you post but also an attractive Instagram profile photos, an interesting bio, story highlights and if you have a business profile, then what exactly you specialize in. a well-curated and aesthetic Instagram feed has more chances of getting genuine followers than a haphazard and poorly maintained Instagram feed. Plan your Instagram feed in advance and foresee how it will appear to the audience on a weekly or day to day basis. Make sure you schedule your post on time and have a visual planner like a social media marketing strategy to create the best possible outlook. 

There are a few apps that you can use for getting the aesthetic and follow-worthy Instagram profile. Get the photo editing apps like Adobe Light room, Snapseed, VSCO and more to use the appealing presets which make your average normal looking photo appear more attractive? There are also multiple Instagram stories templates available today like Unfold or Canva which can be used to make your stories more uniform, aligned, consistent and aesthetic.

Location tags are the new hashtags

Instagram Stories pop up on the Instagram Explore page, which means that people who don’t even follow you can still find and watch your stories.

If you can find your way to crawl into the explore page of Instagram, the audience can watch your feed or stories without even following you and then tap on your profile to follow you. The best way to do this is the relevant hashtags. But apart from the hashtags, Instagram also uses the geo-tags or geo-location tags in order to categorize the content. Location tags are basically used to find out the activities going on in that particular area or region. Both live stories and posts appear on geotags and if you are in a live event, using both hashtags and geotags will get you noticed and discovered by a larger crowd instantly. Be it a holiday destination, event, conference, party or just a restaurant, putting a location tag in your story will feature you on the explore page of that related geographical location. 

A lot of people are not aware of this technique and it can easily be recognized as the most underutilized Instagram hack which attracts a larger audience easily by searching the geotags. 

Face value matters a lot

Photos with faces get 40 per cent more likes than other photos on Instagram. Even though Instagram is a social media platforms where people can put photos of literally anything, anyone and anywhere; the algorithm recognizes the “people” more easily than other pictures. Even though people follow people, places and products, but they tend to be keener with people and their lives. Therefore, if you keep your Instagram account more personal, relatable and real; the chances of getting recognized by business, brands and other audience are higher than the usual 

There are tons of filter options in the Instagram stories, boomerang, videos, hand-free videos and the newest feature of live and IGTV videos which showcases the faces more personally than the feed. if you want to set a personal tone to your Instagram and not keep it too professional, artificial and plastics, make sure you put out your real pictures as much as you can. You can either put still pictures or videos. Currently, videos with faces on Instagram is attracting a lot more traffic than photographs. 

Create Instagram Ads

If you are all set to take up Instagram professionally then don’t shy away from Instagram ad campaigns. Having a good and established Instagram ad campaign is not extremely difficult but can be intimidating for people and brands who are just starting out. There are various kinds of Instagram ads that can be run online starting from feed style to images to videos; you can promote almost anything. The best part about these Instagram ads is you can target your audience as per your requirements. You can find the users with a particular kind of interest, age group, gender, location and preferences who will be more interested in your content as compared to others. 

Instagram does all the algorithms and finds a similar kind of audience who will view your ads. These sponsored ads are charged on the basis of your audience reach itself and thus, you can select the target and time according to your budget. 

Make sure you spend some time doing your research on finding the right kind of audience before customizing your Instagram ads target audience. Find out how and when you get the most engagement and what kind of content is most loved by the audience. Initially, put out some of your content to observe the response and then modify your strategies according to the results. Offer the audience what they want to see and now what you want to showcase, if you can find a middle ground for this, you will be doing great with your sponsored ads. 

Promote via other platforms 

Like people, even social media platforms cannot function in isolation. If you want to increase the reach and visibility of your content on Instagram, make sure you promote your posts on other social media platforms as well. Instagram gives you the option of sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr while you are posting it on the gram. Your Instagram strategy must include wider marketing efforts which can help you grow beyond the application. This strategy is popularly known as cross-promoting and can be done in other marketing channels of content like YouTube or WordPress as well. Since most of these social media platforms are interlinked in a manner, all of them keep an eye on your content and the consistency will help you appear on the explore more often and will increase the horizon of your engagement as the content will be available for a larger audience. 

Customized filter

Augmented reality is the newest trend in social media marketing and not a lot of people know they are using it on an everyday basis. The filters on various social media apps like Instagram or snap chat with the dog filter and black and white filter etc. are the part of augmented reality. Many major brands have crafted their own AR for Instagram stories. The most popular one happens to be stories from Kylie cosmetic and Fenty beauty by Rhianna. When a user uses the brand’s AR filter in the stories, the viewers are enticed to visit their profiles and use it for their own stories. 

You can get an Instagram filter customized for your profile for more visitors. This is a creative and a subtle way of inviting more people towards your story. There are some tips and tricks you can follow to make the most out of your filters, like make the filters more user-friendly and shareable, you can also make it fun and interesting which can be a new trend on stories for everyone. Also, make sure you include a subtle hint of branding to the filters without actually giving out a full-blown sales pitch.

Collaborate as much as you can

Instagram is all about posting and sharing. If you want to increase the follower’s count for your profile, starts collaborating as much as you can. Collaboration is like a co-marketing campaign where you partner with like-minded people, influencers, brands or business who will happily introduce your profile with their audience. This way you will be able to reach a wide horizon of audience. Instagram is full of social media influencers and there are various kinds of collaboration that takes place. You can do a full-blown barter system, a paid collaboration or just out of goodwill, either way, you will come down to a mutually beneficial partnership with the other person. 

The effectiveness of co-marketing campaigns can vary differently depending on your budget, it does not have to be too complicated and costly but more of a consensual business collaboration from which bot the parties can easily reap the benefits. 

These were some of the effective starter packs of growing your Instagram following organically. Having a curated social media strategy after carrying out thorough research is much better than getting paid followers. The process of increasing your followers count on Instagram organically is slow but extremely effective in the long run. This will not only keep your content genuine and attract real viewers instead of spam of fake followers

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