5 Ways to Grow Your Instagram Profile
One of the effective social channels is Instagram and with a large user base, you can effectively use it for marketing, but how do you grow your Instagram profile?
When using Instagram, it can be an effective channel to grow your business and brand in conjunction with other social channels.
In 2021, 2022 and into the future, growing your Instagram following and engagement is vital, being one of the main ways of engaging in digital communications.
In this article, it will lay out 5 ways to grow your Instagram profile so you can use it more effectively for your marketing efforts and strategies:
1. Instagram Stories
When sharing content using Instagram Stories, one of the many features within the platform is the stories feature, two of the elements within stories, are Polls and Questions.
On Instagram, stories, especially when you’re using a sticker that provokes engagement or conversation from a concept that is helpful or informative, will create more engagement and make your audience more engaged. You could also use polls or questions in stories for feedback or research for your business.
When using questions or polls in stories, if you want to link out to other services, products or pieces of information externally to Instagram, this can now be achieved through the link sticker.
Within stories on Instagram (which can be shared to Facebook), as mentioned, with the use of the link sticker you can promote an external piece of content or share information externally from the Instagram platform, this means you can make Instagram stories, part of your next campaign or marketing funnel for awareness within your promotional pieces.
2. Consistency
When uploading content to Instagram, consistency is one of the most crucial factors for building engagement and increasing the audience which is following your content pieces.
Uploading images, videos or stories to Instagram consistently will help grow your following as your audience will come back for that piece of content. If there is a schedule for your content, this will help because your audience will know when to expect an additional piece of content on your profile. This would also grow your engagement rates on the released content.
When posting regularly to social platforms, especially Instagram, this is where it is another important factor to ask your audience to turn on push notifications based the algorithm will factor your post within a couple of minutes, but the first hour is important for the posts trajectory. The engagement you gain on a post, the more people will see it.
The consistency of stories throughout the day and week will help grow your Instagram profile. You should also upload as many stories to Instagram as possible throughout the day but don’t record stories for the sake of it, make sure the content is interesting.
3. Hashtags
There are 2 main types of hashtags you should use: popular and longtail.
Longtail hashtags are hashtags that not as many people have used so they only have between 0–25,000 images connected to them and are more niche than Popular keywords. Popular keywords are hashtags are used more than other hashtags and they have more than 100,000+ images connected to them.
Using popular keywords can grow your profile’s following whereas using longtail keywords can grow your engagement as likes and comments and sometimes shares. Using a mix of both will grow your following and engagement throughout the different posts you upload and through the content created.
4. Geo Location Tags
Geolocation tags will help more people see your profile and the total reach of your profile. When people are searching locations, especially locally, then this can grow your profile and sometimes increase likes and comments as engagement.
Through location tags, if you’re trying to build an audience around a specific location or an area, adding a location is important because other users on Instagram can follow these locations or search these locations for content in their area.
If you’re building a business, the usage of geo-location tagging can is extremely useful because when people search for business industries, or even the generalised location, your posts and Instagram profile has the potential of showing up in the listing so more people will see your profile and potentially convert into customers.
This is even more important when you’re a brick and mortar business because this element will be slightly different in the strategy around your marketing campaigns.
5. Promote via Other Channels
Promoting your Instagram via other social channels. When promoting your Instagram, and other social channels, on external channels will grow your following and sometimes engagement.
When you’re trying to promote your content on other channels, it is important to build up these channels as well, here are a few tips to build up other social media channels:
Twitter:
- Use fewer hashtags
When using hashtags on Twitter you should use two or fewer hashtags. When using more than 2 hashtags, your engagement drops by an average of 17%.
Within your Twitter copy, try and integrate the hashtags within the text organically, otherwise, the hashtags will look forced and put people off engaging with that specific piece of content.
YouTube:
- SEO Algorithm
The main objective for building a growing YouTube channel is a great thumbnail, title and tags.
This includes tags that surround your content that will improve your rankings in the youtube algorithm. If your thumbnail isn’t matching and somewhat clickbaity, then no one is going to discover your content.
Even if people do discover your content, the likeliness of people clicking on it is quite low, so ensuring you keep up with youtube standards and best practices in this creative medium is important to ensure sharable content.
If you want to learn more about marketing, social media, and the strategies surrounding it, you can follow me on here. I’m also going to start being more active on Twitter, so if you wish you can, follow me there also.
Hopefully, this article helped you, or you have learned something new, thanks for reading!
