How to Organically Increase your Instagram Following
When it comes to Instagram, the thing that everyone wants to know about is followers.
You want to gain credibility, increase top of funnel traffic, or want more chances of brand partnerships or collaborations.
And whether you’ve been a user for years, or you have recently started an account and hope to boost your presence, you want to know how to grow followers and what you’re missing from those accounts that seem to effortlessly gain followers.
To address these issues, let’s start from your perspective and work backwards. Really think about the accounts you follow. Why do you follow them?
Maybe you’re searching for some inspiration on… dinner, for instance. You may open Instagram, go into hashtags, search #dinnerinspo or something similar, scroll through until something interests you, and click on a post to see if there’s a recipe.
When you read it, not only do you get a recipe, but the post touches on the struggles of coming up with something new, quick and easy for dinner. You suddenly feel like you’re being understood, and that this post is reading your mind! This makes you want to know more. Maybe this account has other great meal ideas, you think.
So, you click on the account profile, and the first thing you see is a clean, professional looking feed layout, with clear headlines like “breakfast-on-the-go,” or “simple brunch spread.” The bio emphasizes something like
Your go-to hub for holistic wellness: #vegan #glutenfree recipes⠀
In the past, you’ve tried looking at similar accounts, but they all seem to have the same kind of recipes and things you’ve already tried.
To your surprise, this account has fresh ideas. It’s not long before you hit that blue follow button and even save a few recipe posts to use for the rest of the week!
Now, what can we learn from this user behavior? If you want followers, your job is to recreate a similar user experience for your account topic or industry.
This user experience centers around keywords, which are the words and phrases associated with the purpose and focus of your Instagram account.
As such, we start with creating quality content that uses these keywords.
Quality content
Before you can get followers, people have to know about you. But not everyone who knows about you has a vested interest in following you. Those that feel connected enough to your account and posts because you resonate with them in some way have a higher chance of following you.
Creating quality posts is mainly about providing value to your target audience. What problems or goals you are seeking to help with? These are your initial keywords. If you’re a wellness coach, these may be stress or chronic pain. Make posts topics, and include hashtags, related to these topics.
The more of such content you produce, the higher the chances that more of people that resonate with these topics will find you and follow you.
But beyond them finding you, you can also find your people. But how do you know who these people are and where to find them on Instagram?
Knowing your target audience answers this question.
Engage directly with your target audience
If all you do is broadcast quality posts consistently, that leaves a lot up to chance. Think of how much your content has to stand out from all the other posts in hashtags for your target audience to see and click through.
Luckily, there is more than one kind of Instagram user experience. Consider while you’re scrolling through hashtags looking for dinner inspiration, you get a notification that an account has commented on your post. Curious, you click to see what it is.
Your last meal that you posted about has a comment that reads something like: “Looks delicious. We enjoy similar food, particularly the turmeric add.”
In this case, value was brought directly to you in the form of a compliment, and you’re moved enough to click over to the account. This is the power of engaging directly with your target audience. It bypasses the noise and luck of being found in hashtags or the explore page alone.
To create experiences like this for you, ask yourself these questions:
What types of posts does your audience consume?
What hashtags do they use/follow?
What do they need to overcome problems or concerns in their life?
These give you even more keywords to work with.
Next, insert the initial keywords you’ve used to create quality content, along with the ones you’ve discovered through answering the above questions, and put them into Instagram search to see what accounts or hashtags come up.
Selectively engage with these accounts and hashtags, then after a few days, you should start seeing followers from this type of outreach.
The thing is, though, that lots of other accounts offer similar purposes and value. What would make your target audience follow your wellness account over others?
This brings us to having an eye-catching feed layout, the third part of our system.
Eye-catching feed layout
You can differentiate yourself through your feed layout. The way your account looks alone isn’t enough to get you followers, but it helps people that have already discovered you get a further impression to decide if they want to follow or not.
This may only account for 1 or 2 more followers every time you post, or for every day of outreach, but over time, these numbers add up quickly.
To achieve a layout that maximizes followers, think of how the keywords you’ve gathered, based on what you’re providing (stress relief or pain relief), can be converted into visual symbols, colors and designs. You could be described as calming and therapeutic, so symbols like plants or a spa, and mellow greens, blues, or white represent what you do.
In general, choosing a clean and professional, aesthetically pleasing layout gives you a good impression. While there are many tools out there to help you achieve this, we use our knowledge of color psychology, coolors.co, and Planoly to craft and test how our feed looks before we post.
These 3 parts, if implemented, provide a steady stream of followers. But sometimes you’ll experience slumps or plateaus, which is why we continually test, too.
Continually Test
What’s good about having keywords being included in all parts of this system is that when followers stop growing, we know it has something to do with keywords. Most likely, it’s because we’ve already exhausted them. We’ve helped our target audience overcome an obstacle, and now they have a different problem or goal.
Which is why we cycle back to step 1 and start posting different content related to your account’s purpose aligned to other keywords, different searches, and even tweaking designs and colors to a degree, all until we start getting a steady stream of followers again.
Conclusion
We here at Reform Balance Academy (RBA) believe that understanding keywords is the key to also growing followers.
So there it is, our four part cycle to grow your following.
- Quality Content
- Knowing your target audience
- Eye-catching feed layout
- Testing and optimizing
If you follow these steps and include them in your content strategy, you will grow your following, too.
But here’s the thing. Followers alone are not all you need. You’re trying to grow a business and ultimately convert your target audience into paying customers or clients.
Our system gets you in front of more of your target audience while also happening to grow your following.
In order to get your audience to convert the rest of the way, you need to have your content strategy set up for success….
And RBA’s course will get you there. Click here if you’re interested to work with us.
Tell us, have you considered using Instagram for business or professional purposes? And how do you most effectively find you get followers that are right for you? Let us know in the comments.
