So you’ve just opened an Instagram account and are looking to gain your first 1000 Instagram followers fast. Let’s take baby steps. So the question is how to get your first 1000 Instagram followers fast?
Now there are 2 ways you can do it. One is spending big bucks and doing it the shady way and the other is having an organic growth and a committed fan base. There are many sketchy methods you can try like buying fake followers and using spammy bots to grow your Instagram followers fast.
Albeit when it comes to detecting and deleting “Suspicious Activity”, Instagram has stepped up its game. Such questionable strategies and blackhat ways might raise your followers for a brief while, yet they won’t help you in the long run.
So we’ll resort and stick to the natural and organic way of growing your Instagram followers that will pay off in the long run. So let’s dive in.
13 Hacks to Grow Your Instagram Following:
Unlucky 13 as many people call it. But today, 13 is gonna be your lucky number as we tell you 13 different things you can do to increase your followers fast. Like really fast.
1. Plan a Great Strategy
Just like everything in life requires careful planning before execution, Instagram is no exception to this rule. Using this social media platform without a good strategy and planning may lead to a waste of resources and low ROI. The investment here doesn’t necessarily have to be your money. It can be the time and work hours you put into it
As you’re here, you’re possibly trying to grow your following on Instagram. But your approach should go with the overall sales plan and marketing goals. So start out with a great plan.
2. Switch to a Business Account
By default, your Instagram account is set to private. That means only followers you permit and accept follow requests can see your content. This limits your reach to a huge extent and you can’t apply any of the tactics that we are going to discuss below. Your hashtags won’t matter either.
Switch to a business account on Instagram today to make sure you can have all the premium features starting from seeing your audience insights to reach and engagement of your posts.
3. Find Your Target Audience
Whether you’re starting out with Instagram or trying to grow your existing fanbase, it’s crucial to find a new audience involved in what sort of content you’re preparing to make.
As a part of Instagram Insights, their analytics tool, the platform provides a lot of useful information for learning more about who these people are.
These help you identify your Instagram follower’s user demographics starting from their age, gender, and a number of other things. Cater your posts towards them to get the best bang for the buck
4. Post Engaging Content
This is one of the most important steps in starting your Instagram journey. It doesn’t matter how much cash you throw in to boost your posts, as long as you don’t post content that creates engagement, you’re bound to collapse sooner or later.
Everything you post must be interesting to your targeted audience. Good content encourages users to like and comment on it. This engagement signals to Instagram that the post is helpful and Instagram shows it to more people. More reach results in more influence and more followers.
Always add “Call To Action” in the caption.
This can be something as simple as “Hey what are your top three favorite lipstick brands?” in the caption of a post
5. Host Contests/Giveaways and Grab Attention
Contests and giveaways grab people’s attention and get maximum reach and engagement to your content. More engagement = More chances of getting a Follow. Only once you’ve grabbed someone’s attention with an image will they look at your captions.
6. Highlight Stories
Instagram stories see engagement higher than regular posts. They help you provide regular notifications, and build longer brand narratives. After 24 hours, however, stories vanish which is a bummer.
You should host Story Highlights on your profile page, so people new to your brand would be able to access them. If the Story Highlight is adequately engaging the consumer may actually decide to follow you. This will be a big step forward in gaining your first 1000 Instagram followers.
7. Use Appropriate Hashtags
Whether it be generating leads for your business or increasing followers, using an Instagram hashtag will increase your engagement by 12.6%. over a post that has no hashtags. They can be a difference-maker when it comes to most of the posts being unseen.
Well great! So just slap around a few hashtags and boom! You’re set to go right? Wrong! You must carefully research your Instagram hashtags and compile them to get stellar results. You must put targeted hashtags that align well with your niche unless you want subpar results. So you should use a mix of low competitive, medium competitive, and high competitive hashtags related to your post.
8. Follow the Hashtag Rule
Whenever someone searches a hashtag you used, they’ll find your post or story. This is a great way to attract people that are not within your reach.
Don’t Spam Hashtags
Use the Instagram search function to know about popular hashtags related to your product, business, or industry. Although you can use a total of 30 hashtags per post, we highly request you do not spam hashtags. 20 is a fairly good number that you should cap your numbers with.
Don’t Use Spammy Hashtags
However, don’t use gimmicky hashtags like #like4like, #follow4follow, which will give you only a temporary increase in followers. But they will likely be spammers at best who will just follow you to get a follow back and unfollow you again
Maintain a balance between High and Low-Engaging Hashtags
Let’s say you have a makeup business or clothing business. If so do not use hashtags like #fashion #ootd #outfit_of_the_day. These hashtags are very populated and the chances of people seeing your post through searching these hashtags are very rare. So use a hashtag with a mid-level reach so that your post doesn’t get flooded.
If you’re posting 20 hashtags, then use 8 low competitive hashtags, 8 medium-competitive hashtags, and only 4 high competitive hashtags for the maximum benefit.
9. Write an Engaging Bio
Although your posts are generally the first item new followers can see, your profile can help link to your audience. Bios will help people form an overall impression of you. An example of a very engaging or alluring bio that would pique people’s interest could be “Life is short. Don’t waste time following other people unless it’s me”
10. Tag your location
Think of it in this way. You went out to grab yourself a coffee at Starbucks. Like you every day over a thousand people go to Starbucks. You were going to direct a friend towards your location so you searched Starbucks. When you did you did not only find the location but also many people’s Instagram posts of when they were present there.
When your company/business has a location, make sure that it is marked and tagged in your posts and advise clients/customers to do the same. Then users can click on that location to see all pictures and stories posted from your shop, restaurant, or office. It can help connect more people to the brand (and Instagram account). So tagging your location in your posts is a brilliant strategy.
11. Know the Right Time to Post
People spend the whole day interacting with Instagram. The perfect time to share on Instagram depends on when the viewer is most interested. But you don’t have ti post every hour to figure out when you’re getting the maximum engagement.
Thanks to Instagram Insights now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Through that, you can see which time is the best to post on your feed and also when your audience is usually the most active. Many forms of Instagram posts are more influenced than others by the uploading period. For starters, stories around peak hours can pull in more viewers, while posts will gain momentum over a few days.
12. Post consistently
Remember the golden rule. 1 post a day keeps the boredom away. It’s needless to say that your current followers subscribed to you to see your posts.
As we just mentioned, when users interact with your posts, that activity is visible to their followers. So give them something great to interact with! Posting regularly will give you the chance to pop up on everyone’s explorer page thus resulting in you getting more reach
13. Use IG TV
Instagram TV is a channel where you can view video content inside the stream which is longer than the 60 seconds permitted. IGTV helps you to expose your brand to consumers without any time limits, and they truly appreciate the appeal of your channel and are likely to pursue it. It is a relatively new feature; one that’s best suited for content creators. Create video content and post it to IGTV to grow Instagram followers fast
Conclusion
So there you have it. 13 “lucky” steps that you can incorporate starting today to grow your Instagram followers fast. Best of all you don’t even need to spend money or buy followers or use bots/tools to increase your following which may or may not pay off in the long run. We are hopeful if you follow these 13 steps, you’ll greatly grow your Instagram following.
As always we love hearing from you So, we would love to hear about your experience in growing your Instagram account. If you have any queries don’t hesitate to comment down below. Have you ever tried to grow your Instagram following? Did you try any other tactics that worked for you that we haven’t shared? Would you recommend our article to your friends?