Instagram is one of the leading social media platforms these days. From the user’s perspective as well as from the marketers’ perspective, the photo-sharing platform has been a popular choice.
It is a beautiful online photo and video-sharing site allowing the user to connect to the world. The level of social network connectivity enjoyed through Instagram is phenomenal.
According to Instagram statistics, the Instagram community boasts of engagement of more than 500 Million users worldwide with 300 million active users.
The social media giant has traffic of approximately 70 million new photos per day, and 5.2 billion photos are liked daily.
For businesses, it’s a way to let your brand reach out to a maximum number of people, give it a human touch, make people trust your brand, surprise the consumers and generate business and popularity.
Here are a few ways and tools you can follow to start collecting a massive following for your personal or professional account.
It is all about how to put your time and content to use.
Use Instagram in Style
Start Posting Regularly
Once your Instagram account is active, you should start posting. Have at least of 15-20 photos to start with. Make a plan for how you will be going about the posts. How often you are going to post and rest. Post often and aim to be more connected.
Posting 2-3 photos on average every day is recommended. The most successful accounts post with a higher frequency. If you share on a regular basis and your posts pick up the right engagement, then the Instagram algorithm will do the rest for you.
Timing
Post pictures of the day and post videos during the night. The simple reason would be that during the day people are busy and can just look at your pictures whereas during the night time (9pm-8am) they have time and can enjoy the luxury of watching your posted video.
Instagram is available 24/7, so there is no particular time to post your photos. But according to research the maximum number of people posts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Go ahead and try your luck.
Create Cool Captions
Posting pictures are nice. However, the caption of the posted image plays an imperative role. It introduces your picture and what you wish to say with your posted image.
Showcase your brand in the caption. Catch your audience’s fancy with the picture. Ask them a question or communicate with them in your caption.
Use High-Quality Images
Quality matters on Instagram. Instagram is all about photos. A bad picture goes unnoticed and unappreciated. It does not mean that you have to take a photography course or spend hours trying to learn Instagram but be good with pictures.
Use high-quality images.
Make it look good. Catch the fancy of an observer. The most popular filter has been no filter. But filtered photos have got 21% more views and 45%more comments than photos that did not use filters. The most sought-after filter is a combination of the following:
Use DSLRs to capture your pictures or use a better camera. Play with light and learn better techniques. Capture and post high-quality and visually stunning images.
You can also think of using good photo editing apps such as Afterlight (59 adjustable filters, 128 frames, and 66 different textures.), VSCO, Whitagram, PicStitch, Aviary, and many others.
Story Telling
Use storytelling to grab the attention of your followers and other users. Tell them an appealing and exciting story.
Build up a story around your picture simply by narrating the background and your thoughts about the picture. Create a story using visual content.
Make your audience feel valued and interest them. Develop that urge in them to listen to you. Grab their attention.
Give them something different and out of the box.
Use Quality and Quantifiably Mass Appealing Hashtags
Using just words can be limiting and less fruitful on Instagram. If you wish to connect with the masses, then you need to use trending hashtags. Hashtags can be used to find, track, share, and participate in topics of interest.
Larger brands with more than 1000 followers receive 21.21% interaction per post, but with 11 hashtags they receive staggering 77.66% interactions. Instagram allows the use of more than 30 hashtags.
However, avoid using hashtags on a large scale. Try to pick and choose. Try to do your research. Use ‘Explore’ option on Instagram to let you help in such cases.
Tagging a Friend
Tag a friend in your posts. Ask your friends to tag their friends further if they like a post. In this way, you would be able to reach more and more people.
Host an event and try to reach a maximum number of people. In an event or contest, you would be able to reach the highest number of individuals with similar interests.
Adding Emojis
Emojis have become popular among people as a form of expression. Instagram reports that nearly 50% of comments and captions have an emoji or two.
Engagement
Instagram keeps an open door for the people who follow you or want to follow you. People who already support you are interested in the things you have to offer.
Instagram connects people through photos and videos so consider a few things for better engagement.
For Business
Instagram worked with hundreds of business users to figure out what was needed to enhance their Instagram experience and it was understood that the three most important requirements of business users are:-
Primarily, they found that businesses want the ability to stand out on Instagram. Secondly, those businesses needed a better understanding of the current scenario and imagination into their future performance. And lastly, businesses want to expand.
Instagram offers a Business profile as a free feature for accounts wanting to be recognized as a business on Instagram.
Businesses can choose how they want to connect with their customers from three available options: Contact, Map (Direction to the location) and Email.
Insights on Instagram give businesses information about their users and followers and the post’s performances.
By knowing more about your audience, you can plan your posts better. Insights will feature metrics like reach, top posts, engagement and impressions around posts, and more info about your followers like their location, gender, and age.
Promoting your business is another interesting feature available that enables you to create ads within the app and make it accessible to your followers and encourage more following.
The Tools to Get a Massive Following on Instagram
Other than these ways to grab a massive following on Instagram, one can use a few tools to enhance the number of followers.
Here are a few of them.
1. Tailwind
Tailwind is one of the best optimization tools for Pinterest and Instagram. You may use Tailwind to increase your followers on these two platforms.
The Instagram marketing tool offered by Tailwind makes it simple for users to manage and grow following with a limited investment of time.
The Smart Instagram Assistant of Tailwind will help you to plan all your Instagram posts, and optimize them for better visibility and you will have the option to add smart bio links that will keep optimizing your landing pages.
2. Share My Insight
An all-in-one type of tool for Instagram marketing, the Share My Insight tool can be very handy to grow your Instagram following.
Over 5000 brands are already using this tool to grow their Insta account.
So, what can the Share My Insight tool can do to help you increase your following?
Well, to start with Share My Insight tool will give you complete statistics for your Insta posts so that you can analyze the data to check the kind of content that gets the maximum visibility and engagement.
Competition Tracking
Knowing your competitors can be very helpful when it comes to growing any business. Instagram is no different, you can use this tool to do a detailed analysis of your competitor’s account to understand how they are growing their profile.
Team Collaboration
You can use Share My Insight tool to collaborate with your team while you work on any campaign on Instagram. It allows you to add an unlimited number of team members to work with you.
This will be extremely helpful when you hire someone to work on your behalf. While they work on your Insta account, you can keep track of all the activities.
3. Schedugram
It is an extremely user-friendly and easy-to-use tool. The tool acts as a schedule manager to schedule your posts. You can plan in advance how you need to schedule your posts on Instagram. It also provides you with the flexibility for a single post as well as bulk posting.
4. Crowdfire
This incredibly powerful tool lets you clean your account in the simplest way. It efficiently manages your followers on Instagram.
Available for the iOS, web as well as Android platforms, the spectacular tool lets you easily manage who you follow and then pursue users who might have an inclination and interest in your offering of any service or product.
A few of the services offered by Crowdfire can be as follows
5. Later
Another very effective and useful Instagram tool that will help you schedule your posts for the image marketing platform. Many frontline brands are already using this tool to maximize their outreach on popular social platforms.
With the help of this tool, you can visually plan and schedule your posts for maximum benefit. Not only Instagram, but you can also use this tool to plan your posts on other leading social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools that is used by millions of users to automate the social marketing process.
The Hootsuite tool makes it easier to schedule your social media posts so that you can keep your timeline active all the time.
You can use this tool for many different social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. So, you will not have to go to all these sites separately and post your content, but you can manage all these from one single interface.
7. Olapic
This tool helps brands and businesses manage their posts as well as the posts of other valued followers. Curation, Activation, and Analysis are the three steps followed by a process.
It was earlier called as Piqora. It is a beautiful tool for enhancing your Instagram posting.
The tool uses the lethal combination of Artificial Intelligence as well as human advice who are professionals to help you manage and analyze your posts.
8. SocialRank
A well-known tool in the field of social media account management, SocialRank optimizes your online presence on Instagram. It provides value added to the basket of tools. It gives you information about valuable followers.
It lets you know who the social media influencers are. These influencers go a mile and provide you with a large gathering of followers simply because they have a huge following.
9. Facebook Power Editor
Integrating your posts with your Facebook account is a welcome idea. This tool allows you to achieve exactly such flexibility.
Specific advertisements can be earned using this tool as your Instagram posts are sponsored on Facebook as well.
Therefore, this tool becomes a must-have in your arsenal of content advertising. The USP features of this powerful tool include:
- Call to Action Button for sponsored Ads.
- Customize the target audience as per demographics and preferences.
10. Minter
Filtering and tuning your analytics from the country, age, and city allows you to manage your posts and content well. This fantastic tool allows you to pick the ideal time for your posts as well as fine-tune your analytics.
11. Stribr
This is an online tool. It offers optimization and tracking of your Instagram activities. KPI or Key Performance Indicators measure the connect of your content with your users. Stribr allows optimizing your accounts, managing content hashtags, and your conversations.
12. Simply Measured
An astonishingly simple tool for Instagram, Simply Measured is a reporting tool. It lets you know about your extremely popular Posts, most popular Filters, and Engaged Locations.
13. Iconosquare
A beautiful tool that makes the process of liking and commenting on your follower’s posts incredibly straightforward and easy.
It lets you analyze your favorite photos, your new followers, and the ideal time to post. It also provides the option of tracking new comments.
14. Repost
It works the same way Retweet works on Twitter. It allows you to share from your followers into your account. It is extremely helpful when you are in a quandary as to what to post.
The Essence
These are a few ways and tools that you can follow to allow your following on Instagram to reach exponential heights.
However, a consistent effort and regular posting of beautiful photographs and videos from the bottom line.
