How To Grow Your Instagram After Creating High Quality Content
You have now established a great content strategy. Your Instagram profile looks appealing and it contains valuable content that would interest your potential audience. Now, you need people to become aware of your content so that you can build up an audience.
The following 3 tips can help grow your Instagram significantly. You can average ~500 followers a week if you apply these tips aggressively.
Tip #1: Research & engage with hashtags that are relative to your content
For example, if you’re a local food blogger, look for popular hashtags (preferably hashtags used by a local foodie as well) and engage with users who use those hashtags.
What do we mean when we say “start engaging with those posts?”
Start a conversation with them. If they used a local restaurant hashtag, then you can simply ask “How is that place?” I am thinking about checking it out this week for my feed. Let me know!” That’s just 1 of many examples. You can also engage with users by just liking a photo of your interest or following them (if you are actually interested in following them – I am not really keen on the whole “Follow/Unfollow” strategy. That was a very common strategy during the early days of Instagram, but now since social media has matured it is important to really build authentic relationships & your community.
This strategy can also help you get noticed by other food bloggers with similar goals as you. You can leverage those relationships to help you grow in multiple ways. We will discuss one of them in tip #2.
You can also engage with a new audience by searching through a Geotag location. It’s always better to engage in a photo that has only been recently posted. That way the users would immediately notice you when your name pops up on their phones just minutes after they’ve posted.
Tip #2 Create Strategic Giveaways
People love giveaways. There are multiple ways you can come up with something enticing such that it gets your followers excited & willing to participate. If the giveaway sucks, don’t expect people to go nuts over your campaign. Let’s run through 1 example.
Find a popular restaurant. Purchase a $200-$400 gift certificate/card for that venue & then come up with a creative that quickly captures your audience’s attention so that they can participate right away. Make sure you come up with rules that ask your followers to follow your profile (since your goal is to build an audience that is interested in restaurants within your local area) & have them take action by either tagging a friend or resharing your photo with a certain hashtag + tagging you to create additional exposure for you. This creates a dynamic effect & will help you grow.
Here’s a good example of a creative giveaway:
You might also want to ask influencers to do a collaboration with you and host the giveaway that you’re currently hosting. Most of the time, they will agree to do a giveaway with you because it could also help them grow their account.
Bonus Tip: Look for other creators in a similar niche that may be interested in teaming up with you for a giveaway. You may want to consider creators that have a similar follower count than you (+/-20k is a good rule of thumb) since they are more likely to collaborate with you than someone that has a significantly higher following.
Tip #3 Push more video content on your feed that also tells a story
Short Form videos that tell a captivating story tend to do well on Social Media. Especially if you’re a good story-teller. On @nychungry, we have tested our a few videos that tell a story via subtitles. Our videos are usually 45-60 seconds long and every segment of the video has something interesting to say that keeps the audience tuned in throughout. I
Also, videos take a lot more work. That means, fewer people are more likely to do it which will make your account stand out further – that is, if you’re willing to put in the work ;).
Here is a video we made for @TipsyScoop and pushed it on one of our pages @nychungry