3 Tips to Grow your Instagram Page Organically If you have little time.
When you look up how to grow Instagram or talk to anyone about it, I bet you hear the word algorithm. It is all about the algorithm is what I often hear and this instantly gives people an excuse. You hear that the algorithm doesn’t work in your favour now so you should just buy followers instead.
Or you could follow/unfollow.
Wrong. You can still grow Instagram and there are a few simple ways to do it. These 3 tips are more for those who want to gain a few new followers a day, who want to post but probably don’t have the time to fully engage.
I just want to clarify, that the way you truly grow on Instagram is to fully engage every day with your target audience. We will cover this another time.
You just need to do these things consistently and daily is even better.
Instagram Stories
Tagging Peop
Hashtags
Sounds simple and it is simple to some extent. It all depends on how much work you want to put into the 3 of these.
I’d suggest you spend every Sunday evening planning this out along with the images you are going to post and the caption you are going to use.
Instagram Stories
Stories are a feature of Instagram that can get you a lot of extra views. In fact, it will likely be that Stories become one of your main points of engaging and spreading your message.
Stories last for 24 hours. Which means they are suited to giving snapshots of your day, whether this is selfie style videos or a choreographed video that would proudly sit alongside your YouTube videos.
For those of you who have limited time you want to make sure you are posting once a day to your feed as a minimum. You then want to go to that post, press the share button and select send to Story.
Once you have done this, create a story caption, use a feature such as Questions, Polls or the slider. This creates engagement within Stories and also sends people to your post. Win-Win.
If you have a bit more time each day you could plan a short story that lasts a minute long and create 4 15 second clips. There are a bunch of apps that can split your video content into 15 second snippets for stories. Or you could use a video editing app.
Planning a short story as a theme for your Instagram Stories posts makes sense. Like I said, it depends on how much time you have.
Tagging People
When I write Tagging People what I am talking about is in your posts. Obviously, you can tag people in posts that you find interesting by commenting @ and selecting their username. You can do this for up to 10 users.
This can help build your engagement. But I’m talking about something that is more powerful.
When you create a post you can tag up to 20 people. If you are a business, tag 10 existing customers and 10 potential customers.
If you are a Personal Brand, then tag 10–15 people who are going to comment or tag others (like we said in the first paragraph to this section) or tag 5–10 brands, especially if you have any of their products in your photo.
Now, these Instagram Users will get notified that they have been tagged but the beauty is not in this prompt for engagement. Every time someone comments on your post, any user that is tagged in your post will get notified that someone has posted a comment.
This is awesome.
If your post gets comments, the people who have been tagged that see this are more likely to comment on the post too. It serves to be social proof on your post which everyone loves.
Hashtags
There is always a debate among people trying to grow their Instagram following around Hashtags.
Do you use them?
How many should you use?
I’m going to answer from personal experience.
First off, you need hashtags! Instagram is focussing on these now and you can even follow the hashtags in your niche, which you also need to do.
Hashtags are the only search functionality within Instagram. So get on board with them.
How many is another question altogether. From experience, 25+ hashtags has always worked best.
I’ve been trialling a variety of hashtags this past two weeks and found that the more hashtags I have, the better the post performs.
But I haven’t taken into account the caption which could have been a better caption. So over the next couple of weeks I’ll do a comparable test if possible and assess how the posts compare.
The key with hashtags is not picking the super popular ones!
If you were into #beauty and selected that hashtag you would be competing against 262 MILLION posts!
If you had used the hashtag #beautysecret you’d be competing against 488K posts.
This is a significant difference and is vital to your posts getting visibility.
When researching your hashtags, which we can cover next week, make sure you select hashtags that have under 500K posts. This will give your posts the best chance of winning on Instagram.
That’s it for this week. Start implementing this into your Instagram strategy and you will notice an improvement. It would be awesome if you could follow my brand page over on Instagram.
