Find your niche and your specialty
Unless you’re a TV or movie star, it’s going to be hard to gain a following, and therefore success, simply by taking selfies in front of the mirror. You’re going to need a real niche, something that sets you apart from everyone else to succeed on Instagram.
Do you have any specialty? A passion? A peculiarity? Fantastic! If you talk about it, it will help you find your audience naturally, because you will need a real added value among the multitude of new accounts that are launched every day on Instagram.
Quality content with high added value
To increase your number of followers, you will have to be regular in creating content. Therefore, Goread.io strongly recommends that you make your Instagram account according to your specialty or passion. If you don’t travel often, it will be very difficult to feed a travel and hotel account.
Regularity is the key; the ideal is to publish 2 posts a week, in addition to several stories every day, reels and lives.
Your photos must be original and must not come from an image bank, for example. Ideally, your photo should give Internet users the opportunity to connect with you. If they have never seen the photo you post, they are more likely to be surprised and like it.
Accompany your photo with an inspiring text, with a clear call to action to leave a comment. Feel free to post an open question, share your opinion, and ask for your community’s. This will generate conversation and, therefore, commitment.
Create stories
This is one of the best ways to keep your followers engaged, and attract new ones. Posting at least 4 stories a day, with your story, your favorites, your protests and other interesting topics, allows users to enter your daily life. They feel like they know more about you, and they’ll want to wait the next few days for the end of the story if you’re good at teasing.
The participation rate or engagement rate is the key to the Instagram algorithm. The more “likes” and comments you get on your posts, the more prominence you will have on the social network and, above all, when people search for the hashtags.
Optimize the use of hashtags
Instagram has its own search engine. It is very powerful as it allows users to find content that they like and that is relevant to them. Therefore, the use of hashtags is essential to naturally increase your visibility on Instagram. The more relevant and numerous the hashtags you use, related to your account and your content, the more likely you are to be found by other users.
There are automated hashtag management tools that are very effective and automatically generate hashtags related to your post.
What is your ideal target audience? Who are you addressing?
Do not hesitate to establish the typical profile of the Internet user who could follow you and investigate. Do you do makeup tutorials? Why not search for hashtags in your field to discover some posts from potential future followers?
For example, you can search for #makeup, #naturalmakeup, #makeuptips. These are hashtags that already have a large number of posts, but they can give you an idea of them.
Look at the profiles of other influencers in your field, check their follower lists to see what kind of profiles follow them. Also look at their subscriptions, you may discover inspiring and interesting new accounts to follow.
Interaction is the key
For your already established community, it is also very important to encourage discussions, making posts with open questions, allowing debate, exchanges, writing comments…etc. You must also know your audience. Who are your most loyal followers or how to get more followers in real? Get them with Goread. Those who almost always like your posts, those who send you messages very often or make comments almost always.
Feel free to take a moment and check out their profile, so you might be able to understand who they are and what they like. Answer them every time! They are the ones who could share your profile, tell others about it and help you grow your community!
If you interact often by responding to private messages, to comments, but also by viewing stories and commenting yourself, the Instagram algorithm will understand that you are an engagement relay, that people communicate with you, that your account is active, that you are Present.
Your account will then be featured and you will be able to gain visibility, grow your community and gain followers.
Make collaborations
If you have an account with few followers, it would be very relevant to collaborate with influencers, with the same target audience, to benefit from their audience.
- Choose your collaborators: The ideal is to choose collaborators who are in a range of 50% more or less followers than you. If you have 800 followers, the target contributor will therefore be between 400 and 1200 followers. Targeting an influencer with fewer followers than you will allow you to get rejected but will still be useful. If, after collaborating, you manage to gain even 10% of the collaborator’s audience of 1,200 followers, that will give you 120 more followers, that is, 15% of your total audience, which is not negligible, right?
- Choose topics: Let’s say you’re a beauty influencer and you’re used to doing beauty tutorials, product tests, etc. What would be the broader themes you could choose? What would be the general topics that would interest your audience? Aesthetic medicine, facials, the natural approach to beauty, maybe even facial yoga? The idea is to engage your audience with another expert’s perspective and try to convert their audience into your content.
- Get in touch with potential collaborators: They should definitely not be your competitors, but people “complementary” to your business. The idea is that they have the same target audience. Take the example of the influence of beauty. Collaborating with a specialist in aesthetic medicine, for example, who talks about botulin toxin or other professional treatments, may allow you to gain followers interested in this topic, and in beauty in general, and who will therefore want to come and follow your beauty tutorials and your product tests!
