How To Increase Instagram Followers [10 Verified Ways]

Instagram is the perfect platform for increasing visual marketing and engaging people. Growing your Instagram account is an excellent medium to enhance brand awareness, reflect on your work, and earn money. If you are also keen enough to know ‘How to increase Instagram followers’ rapidly, read on till the end.  

To increase followers on Instagram, users must post high-quality, visually attractive content, engage audiences with replies and comments, use related hashtags, run contests and giveaways consistently, collaborate with other accounts, and promote their Instagram accounts on diversified platforms. 

Strategies for Increasing Instagram Followers 

Don’t know, “How to increase Instagram followers?”. Use the tips below to increase followers on Instagram. Although there isn’t a definite strategy for increasing the number of followers on Instagram, you can use the below approaches to enhance your Instagram followers. These include: 

1. Optimizing your Instagram account

To increase Instagram followers without posting, you must understand how your business profile is being created. Also, a bio is usually the first thing new visitors on Instagram can notice when they come across a particular profile. Moreover, you must keep an appealing bio as it is a great medium to convey who you are, and what you offer.  

Since the bio includes 150 characters, you must ensure it is short and informative and include related keywords to make your account accessible. Additionally, you can only use one external link on your Instagram bio and must be careful about the way you use it. 

2. Select a professional profile photo

Your profile photo is part of your brand recognition on Instagram. For business purposes, a premium quality, rightly sized logo is perfect. Any text on your profile picture must be readable on a smartphone screen. 

3. Use keywords in your name, handle, and Bio

If you want to expand followers, your profile must be accessible to your target audience. Beginners must include the correct keywords in their account. You must target here mostly the three places which include: 

• Profile name 
• Username or handle 
• Bio (description)

Instagram users must use the brand name or anything closest to their Instagram handles to keep the search-friendly name. If your name is too long, try shortening it to a variation that becomes recognizable to the audience. You can write the complete version in your profile name. Moreover, for bio, you can use space to add keywords that belong to your industry, niche, products, or services. 

4. Cross-promote your Instagram handle on other channels

If you are searching for exclusive ways to grow your Instagram followers, cross-promoting your account on diverse platforms is the best way to begin. It is recommended that you display your recent Instagram posts and most important links with Later’s link in Bio for free. You can also connect people to your Instagram account through different modes including podcasts, email newsletters, websites, or any other social media handles, and can increase your followers without any app. 

5. Track down the right time to post on Instagram

There’s no perfect time to share content on Instagram but one can target to ascertain the best time to post for their followers. Thus, if you want to figure out when your audiences come online then you must check the insights in four simple steps: 

• Proceed to your Instagram profile within the app and tap on the hamburger (the three horizontal lines) on the top right of your screen. 
• Click on ‘Insights’. 
• Next, tap on ‘Total Followers’. 
• Navigate through to the bottom of this page and search for ‘Most active times’. You can switch between hours for every day of the week or search during particular days. 

If you want to make your search more effective, you must use buffer analytics to find out the right time to post, the best post frequency, and the best types of posts. Moreover, buffer uses the data from your earlier posts and followers’ activity and rearranges the numbers in such a manner that is easy to comprehend. 

Pro Tip: Besides the timing, you must also consider when your content is more suitable logically. You must experiment with the posting times to ascertain the time when you can be more accessible and engaging. 

6. Create an Instagram marketing strategy

Having clarity of where Instagram is best suited to your overall social media marketing strategy will not only offer you a positive business outcome but will also provide you with a particular direction on what to post on Instagram. Ways to create an Instagram growth strategy include: 

• Sort out your goals: 

You must decide whether to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, boost direct conversions, and more. Specifying your aim showcases the content you post, your actions, and keeping your Instagram grid on-brand. 

• Mark your schedule for Instagram posts: 

Brands are in the search for the Instagram algorithm for reach. Hence, posting at the perfect times can increase the chances of the post’s visibility. Therefore, anything you can do to increase engagement is an added bonus. 

With the help of Sprout’s newest tools, brands can schedule reels, posts, stories, and Carousels. Scheduling content in advance assures control and organization. Instagram scheduling tools also highlight the ability to crosspost content from different networks. You can also use Sprout’s viral post feature to mark your timing. The platform also ascertains the user’s engagement history and identifies the best time to post. 

• Keep a constant content calendar: 

You must keep posting content on Instagram as it would increase the number of followers organically. Crafting content and providing value is what creates your audience. Doing so regularly is what helps you keep them. Hence, sticking to a specific posting schedule is important. Especially when and how much to post, you don’t need to stick to a particular number. Most brands post almost daily. This helps in keep track of our research on how often to post. 

7. Write compelling captions

Instagram captions hold more weight than one can think. You must craft captivating captions for an ideal carousel or video. These captions can either poke someone to follow you or scroll past you without looking. Also, Instagram captions are perfect when they are either very short or long (consisting of 20 characters vs 2000 characters). 

Moreover, for writing an ideal Instagram caption, you must know how your target audience and the meaning of your post then try to make it to the character count. If you are writing an educational post, it is essential to have a longer caption. Additionally, shorter captions are better for aesthetic product images. 

8. Use similar hashtags

The perfect hashtags can reveal your Instagram posts to a wider audience. Instagram users must know that they can use only up to three to five hashtags though you can post up to 30 hashtags. 

However, if you want to rank your Instagram hashtags to make the most benefit out of it. In this circumstance, your aim must be to appear on Explore’s page at the first look when others use your niche’s hashtag. As many people follow hashtags to view posts about a topic or search for something particular.  The correct method is to use hashtags with a combination of niche and popular. 

In case you wish to discover hashtags that would captivate your target audience, you must use the free hashtag generators to discover similar hashtags for your Instagram posts. Once you add a few words about your image or video, this tool will suggest the top hashtags that work well with it. Moreover, you can also create a list of the hashtags for your community and combine them with the help of the Buffer Hashtag.

Pro-Tip: Use brand-specific hashtags to accumulate all your user-generated content (UGC) about your small business in one place. 

9. Comprehend your analytics

Instagram users must pay meticulous attention to Instagram analytics by checking them regularly and comprehending what’s working and what’s not. You might discover that the audience reacts best to entertaining reels; however, educational posts are best for carousels. Exploring trends assists your content creation strategy obtaining an optimum return on investment from Instagram. 

Pro Tip: Use a third-party tool like Buffer Analytics to obtain all the data, including individual posts’ performance, in a single window, compare them side by side, and even create custom reports for stakeholders. 

10. Join up with Instagram creators or small businesses

Connecting with other creators through Influencer marketing or partnerships with small businesses is good because it discloses both parties to a new community. Make sure you join hands with the company or creator who coordinates with your values and whose followers’ demographics and interests coincide with your target audience. 

These posts are highlighted on both accounts, which implies that all followers of your creator partner will view the shared post. If influencers with over a hundred thousand followers are over budget, you can run a micro-influencer campaign. Moreover, you can also proceed with the manual Google search or search with the help of hashtags and keywords on Instagram. You can use influencer discovery tools like Modash to save time and explore similar creators. 

Alternatively, you can also create partnerships with other small businesses including Linkedin and Headspace to form a post about recovering from the job loss.

Summing Up 

To increase Instagram followers isn’t something that can be done occasionally. With the use of the tips provided above, you can certainly expand your Instagram followers. Maintaining Instagram growth is something that one must take care of. One must publish top-quality content regularly to be on top of your social media strategy. 

Although it is time-consuming and requires more effort to manage the posting, planning, engaging, and tracking manually, you can effectively do all this with the help of a Buffer tool.