Instagram (IG) is among today's most popular interactive social media platforms. People use this app to share photos, videos, and stories about their lives and interests. They stay connected with loved ones through the platform and engage with new-found friends.
Statista’s data reveal that Instagram recorded over two billion monthly active users in January 2023. This is why it is an excellent medium to generate business growth. Many small businesses have continuously leveraged its popularity in their digital marketing tactics. They use it to promote products or services.
Since the app is now considered one of the ideal marketing tools, Instagram growth should be included in your advertising priorities, especially if you’re running a small business. Rapid and organic development through the platform can drive higher sales and revenue to your enterprise. If you’re unfamiliar with it, learn what it means and how to achieve it in this article.
Key Takeaways
- Instagram growth is essential to any social media marketing strategy. It helps businesses know that they’ve succeeded in their endeavors using the app.
- Engagement rates, likes, comments, and hashtag performance determine this marketing aspect.
- Rapid Instagram growth is achieved through an elaborate process of employing different marketing strategies. These include consistency, using influencer marketing, and posting different types of content.
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What does Instagram growth mean?
Instagram growth is the performance of your business on the Instagram app. It shows how well your account is doing regarding visibility and engagements. It is usually measured by quantifiable factors such as follower counts, likes, comments, hashtag performance, and content reach. You can include these in your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
The first thing to do to achieve Instagram growth is to create a business account on the app. With an Instagram business account, you can establish your brand, sell products and services, and provide excellent customer service to clients. At the same time, you can reach and engage with more audiences, promote your brand better, and work more on your business growth rate.
Starting your company’s Instagram growth journey can be daunting. But with enough knowledge and with the help of tools, you can craft an IG marketing strategy that ensures substantial development for your business.
How To Achieve Instagram Growth
Attaining Instagram growth may be challenging, to say the least. It has many factors you should consider. With more and more entrepreneurs and companies leveraging Instagram for their businesses, the app’s market landscape is already saturated and highly competitive. To help you stand out among these competitors, here are several Instagram growth strategies to try yourself.
1. Be consistent
Consistency is essential for any social media marketing, including Instagram marketing. Like other social media platforms, Instagram has rapid-changing algorithms that distribute content across the app. Posting consistently and staying active helps these algorithms put your content on users’ feeds.
Consistent postings are regular updates that allow algorithms, metrics, and users to know your account is frequently active. This constant activity assures users that you will respond to queries or post updates about transactions regularly. Additionally, consistency lets you keep your existing Instagram followers because they know you’re continuously making audience engagement efforts.
However, consistency doesn’t necessarily mean you post every hour or every day. It means regularly posting content based on your calendar to keep your account active. This activity increases your engagement and visibility, driving follower growth.
You must also ensure consistency in the quality of your shared content. Remember that high-quality content can easily go trending and reach more users. This allows your account to stand out among the massive number of content creators on Instagram, drawing in more potential customers to become interested in your business.
2. Post different types of content
You shouldn’t post the same type of content on your Instagram profile repeatedly. Delivering various content to attract new followers, retain existing ones, and enhance engagement across the platform is essential.
Keeping users interested and engaged allows you to experiment with various content formats to see which appeals to and resonates with them better. This experimentation lets you align your content marketing strategies according to user needs.
You can use the following user-generated content (UGC) to ensure variety in your shared content:
- Videos – These can be Instagram reels, IGTV, and Instagram stories. Reels and stories have a 60-second limit, which is ideal for posting brand, product, or service teasers. Meanwhile, IGTV content can last one hour, making them excellent for more elaborate topics you wish to share.
- Contests and giveaways – Hosting contests and giveaways can attract more new followers and encourage better engagement with your brand. This strategy involves giving away products or services as gifts to one or more Instagram users. You define the criteria for these events, including commenting, liking, and sharing your posts.
- How-tos, tips, and tutorials – These content types are excellent for showcasing your products or services. You can make a how-to video detailing how to order from your Instagram account, provide tips for using a product or service, and post tutorials about topics aligned with your brand niche.
- Quotes – These are statements or passages repeatedly used to emphasize their significance to your brand. You can use text images with inspiring captions to uplift or inspire your audience.
- Memes – These can be funny jokes, catchphrases, GIFs, or videos with relatable context to connect with your audience.
- Screenshots of posts from other social media apps – Nowadays, people screenshot viral posts to repost. This content can also be ideal for connecting with your followers.
3. Go for influencer marketing
Suppose you come across promotional content featuring well-known personalities on your Instagram feed. They could likely be influencers with paid brand partnerships. This advertising strategy, called influencer marketing, is becoming popular on all social media platforms.
Influencer marketing is a technique where you collaborate with social media personalities, called influencers, to market your brand’s products or services. This tactic is usually used to enhance brand awareness and recognition.
Influencers are not only celebrities. They can be anyone with substantial followers and massive influence. Every industry has these influential stars, which could be overwhelming. However, you should be able to find one suitable for your business.
You can choose from different types of influencers, depending on your promotional goals. Below are the types of influencers and their characteristics:
- Nano-influencers – The smallest influencer market, with followers ranging from 1,000 to 10,000. They can bring the highest engagement through personalized and user-generated content and are usually most excited to partner with brands.
- Micro-influencers – Influencers with higher authority than nano and followers ranging from 10,000 to 50,000. Their advertising approach is typically a mix of professionalism and authenticity.
- Mid-tier influencers – These are social media stars respected in their respective niches with 50,000 to 500,000 followers. They are relatively more affordable than macro and mega influencers, making them cost-effective if you aim to reach a larger audience.
- Macro-influencers – These are is the second highest influencer type, with 500,000 to a million followers. They share the same authority with mega influencers, so their opinions can significantly influence their following.
- Mega influencers – They are the highest and most authoritative because of their celebrity status. Their followers must be at least one million, and they are often brand ambassadors of multiple companies. As they are highly in demand, they may be costly and hard to contact.
4. Work on audience engagement
Organic Instagram growth must be paired with audience engagement. As your account becomes well-known to existing and potential followers, expect more users to like, comment, and tag you on posts. They may also send you direct messages (DM). Naturally, you should do your best to respond to these interactions because they could be queries and reviews about your products and services.
This is where audience engagement comes into the picture. It is interacting with your audience by responding to their comments, tags, and DMs. You must give your responses much thought, so you can write them well. Remember to respond only to the reasonable messages you receive to maintain a good reputation.
With audience engagement, you must also leverage Instagram’s interactive features. These include stickers, polls, quizzes, link-sharing, and countdowns, primarily available in Instagram stories. These will allow your audiences to interact with your content more.
On the other hand, you can engage with other Instagram users by liking and commenting on their posts. That way, when other users browse the comments on a particular post, they can see your account’s comments. If you capture their interest, they will likely visit your profile and get them as potential followers.
Above anything, Instagram is all about engaging with its users, so your growth here should be mainly aligned with this purpose.
5. Optimize your profile
When potential followers view your account, they will see your profile first. It’s likely going to be the determining factor whether they’ll follow your account or not. So aside from having engaging posts, you should also have an enticing profile structure that showcases your brand identity.
Your profile must include a display image of your logo and a bio describing your brand. Use your logo as the profile picture for display images and create highlights with cover images that align with your logo’s design.
Meanwhile, your bio should ideally contain your company tagline, mission, vision, core values, and a link that directs your potential followers to your website. Optimizing your profile with this information is essential to your Instagram business account.
Remember that Instagram bios have a 150-character limit. So you have to maximize your creativity in writing them. Make your bio short but sweet. It should be a statement that appeals to your potential followers and their purchasing decisions.
Additionally, you can make your bio fun and engaging by using puns, quotes, and emojis. At the same time, you can try to write a one-liner representing your company’s brand or update it occasionally whenever you release something new. Putting your location and office hours also helps your potential followers know when and where to contact you.
Using fancy fonts is another creative aspect you can add to your profile’s bio. They can enhance your Instagram’s overall design, making it more visually striking.
Moreover, putting call-to-action buttons will allow visitors and followers to message and contact you directly when they find your profile engaging.
6. Use relevant hashtags
While browsing social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, you may notice that viral posts usually have hashtags. These tags often specify that the posts are for particular niches and target audiences. Although they’re used for different business purposes, their potential for becoming viral is one of the reasons they’re also used for Instagram marketing.
Hashtags are social media features that use the pound (#) symbol to make keywords, phrases, or words clickable. Since their rise in popularity more than a decade ago, they have constantly been applied to digital marketing to boost brand visibility, especially on Instagram.
By using three to four hashtags in a post, your Instagram content can gain valuable engagement impressions. However, they don’t necessarily make your posts viral quickly. For this reason, you should research the best hashtags for your brand to gain more followers.
The best hashtags are the ones aligned with your brand and niche. You can pair general hashtags with specific terms related to your company, product, or service. You may even make your company slogan a standalone hashtag or part of a phrase. Either way, specified hashtags provide context to your Instagram posts and give the viewers an idea about what you’re promoting.
You can support advocacies, participate in challenges, and geotarget a particular target audience through hashtags. Supporting advocacies allow followers to know you’re a company with moral values, while challenges can help put your brand more out there. With geotargeting, you can bring your content to specific locations, especially if you want to reach location-based audience demographics.
Remember to be mindful of your hashtag usage.
- Dos: #Hashtag, #Hashtag101, #Hashtag_101
- Don’ts: #Hash Tag, Hashtag #101, #Hashtag.101
7. Implement cross-posting on other social media platforms
You don’t have to limit your promotions to Instagram only. While Instagram users may know about your profile’s existence, non-IG users will have little to no chance of coming across your posted content. Address this by cross-posting your Instagram content to other social media marketing channels.
To cross-post, connect your Instagram account with Facebook and Twitter. This enables the “Share to Facebook” and “Share to Twitter” features. When your posts are shared on these channels, they can be reposted.
Facebook reposts your entire content (both caption and image or video). Meanwhile, Twitter shows a part of the caption with a link to the actual post.
Social media cross-promotion isn’t the only way to cross-promote. You can also add your Instagram feed as a widget on your website. This way, visitors can see you have an Instagram account when they scroll through your site. You can also put your Instagram account on calling cards and email signatures.
When you cross-promote, emphasize something in your Instagram account that cannot be found on your other socials. For example, let customers know what benefits they can get from following you or the rewards they can receive from engaging with your posts.
8. Publish unique and engaging captions
Instagram captions play a significant role in enticing your followers. Some users will read a lengthy caption, but others may not. Grabbing their interest in the first few words is essential so they’d click “See more.” This can only happen when your caption has context, personality, and educational aspects. Good captions can also inspire followers to take action.
When users take action, they recognize that they want and need to buy what you’re offering. When they successfully make their purchases, they add to your sales. Afterward, they can recommend your account to their loved ones who might be in need of your products or services. More recommendations can bring rapid Instagram growth.
The following are tips on writing unique and engaging captions:
- Define your purpose – All kinds of writing have distinct purposes. Establish yours to determine how you like your caption to sound to readers. Do you want to sell something? Do you want them to visit your website? Do you want them to share your post? These are just some of the intentions you can use in caption writing.
- Create a hook – The first sentence is crucial in any caption. You should write something that will grab your readers’ interest instantly. That’s what many know as a hook and it can be a question, a quote, a one-liner sentence, or a phrase.
- Write like the human that you are – Artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools have increased. Sure, they can help. However, it’s best to be authentic in your captions by simply being human. You should sound natural and friendly to your potential followers.
You may also create stories and include emojis in your captions to keep the fun and engagement going.
9. Leverage the best posting hours
To reach more Instagram users, you should post during peak hours when many users are online. The best posting hours are usually on weekdays outside work hours, like early mornings, lunchtime, and evenings. Although these are the ideal posting times, they vary depending on your content and target audience.
It is recommended to use Instagram analytics to know when your followers are most active daily. Then, create a posting schedule from this data to maximize your visibility and impressions.
Bonus Tip: Pay for Instagram ads
Instagram ads are sponsored content users can see on their feeds and stories. They typically look like usual posts but are tagged as “Sponsored.” They have call-to-action buttons and product tags for users to click on. Some Instagram ads include images, stories, videos, explore page ads, shopping options, reels, or a carousel with multiple images or videos that viewers can swipe through.
Pro Tip: You can do competitor analysis on Instagram to get valuable insights on content creation and audience engagement. Do this by analyzing the competitors' profiles, posts, highlights, and stories. From there, reverse engineer their strategies based on your marketing goals.
Generate Instagram Growth With These Strategies Through Archive
Rapid Instagram growth is hard work. You can’t just create an Instagram business account and expect to gain it overnight. This is why these strategies are handy for your Instagram engagement and marketing. Remember that the results won’t come quickly, as the process takes time.
An Instagram marketing first-timer? Lessen your burden and confusion by using an Instagram growth service like Archive to help you curate efficient Instagram marketing campaigns for visibility and success.
Build a successful Instagram growth campaign through Archive. Contact us and learn how we can bring you more followers and engagements today.
FAQS on Instagram Growth
How do you set up an Instagram business account?
You should create an Instagram account or have an existing one to create an Instagram business account. From there, you can switch your profile to a professional account.
- Tap the three horizontal lines on your profile’s upper right corner, then select Settings.
- Press Account, choose Switch to a professional account and click Continue.
- Pick a Category, tap Done, and press OK.
- Proceed to Business and tap Next.
- Fill out the necessary information and click Next. If you want to skip, choose Don’t use my contact info.
- Afterward, click the X on the top right to return to your profile.
Note: You may only create five Instagram accounts.
How do you get brand deals on Instagram?
First and foremost, you should be eligible for Instagram’s community guidelines and partnership and content monetization policies. Then, join the Creator Marketplace (currently available in the US only). You can do Partnership Messages to contact the creators or brands you want to collaborate with.
What are the editing applications you can use for Instagram?
Video editing:
- CapCut
- Adobe Premiere Rush
- InShot
- Filmr
- VideoShow
- A Color Story
- VivaVideo
Photo editing:
- Canva
- VSCO
- Snapseed
- Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom
- Instasize
