7 Ways Businesses Can Get More Instagram Followers

An engaged following is necessary for social media success. You depend upon followers who find your content interesting enough that they want to click over to your website and make a purchase. That’s the point. Isn’t it? 

However, sometimes it can be a struggle to clear that initial hurdle of finding quality followers. Read on for some simple ways businesses can get more Instagram followers and move toward purposeful engagement. 

1. Drive Traffic with Your Bio

Because Instagram has become so immensely popular, it’s not unusual for many people to turn there first for information about a brand or business. That means you need to treat your Instagram account almost as you would a website. You should optimize it for searchability and recognition, both by search engines and real people. 

Your username needs to match your brand and be easy to remember. You should include keywords in your bio that reflect your brand, and it’s of absolute importance to include a link to your website, landing page or other prominent online location that best meets your marketing goals. 

2. Maintain Consistency

Once you’ve established a bio that is set to entice and inform followers, you’ll want to make sure your content consistently reflects the image you’ve set out to create. The first step toward maintaining that consistency is to post regularly. You want to keep giving your followers reason to come back for more or they could easily forget you. 

It’s advisable to post at least once a day for best results. It’s also good to post at predictable times. Some trial and error, along with monitoring your analytics, should help you to nail this down. You can always schedule your posts in advance to help with this process. 

3. Enlist Your Audience

One of the best, yet sometimes most overlooked, ways to gain quality followers is to aim for audience participation. You can do this in a number of ways. When people feel involved with and connected to your brand, they’re more likely to become loyal advocates and customers. 

Use custom hashtags to encourage followers to share their experience with your product. This also serves as fabulous promotion. Shout out to other brands and individuals whose content complements your own. This exposes you to their followers, with the possibility of these folks joining your social media tribe. 

4. Be Prepared to Engage

Part of social media is the act of being social. While it’s great to encourage your followers to take part in your hashtags, contests and everyday posts, you absolutely must be ready to engage with them in return. No one likes to communicate into a void. So, for example, if you’re going to post on Instagram Creator Studio, help make your followers feel validated and keep the conversation going by dedicating significant time to maintaining your Instagram account each week. 

Monitoring activity ensures you won’t miss the likes you get, along with comments and questions from your audience. When you address these activities in a timely manner, you encourage future interaction. 

5. Know Your Audience

Once you begin to gain a regular following, you want to get to know them. Part of this should be done already in the form of market research and targeting. 

Hopefully, you’ve taken time to create a vision of your ideal audience and have been working to attract these types of followers. You can get a deeper understanding of your current following by examining your analytics. See what type of demographic you’re attracting. If they fit your ideal target, great. If not, try new strategies to reach your target or find ways to attract more of the followers you have now if they’re meeting your marketing goals. 

In addition, you want to pay attention to the type of content that’s performing well and make note of what’s not serving you. It never hurts to ask your followers in a call-to-action or even a poll what they enjoy most about your account or what they’d prefer to see more of. Then be sure to deliver it. 

6. Share Everywhere

A big part of gaining a significant Instagram following is shameless self-promotion. That’s right. You have to enthusiastically share your Instagram username and profile in as many places as you can in order to capitalize on the audiences you have elsewhere. If you have a physical business location, add a sign with your Instagram username and invite customers to find you there. 

Put it on your business cards, in your email signature and throughout your blog. Don’t forget that other social media platforms can be a great place to cross-promote your Instagram account. If you have a loyal, engaged audience already, they’ll surely be interested enough to check out your Instagram content, too. 

7. Make Your Followers Feel Something

A fantastic way to get more Instagram followers is to elicit emotion from your audience. Try to create posts that make it hard to resist liking. Content that doesn’t convey a strong message is easy to scroll on by. Instead, reach out to your followers through the images you create. 

Think about the way you want users to feel when they see you image. Keep this goal in the back of your mind with every post, and you’re sure to see your following begin to increase. People want to share content that makes them feel something. 

These are just seven ways you can get more Instagram followers for your business. Start with these, and add your own unique touch. Then you can begin to branch out and grow your ideal following even more.