Time To Focus On Building Your Instagram Following

Compared to your businesses other social media accounts, your Instagram followers are a lot lower, so you spend less time on the platform.
Why should you focus more time on Instagram?

Here are a few Stats
Instagram has a 4.71% per-follower engagement rate, this is

  • 58x per follower more than Facebook
  • 120x per follower more than Twitter

If you don’t have an Instagram account for your business, then you need to get one set up right away, (why Frankie, I have a Twitter and Facebook which have a good following, why do I need another social media account?)

Try these steps below to help set up your account and to start increasing your Instagram followers.

Getting Started

Step 1
  • Create Your Account: your username should represent your business/brand and if possibly the same username as your other social media accounts.
  • Fill Out Your Instagram Profile Completely
    • Profile
    • Bio
    • Website
  • Photos
    • Think of a theme you want to use for your images (e.g A certain Colour or Black and white)
    • Have at least 7 Images in your theme ready to post.
Step 2
  • Connect your account to your Facebook business page:
    • This enables you to convert your Instagram account in a business account
  • Sync your email and Facebook contacts with Instagram
    • To find Instagram followers you already know or are following
      • 20% of all Instagram user are also on Facebook
  • With A business account, you can
    • View insights,
    • Check the analytics and
    • Check data so you post your images at the optimal times.
  • Fill in the contact details
    • Email
    • Telephone Number
    • Business Location

Instagram will then create a Call To Action (CTA) on your Profile.

Step 3

Discover The Best Hashtags

  • Piggyback on other hashtags:
    • use the most popular hashtags for your niche, when you start typing the hashtag a selection of hashtags will appear and next to each one will be the amount of time it has been used in posts
  • Use Keywords for hashtags this will also help others find your images
  • You can also create your own hashtag if it takes off and becomes popular enough for others users to use it a collage of images will be created.
  • You can use up to 30 hashtags
    • Tip: Instead of filling your caption space with all of them, just add two or three in the image caption it looks better on your feed and when you share your image on other socials
    • Add the others hashtags to the comment section. (Your Images will still be seen by others)
    • Try a third party app like WEBSTA to find the top 100 hashtags
Step 4

Geo Tag your Images and Tag Other Users

  • Instagram has a photo maps feature, This enables users to see pictures that were taken from a certain location.
    • Adding a location results in 79% higher engagement
  • Tag people and mention accounts that are relevant to you and the pictures you are posting.
    • Stat: Mentions in captions receive 56% more engagement.
Step 5

Constantly Like and Comment On Other Images

  • On average there are 575 Likes and 81 Comments on a picture per second
  • When you comment people are 401% more likely to follow you

Tips for commenting

  • Search for relevant hashtags
  • Comment on photos no more than 2 days old with less than 5 commentsfor better ROI
Step 6
  • Place a Hashtag feed of your Instagram on your Website or Blog

feed

 

Following these few steps, posting 1 – 2 times a day, will hopefully increase your Instagram followers.

 

For more social media blogs visit – The Social Doughnut 

Share This