This information is incredibly important if you manage a corporate account or generate income on IG - your audience are the people who bring you money. It is important not just to engage your audience but also to pull in non-followers regularly.
You may be familiar with some of these methods, and a greater effect can be achieved if you practice them in combination. Remember that there's no sense in buying followers, since this fake audience will not create real income. If you are an influencer, this fake boosted number will not drive paid advertising offers from brands unless you have a real engagement on your account. This can be easily verified by using profile analyzers and other services.
Therefore, below you will find only organic methods to grow your tribe - only relevant tips for this year. Briefly, these are:
- Hashtags
- Active interaction
- Contests
- Influencers
- Feature accounts
- Keywords
- Relevant content
- UGC
Let's look at each one in detail.
How to use hashtags to get more followers on IG
With the help of these promotion tools, you can reach a wider audience for free. Tags work to promote your account in such a way that it appears in the feeds of potentially interested followers.
Now you may think - yes, I already use hashtags. However, you may not know the subtleties of choosing keywords. Tags work like keywords, and they are the only mechanism that helps the algorithm to sort content and organize internal search within the application. Therefore, the main function of tags is to make your content easy to discover - which means it will become available to those people who are looking for it.
What does it mean? Some people may already be searching for your services and be glad to become your followers. With tags, you can effortlessly attract these people and show them your content.
In case you've neglected this tool, check out the Hashtag Generator. Otherwise, creating and searching for tags manually in the application you may waste tens of hours.
How to get hashtags in 2 minutes to gain a new audience:
- Open a competitor's account. This can be a best-selling account in your niche, and not necessarily your direct competitor performing services in your location. It might simply be an account that is in demand with your dream clients. For instance, you may sell jewelry for women under 25 and discover an account dedicated to women's clothes - it may be influential for the audience you are targeting.
- Paste this account into the Profile Analyzer. In several seconds, the most-used tags from this account will appear. Obviously, if you were inspecting these tags under every post manually, you would waste hours.
It's not advised to copy them blindly; not all ideas may be related to your content. However, you can surely grab several useful hashtags.
- Paste a hashtag idea into the Hashtag Generator. After this, you will see similar and related tags that are often used in publications along with those that you entered in the search bar. This section is marked with green.
- Save prefabricated sets for quick posting. Tick off suitable tags and paste them from the clipboard into a document - it can be a Google spreadsheet or a Note on your mobile phone - from which you can quickly copy them into any post.
By the way, it's essential to use tags on Reels. Explore the dedicated article.
Active interaction
People love attention. And one effective tip to grow your audience is to interact with their IG content. There's no need to start following thousands of people massively (but this may be a solution, too). Sometimes it is enough just to look through a person's Stories to catch their attention. Who can potentially become a new subscriber:
- The followers of your existing audience
- Users that follow niche hashtags
- Followers of popular bloggers in your niche
- Competitors' audience
- Participants of events popular in your niche
All of these users are your potential followers. It may just take watching their Stories to gain a subscription in return.
Two ways to manage active communication are:
- Perform at least 20-50 actions manually every day. You may perform this task yourself or hire a responsible manager.
- Delegate interactions to the bot. In 2022, many bots have lost their relevance, but the Inflact Promo Module is really able to bring fresh followers while maintaining increased security. With an integrated VPN and Safe Mode, your account will not be suspected of applying automation.
Now a limited offer is in effect - you can try the IG bot for 2 weeks for just $9 with free VPN. Even during this period new subscribers will appear - it is quite possible to attract 200 subscribers with a successful targeting setting. We also refund your money if something goes wrong - you risk nothing.
Explore the Beginner Guide.
What actions does automation perform? Everything that you would do yourself or via a hired assistant:
- Explore stories of potential clients
- Like posts and comments
- Subscribe to the target audience
- Unsubscribe from irrelevant users
- Show a daily report on audience growth
On Inflact, you can manage precise targeting for accurate results to grow your potential client count:
- By nicknames. Include your competitors, niche profiles, and bloggers' nicknames - Inflact can bring their subscribers to you.
- By hashtags. Generate a selection of tags that are strategic to your clients. The bot will subscribe to those who use them or subscribe to these tags.
- According to social-dem characteristics. When you apply advanced filters like location, age, and gender, the bot will take all this into account when interacting.
It's easy to remove empty items from the growth settings.
Contests
Often viral challenges help to gain target followers. To find out worthy contest mechanics, you have to understand the preferences of your audience. Explore challenges that are held by competitors and accounts similar to yours.
What may help you grow your follower count?
- Contests with Follow action. Giveaways may stimulate users to start following and connecting. However, do not expect that from one contest you will notice a colossal increase in subscribers. Ideally, make this activity regular - for example, hold them once a week. Do you remember how often Fashionnova managers ran giveaways before the account listed millions of subscribers? Here, personalized vouchers for on-site purchases may help, since the participants are not limited in their choice. Plus, when people see they are playing the game for cash rather than the product, it gets more attention. This investment can be more effective than the cost of paid advertising.
- Lottery. This is a trendy type of engagement. There are standalone accounts that run lotteries and they stand out with their high involvement. Read the article to find out everything about Insta Lottery.
- Brand tag. Make a hashtag to amass posts made by your tribe and clients. You may mention it in the description. To hold a drawing, plan a contest for users that tag publications with your brand tag.
Influencers & feature accounts
When you already have a good follower count, it's time to tap into paid affiliate posts. If a profile is empty of followers, such an investment might not be worth it. So, this method is suitable for stores that have already gained their first subscribers.
The advantage of bloggers for promotion is the possibility to establish social proof. People who trust them will not just become your tribe, but be ready to buy from you. Therefore, such an investment is a profitable option to drive an audience that will stay loyal for a long time.
What's the difference between influencers and feature accounts?
Feature accounts are also influential, but they do not act on the person's behalf. A feature account works as a niche magazine where curators collect content around a specific topic. Insta users love such accounts because instead of subscribing to a hundred influencers and stores, they can subscribe to one such magazine and then go to the accounts of stores and bloggers from each publication. Therefore, it is good for you to conduct a search of such stores on Instagram according to your niche. This is especially true for products where visuals are important, like clothes, shoes, or home decor.
To find out the pricing, you can read the article we wrote on feature accounts. You can order a package of posts - for example, 3 feed posts and 3 stories. Then the coverage will be systematic and you will get subscribers due to the already promoted feature accounts and their promotion schemes.
When users cooperate with bloggers, it likely happens on barter terms. For a product sample (or better, two products - one for the giveaway among subscribers), a blogger will prepare a publication for you. Famous bloggers may agree to cooperate only for a commission. Unlike them, a feature account will assign a price list for the sponsored publication and it might be adapted to your coverage. So, they usually don't charge small stores expensively.
It is more effective to use both bloggers and such niche accounts in order to understand the source of your new subscribers.
How can you investigate bloggers?
You can apply the free User Search. It explores accounts by keywords in the database. Not all IGers are listed there, but you may uncover numerous bloggers. The upside of this search method:
- Free to try.
- There are built-in lists for sorting user collections.
- You can look for emails and phone numbers for communication through other channels.
- You can download the profile sets in the contact table - very handy for outreach.
Keywords
Since Instagram is experimenting with built-in search, and this feature is already available in several countries, it's time to start tidying up your content. That is, optimize it for search. Thus, you teach the system to understand what your publications are about and it will be easier for it to find people interested in them. There is a direct connection between the search optimization of your profile and the growth of target subscribers.
What do keywords mean? For example, if the user wants to find a master who bakes cakes in Vienna, they will enter this query into the search bar in the application. And the topmost results will be profiles that contain these same keywords.
Where can they be indexed?
- Username. Indicate your occupation together with (or instead of) the actual name.
- Nickname. Ensure that your nickname contains a keyword or phrase. It's not always necessary, for example if you use the brand name. But if you work for yourself, and you have a small business, then such a trick can optimize the results of your profile in the search.
- Description of bio. Mention keywords in the summary. Pay attention to what your competitors write in the bio. Analyze and add one or more phrases to your bio.
- Signatures. You can add alt text or use keywords directly in the text below the post. While the search for posts in the feed is not available everywhere, it is possible that in the near future it will be possible to search in your region. By adding alt text, you also help the algorithm to sort the content.
- Hashtags. People can enter key search questions and select the hashtags section to immediately open the gallery of publications. Therefore, select tags that will contain exactly the requests for which subscribers can find you - and not literally what is shown in the photo.
Relevant content
Creating engaging content can take a lot of effort - picking up ideas, organizing filming, etc. - and it is not a given that all these efforts will help to attract subscribers.
Producing original content that sells is essential. You can read how to find ideas for posting and how to shoot for Instagram.
Now you don't have to shoot people for every post. Even big brands are experimenting with digital models. For example, you can put your clothes on a cartoon character. Perhaps a graphic design specialist will cost less than models and professional photography, and it will be interesting to see it in the feed.
Also, don't forget that you can reuse content:
- Download videos and photos from FB - Watch groups and the library may have great ideas for your posts.
- Download video from TikTok - the downloaded clip can be published in Stories or Reels. With the help of the downloader, you will get videos without watermarks, which means they will look presentable.
- Download Stories, photos, and videos from other accounts - you can search for cool visuals right in IG. This is what all feature accounts do. They do not start from scratch, but simply select what subscribers want to see and bring it all together.
- Twitter content - it often becomes a source for memes. Therefore, upload a video from Twitter or take screenshots of offset quotes for posting.
Downloaded visuals can attract followers from the Explore section. Now only feed posts and Reels are displayed there. Therefore, pay due attention to this content.
UGC
Posts from real customers can bring new subscribers and buyers to your account. If you are not currently using such posts, you need to. And if customers are not tagging you, they may not know that you need it.
- Ask them directly. In the profile header, indicate the hashtag under which you will collect posts from customers. Then you can check out this gallery and download publications to repost yourself. In order to keep the original qualities, use the IG Downloader.
- Ask customers to submit a photo of themselves, even without the product. To do this, it is better to contact clients directly. The faces of real people, even if the photo does not show your product, will add a variety of messages to the feed. Plus, it will flatter current customers.
- Use screenshots of correspondence. A simple screenshot of a positive message is already evidence of quality service that will attract new subscribers and customers.
As a result, using all these methods in combination you can upgrade your account in a month to 1,000 new and real followers. Remember that there is no magic button that will suddenly bring you a million-dollar audience. Growing requires daily interactions and tracking what works best for you.
