How to Grow Your Instagram Followers

EPISODE 37

Creating your Instagram community is all about cultivating genuine, human connections

Gaining followers on Instagram within your niche market is achieved by creating an engaging community with your target audience while creating quality, valuable and consistent content that would appeal to them.

It’s not about the numbers or getting more likes, it’s about creating a community where you can interact and engage with your target market- this builds a bond and trust between your business and your target market which will lead to sales

Find your market

To find people and businesses that are within your niche market you can:

• Search and follow relevant hashtags to your industry
• See who your competition is following  
• See who’s following your competition

Liking and commenting on your target markets posts are free links to your page, not only for that individual person or business but for anyone else who looks at the post or likes and comments on the post

Tips for growing your Instagram community

• Post on your feed at least a minimum of once a day and a max 3 posts a day- content has to be relevant to your market
• Post on your story daily
• If applicable post on your Instagram story once a week
• Use all 30 available hashtags on posts- keep the hashtags as relevant to your niche market as possible
• Create multiple hashtag groups that you can rotate on every post
• Reply to every DM enquiry
• Reply to every comment- make it personal, don’t say the same thing to everyone because it sounds like a bot response
• Like and comment on your target markets posts- make it personal and a minimum of 4 words, don’t say the same thing to everyone because it sounds like a bot
• Share posts to your story
• Show your face on your feed- puts a face to the brand
• Share tips and knowledge of your industry
• Share client feedback and testimonials
• Share a mixture of images and videos
• Follow and engage with hashtags relevant to my ideal client

The most important tip when gaining followers on Instagram, is to remain consistent and analyse your posts and engagement and scale on the pieces of content that are working.  

Episode highlights

• Instagram will be rolling out capability for brands to sell products directly in their stories - (02:45)
• When you’re updating your Stories, it pushes you to the top of the feed - (03:20)
• The latest Facebook app update on iOS pushes Facebook Stories to the forefront. - (05:30)
• Instead of focusing on likes and followers and comments, it’s more about creating an engagement community with your target audience.  - (10:09)
• Engagement is more than just replying to people’s comments. - (11:31)
• Scaling your content is all about posting, figuring out what works and then creating more content like it to create content people want. - (18:32)
• All about hashtags - which ones to use, how to find out what works and how not to get banned - (20:45)
• How would you use Instagram stories as a brand?. - (25:35)
• Plus much more... 

Thank you to Morgan Nesbitt for his contribution on this episode - he's a champ! Follow Morgan on Instagram: @morgan.nesbitt