The Secret to Growing Your Instagram Account…is NOT buying followers.
(But keep reading for how you CAN grow your audience.)
As a small business owner myself, I get that it is extremely challenging to stay on top of running an Instagram account along with the mile long to-do lists each day.
However, this does not mean you should take the easy way out when it comes to trying to grow your follower base.
It can be extremely tempting to buy Instagram followers, especially when you see offers for “1,000 Instagram followers for $100” or whatever the latest deal is.
BUT, I promise you, in the long run it will benefit your business to grow your Instagram following organically, aka the hard way.
Before we get in to some tips on how to grow your Instagram followers, it is important to realize exactly why you shouldn’t just buy followers.
First of all, they’re almost always fake bots. Bots can “look” like a real follower, and even may like and share content and “act” like a real follower (for a few posts anyway), but their following to followers ratio is a dead giveaway.
They are usually following way more people than people are following them back and while they may like a solid 3 posts in a row, that’s usually where their engagement activity stops. That’s not the type of engagement you are looking for anyway.
Like in a relationship, you want GENUINE attention.
Genuine engagement means that people are naturally engaging with your content by liking, commenting, sharing and saving your content* because they ACTUALLY like it.
*(Fun fact: having folks save your content is the best thing you can do to impress the Instagram algorithm and get more “air time” on Insta.)
Now that you know why you shouldn’t buy your followers, here are some ways you can organically grow your Instagram followers:
First and foremost, what you are posting should be engaging. Duh. How do you be “engaging?” Well, to start, everything you post should be one of these three things: inspirational, educational, or entertaining.
At the same time everything you post should also be shareable. I personally have found so many accounts from my friends sending me random posts from other accounts because they were funny or inspiring, aka, well worth a share.To give some more context, here are some examples that ring true for me…
For inspiration, I love reading inspirational business quotes from some of the accounts that support women businesses owners.
For educational, on our Instagram (@local44north), we love to share marketing tips that are super short and to the point that help small business owners with their marketing. Tutorial videos are also great if you want to go down the educational route.Entertaining can look different for everyone. I love Barstool Sports videos because a laugh is always guaranteed. The Co-Op down here in Charleston is also such an entertaining Instagram page. He has the funniest captions ever because they are just dark, dry stream-of-consciousness thoughts.
Just remember that what you’re sharing within these categories ALWAYS has to align with your brand and appeal to your target audience.
Another key component to growing your audience organically is creating a strategy and documenting said strategy. This can act as your go-to guide for what to post when you’re in a rut. This will help you think intentionally about what you post on Instagram.
Your strategy should include details like what to post, when to post, copy guidelines, how to engage folks etc. The more specific you can get, the better. It gives your audience a better feel of what makes you, you.
Once you have an Instagram strategy, you want people to come to your page to engage. And guess what? In order to get engagement, that’s right, you have to give it.
The most important ways to engage with other people are to like their posts, share those people’s posts on your story, and comment on their posts.
You don’t want to engage with just anyone and everyone for the sake of “engaging,” you want to get strategic with it. Finding people and businesses that are in your same city, or are a similar brand will help you discover your niche. However, It doesn’t always have to be people or businesses within your area. Finding like minded people and businesses is important for potential partnerships down the road.
It is also extremely important to remember to engage with people that engage with you. That makes them feel included, and more inclined to comment and share your posts in the future.
Engagement comes down to being disciplined. You should be spending 30 minutes a day engaging with folks. And before you say that’s a lot, how often are you already on Instagram a day?
We are conditioned to want to see a big number of followers for our account so I get why it is soooo tempting to break down and buy some followers. Trust me I’ve had to stop myself from doing it before. Just remember, while it’s a quick and fairly easy commitment to buy followers, it’s not a genuine fix or even a worthwhile one. In fact, it can HURT your business.
