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How to Grow your Instagram Audience
The best way to grow your Instagram audience is through great content, but with 200 million followers to date (March 2014) and a whopping 60 million photos shared per day it’s not easy getting your account to stand out above the rest.
Stats Source – http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/important-instagram-stats/#.UzQu8Nwrs3E
As you will be aware, Instagram is undoubtedly a useful platform to have a following on especially for brands, blogs and businesses. If you really want to get the most out of the ever growing photo sharing platform, you really need to implement ways of growing your audience on Instagram.
If you’re managing a business or brand account the main focus is undoubtedly going to be to gain more followers. The obvious way to grow your Instagram audience is to create quality content that is going to appeal to users, however with so many users all producing quality images how can you make you account stand out from the rest?
There are some brands that have smashed Instagram and if they can do it so can you. However, organically gaining Instagram followers can be tough, so if you’re serious about conquering Instagram then you must put the work in if you want to get the results.
We can’t stress enough to steer clear from using services to buy followers, yes you may have thousands of followers in a short space of time, but will they still be around in six months time? Probably not and they more than likely won’t bring you any value in the first place.
So how can you grow your Instagram following?
You’ve heard it all before right? Produce quality content, make sure you use hashtags, post regularly and engage with your audience – all of these are obvious. With a staggering 40% of brands adopting Instagram as part of their marketing strategies it’s even harder for you to get noticed. You need to do something that is going make you stand out from the rest.
In order to grow your instagram audience you must explore different avenues and really put in the effort. It’s all about knowing how to reach the right people, coming up with a strategy and being able to put these plans into immediate effect.
Share on multiple platforms
Announcing your Instagram on other social platforms is a great way of reaching out to even more potential followers. Cross sharing on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is incredibly straight forward – simply link up your accounts and the image will be posted at the same time across each individual platform.
If you want to share an older image or share at a later date you can do so by clicking on the … button on the bottom right hand side of your image where it says ‘Share Photo’, make sure you include a caption and tag yourself!
Be sure to add an Instagram badge to your website too, The Instagram blog has a useful tutorial that demonstrates how to create your own Instagram badges, these are the simplest way of linking your account and directing traffic towards your online profile.
Listen your Instagram audience
Taking tips from your audience is a great way of giving them what they want – they will follow you because they want to see more of what you have to offer. Look at your account and see what sorts of images get the most engagement.
Dont’ neglect your existing followers feedback, it’s one of the worst things you can do. If your audience has gone out of their way to comment on your posts then it means they have actually taken the time out to interact with you – this shows that they care enough about your brand to do so.
In an ideal world you want all you followers to interact with you, whether it’s through likes or comments. Listening to your followers will show that you value them, communicating back to them shows that their feedback is appreciate.
Track Your Followers
There are several tools available that allow you to track your audience and manage your followers. Generally many of the the apps are cheap and can be very useful especially if you’re on a tighter budget.
Apps like Followers can help you track new followers and their engagement.
Contests
Many brands have seen a substantial growth in followers after managing a contests. Contest will always be useful for maximizing followers growth, mainly because people love free stuff. The best thing about contests is you can have full control over the conditions, the best way to grow your Instagram audience through a contest would be to make following your account and sharing and tagging the photo a condition for entering the contest.
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Walkers
Shout Outs and Reposts Build relationships with influencers is crucial you need to connect with your audience at the earliest stage possible. You will find it virtually impossible to grow on your own as you will start with no followers shout-outs from your followers will really help to boost your following so do the same in return. Tagging other users in your posts and then getting them to tag you in return makes it a lot easier for to get discovered, you’ll find if you do it for your followers then they’ll return the favor.
Encourage your audience to repost your content, the more people share and repost your images the more people will see you content – just make sure they mention you in caption.
Good tips, very useful and profound. There’s something else to be added to the list though, and i mean follower management. Good way to promote a hotel is to find as many people interested in travels as possible. It could be a famous blogger (the best option), or just a skilled voyager (not bad either) or just people who are somehow indicated as travelers. The most simple but the most time-consuming way is to add all the people based on their geolocation and travel-related hashtags/posts. Interested people will follow back, the rest can be rid of by an app like fast-unfollow.com, 5000 unfollowings per day is enough to keep a sustainable growth. I first tried this strategy in an oriental fabric store in a hotel hallway, and it worked perfectly. It’s an amazing feel when a customer from another part of the world comes specifically to your place.