In the social media marketing scene, there’s a common practice known as “growth hacking.”
Growth hacking isn’t some clandestine manipulation of social media’s inner workings for the benefit of your brand and its popularity, as the name may suggest. Growth hacking is actually a perfectly legitimate process consisting of a few simple steps that can elevate both business and personal brands on the social media scene.
There’s no need for insider knowledge or deep understanding of the inner working of Instagram; in fact, becoming popular on the platform can easily be accomplished with the following steps. Here are 10 surefire methods of becoming more popular on Instagram.
1. Know your account’s purpose
From the outside social media may seem capable of raising anyone and everyone into the collective Internet spotlight. In reality, the trek into stardom and social media influence is anything but instantaneous; truly making it in the Instagram circle takes dedication and careful decisions.
Identifying an account theme beforehand can largely solve the problem of staying content-focused. The decision can be as easy as choosing a particular type of content to post or topics to address. Whatever the choice, taking those considerations to begin with can do wonders for the longevity of your Instagram presence.
2. Engage with your current audience
The whole point of social media is to provide an avenue for producers and consumer to interact with one another; without engagement, consumers and audiences will feel unrepresented and become unwilling to follow your brand. These interactions strengthen marketing as a whole by driving the creation of new, more interesting ideas. Therefore, follower engagement is tantamount to the success of social platforms across the board. You can use an Instagram bot like SocialDrift to optimize engagement.
There are a number of strategies for boosting follower engagement and spurring audience growth. Whether it’s photo submission contests, giveaways, or random following sprees, businesses have a number of choices for engaging their audiences in positive and intriguing ways.
3. Change up the content
Followers may expect a never-ending stream of entertaining content, but most would agree that keeping content diverse and quality trumps delivering the same posts over and over again.
Instead of sticking to one method strictly, marketers should always be experimenting with their different types of posts, their engagement strategies, and their Instagram approach as a whole. Businesses who diversify their content can protect their brand from decaying in the eyes of their audience.
4. Utilize all online presences
For most current businesses, it’s more than likely that Instagram is not the only online presence that is being focused on. With the prevalence of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and many others, businesses have wide networks of content and audiences spanning the majority of the Internet. Although Instagram is unique in its own right, with strictly visual-base posting, there’s no shame in getting a little boost. Businesses who have multiple accounts should join these online presences together, for a multi-pronged approach to advertising.
Doing so not only connects followers with new content, but it also increases total online traffic for the brand in question. Although Instagram is sufficiently powerful on its own, getting support from other social platforms never hurts.
5. Edit your photos
Since Instagram is largely based on photo, with the other half being video, image quality is an integral piece of the puzzle. Without top-notch visuals, it doesn’t really matter how good your content is otherwise; followers like to draw comparisons, and with so much striking content on Instagram, it’s easy to get buried under the competition.
Although it takes some extra time, increasing your overall photo and video quality before posting can do wonders for your Instagram performance in the long run. Not only will followers be more likely to pay attention to your content, but they will also be more impressed and inclined to consistently tune in for your posts.
6. Make use of Instagram Stories
Although Instagram has largely been associated with embedding visual content, like photo and video, to a personal account, there is a growing wave of attention for less permanent media, such as the platform’s Stories feature. Although not exclusive to Instagram by any means, Stories is a wildly popular feature that allows users to showcase glimpses of their lives to their audiences.
The beauty behind Stories is its fleeting nature; since it’s so easy to miss these disappearing posts, followers are more encouraged to flock to accounts, which increases overall traffic. Businesses should utilize Instagram Stories to spread their influence and provide their audience with intriguing behind-the-scenes previews.
7. Identify your biggest influencers
Certainly connecting with followers is an obvious method of expanding audiences. What may not be so obvious is connecting with Instagram influencers. Influencer accounts are already large online presences that can be used to reach new audiences or untapped Instagram potential.
Conducting content collaborations with other larger brands has the positive effect of creating helpful exposure to tons of curious followers, hungry for new content to devour. Although influencer marketing is less intuitive than the other methods on this list, businesses can reap hefty rewards by employing this strategy.
8. The right amount of hashtags
In the realm of social media, hashtags are like conversation starters. Brief but powerful, they can link different topics to one another and ultimately drive discussion. Since hashtags have a presence on all the social media giants, they are clearly an important part of Internet advertising.
Although hashtags are definitely a powerful mode of communication, businesses should only incorporate them into their marketing strategies sparingly. Consumers will appreciate the use of hashtags to spur discussion, as long as they’re not bombarded by a wall of text.
9. Consistently provide content
Although this growth hack is fairly obvious, it’s importance cannot be overstated. The best way to garner followers is to win them over with a continuous stream of intriguing content. Inconsistent posting or unexplained breaks can cause divides in any audience, no matter how exciting the content.
Businesses and all users alike should know that maintaining a successful Instagram account is a constant time commitment. Becoming involved on the platform will be time consuming, but the rewards in brand awareness and audience growth are definitely worth it.
10. Trust in analytics apps
Although often overlooked, this Instagram growth method is probably one of the most powerful for gaining new followers and understanding the inner workings of your Instagram performance. Through a variety of Instagram analytics apps, it’s relatively easy for businesses to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses and come up with adaptive strategies for overcoming those weaknesses.
There exist a number of third-party applications that provide features like scheduled posting, best times to post, and so on. No matter what application is used, businesses can benefit from analyzing their performance on Instagram, so their marketing strategies can become stronger over time.
