Followers are important when it comes to Instagram. Without any followers how can you get your message out.
Everyone had to start from 0 followers. There’s nothing they could do about that. But there is something you can do about building up your follower base.
In this article we are going to go through 10 ways you can get more followers on Instagram.
How to Get More Followers on Instagram
First what you should do is make a list of accounts similar to your own or competitor accounts. Once you have a list of competitor accounts go on their most recent photos and start following all the people that have commented and liked the photos.
Try to like and comment on the posts of some of the people who you have just followed.
When you have done this, you should have people who are following you back. From the people who have followed you, like their posts and leave genuine comments on their posts.
Don’t leave spam comments like ‘Nice post!’. Leave genuine comments that actually add value. Instagram is a social networking app and so you should be doing some networking.
Before you do this, it is a good idea to populate your Instagram feed with at least 10 good photos, you don’t want your account coming off as a spam account.
If you don’t have any content to post or can’t think of anything you can always repost other people’s content on Instagram. Just be sure to give credit to the account you have reposted from.
If you still can’t think of any content to post, go to the chapter on what to post on Instagram. There’s tons of ideas there on what to post.
Going back to our golf account, if you see someone that has posted a video of them playing golf you might comment on how good they are or even provide feedback. It could be something like this:
‘You got some good power on your swing but you just need to practice a bit on your technique by holding the golf club properly. Practice makes perfect!’
Try to add some value to the comment and make it helpful and make your comment related to the content. Don’t just leave a ‘Nice post’ comment.
Now the people who haven’t followed you back, unfollow them. Having a too high ratio of following to followers is not healthy for your account.
You can use an app to help you with unfollowing quicker.
Some apps available are:
Unfollowers (Android – free)
Mass Unfollow (iOS – free)
Follow Meter for Instagram (Android/iOS – free)
Unfollowers for Instagram + (iOS – free)
Followers Tool for Instagram (Android – free)
Crowdfire (Android/iOS/Web – free)
Followers Track for Instagram (iOS – free)
A lot of these apps are free but have a premium element to it in which you can buy
Stealing your competitors followers (ethically)
Another good strategy you can use to gain more relevant followers is steal your competitors followers.
So what you want to do is go to one of your competitors Instagram page. And click on their latest post. Start following all the people who have liked and commenting on their latest post.
It’s good to pick the latest post because it’s probably been recently posted and the people who have engaged with that particular post are likely still on Instagram. So if they see a notification from you that you have followed them, they will probably follow back because it’s something they are interested in.
This is a good way to find relevant people interested in your niche. You can use your unfollowing app of your choice and then unfollow the people who haven’t followed back to keep a good ratio.
So if you have an athletics and sportswear brand onn Instagram. Go to @nike or @addidas, go to the latest post and follow the people who have left comments and liked their posts.
Leave genuine comments and like the photos for the people whose accounts you have liked.
You’d be surprised at the amount of people that comment on normal, less known accounts. So when you leave a genuine comment on someone’s account, they will likely appreciate it so much and end up being a fan of your brand.
Most brands don’t take the time to engage with their audience so if someone sees you actually engage with your followers they will see you care. It’s about engaging with your community.
Engaging on bigger accounts
If you go to bigger accounts who have massive followings in the millions, go to the accounts and comment on their photos.
A lot of people frequently go onto the larger accounts and look through the comments, if your comment is valuable many people will go check out the account that commented.
These accounts larger accounts can be any large account such as celebrities, athletes, influencers or anyone else. It is good to find larger accounts in your niche.
Putting this example into context with our Golf account.
Make a list of golfer or celebrities interested in golf. Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, etc.
Go to their Instagram accounts and leave valuable comments. Try to be funny or witty but if you can’t just add something valuable.
If your comment picks up a good amount of likes, some people will be inclined to check out your account and may just end up following.
Because there is thousands and sometimes millions of people engaging with these larger accounts, your comment can get in front of a lot of eyeballs.
Not only is this a good way to get targeted followers back to your account, but it can build relationships with the account you are engaging with. Some celebrities actively use Instagram to communicate with their fanbase and actively check comments of their posts.
You probably won’t be able to get in touch with the bigger ones and but some of the smaller ones do.
There are a lot of celebrities who don’t but some do.
So it’s a good way to get onto their radar and in future have some kind of business relationship going forward.
Niche Pages
Using niche pages can help you get your account in front of people who are passionate about what you have. Basically a niche page is something that posts about one particular thing, whether that be football, snooker, boxing, Playstation, Fortnite, having a shit (probably not this one!) or anything else. There’s niche pages on loads of stuff out there.
Anyway most niche pages accept paid promotions so you can just contact them and ask them if they will make a post for you. Most pages charge a reasonable rate so you won’t have to worry about money.
Look for pages with more than 50,000 followers and check to see if the followers are engaging with the account. Are they commenting and liking? If they are go ahead and contact them. A lot of pages you can just DM but some pages will want you to contact them via Kik. Kik is a messaging app similar to Whatsapp. To be honest I don’t really know why some of them use Kik to do business on, but it is what it is.
If I would contact a niche page, I would normally send a simple message to them like:
‘Hey, how much for a promo?’
They will normally then send a message back with their rates and you can pay them via Paypal. Now there can be the one or two shady people on Instagram who might take your money and run but they are scum and karma will deal with them.
However a lot of the people with niche pages are decent people and hold their end of the bargain and do post at the specified time and date that you say.
Now you’re probably asking, what do I tell them to post?
I found that telling them to post sale-sy posts doesn’t work that well. So posts like ‘Buy my stuff’, or ‘3% discount now on!’ doesn’t work as people don’t really want to be sold to.
What you can do instead is try getting them to your page or getting their email. Sure if you have a really good sale then by all means go ahead and promote that.
Viral Content
Viral content is content that has been shared or view a lot and is really popular. You can repurpose viral content onto your own account.
It’s really simple. All you have do is go to the explore page and look for videos or photos that have a high level of engagement (likes + comments) and just repost that onto your own account. Make sure the post is related to your niche or hashtag.
Or you can go to your niches hashtag and repost a post that is popular in a niche hashtag. Use the relevant hashtags for your post. To find out how to make use of hashtags properly go to the hashtags section of this book.
If you’ve just started your business or have a newly started Instagram account, this is a good way to start off.
Remember always credit the account you originally took the post from.
Giveaways
People love winning free stuff. They go crazy over the chance of winning something for free. I don’t really know what happens to people but when they have the chance to win something for free they will do whatever it takes.
With your account you can do promote your giveaway with the niche page.
What you can do is giveaway one of your products in exchange for them entering the giveaway. Here’s how you can do it:
Tell them what they need to do to enter. It can be a series of steps. Whether it be tagging a friend, following your page or anything else. Once they have done that they are entered. In the caption you want to put the end date of the giveaway and when the winner will be announced. Have a good picture, maybe of the product followed by an overlay of text saying ‘win this’ or something like that.
With our golf store Instagram account we could do something like this:
‘To celebrate the release of our new golf club – the Tee-8000, we are giving one lucky winner the chance to win our new Tee-8000 golf club. All you have to do to enter is:
Follow @golfstore
Tag 2 friends
Comment who your favourite golfer is
Once you have followed those steps you will be automatically entered. Winner will be announced on 10/07/2018.
You don’t have to complicate things and can make it quite simple. You might just see a lot of freebie seekers or freeloaders coming in. You know the people.
Have no interest in your brand and just entering because they have a chance to win something. Most likely they will end up unfollowing you once the giveaway is over.
If you use a popular niche page or influencer you should see a lot of entries trickle in. Not only that but partner up with an influencer in your niche and ask them to promote your giveaway on their page.
You probably will have to pay them but it will be worth it and you will have more targeted followers who are interested in what you have to say.
Use a giveaway platform like KingSumo, Gleam.io or Wishpond to add a virality component to your giveaway. These platforms get users to share your giveaways on their social media accounts for more entries thus making your giveaways that much more viral.
These platforms do charge you a fee but it is worth it in the long run.
Free ebook
Another thing you can use niche pages for is giving away your lead magnet. This lead magnet can be anything useful for your target audience or even something that helps solve a problem.
You can create a mini ebook and just give it away in exchange for your followers email. So with our golf store we could create something like ‘5 ways to improve your golf swing’, or ‘Beginners guide to playing golf’.
Emails are one of the useful things you can collect as you can directly communicate with your followers. It is more of a direct avenue to communicate and you have less competition. Plus with Instagram’s ever changing algorithms you never know how the updates will affect your account.
The picture could be the front cover of the book. Here’s what our post caption would look like:
We are giving away our free Beginners Guide to Playing Golf ebook which is worth $10. This is a great ebook and will teach you all about golf including:
How to get started playing golf
Correct exercises to do
How to eat right for golf
And much more
All you need to do is follow the link in our bio @golfstore and enter your email address. We will send the book to your email address
This will drive more followers to follow your page but more importantly it will help get those email subscribers. And we all know how important email subscribers are. When you put the value in monetary terms people will think they are getting a good deal.
Would you rather pay $10 for something or get that same thing for free? I know which one I would get.
Shoutout for Shoutout
Granted this isn’t one of the best ways to get more followers but when you’re starting out it can give you a little boost.
So the idea with shoutout for shoutout is you find similar accounts or like minded accounts that target the same niche and DM them asking for a shoutout for shoutout. A shoutout for shoutout is just when you post one of their photos and ask your followers to follow their account and they do the same and tell their followers to follow you.
You want to look for similar account sizes to your own. Obviously an account with 200,000 followers isn’t going to shout you out when you only have about 20 followers. It has to be mutually beneficial.
There are a number of websites in which you can buy shoutouts ranging from 1 hour shoutouts to permanent shoutouts. The price all depends on the size of the account and the engagement. Some of the websites you can use are:
ShoutCart.com
Grapevinelogic.com
Fohrcard.com
Indahash.com
BuySellShoutouts.com
Hashtags
Instagram allows you to have 30 hashtags under each post. Why not make use of them?
Just like Twitter and other social media websites, Instagram has hashtags. Using hashtags can increase the popularity of your posts as well as new users discovering your content. Use as many hashtags as you can when uploading your photos, but don’t overdo it.
In case you didn’t know hashtags allows your photo to appear in the search results for hashtags.
So if a user was searching for #golfclubs and you happen to use the same hashtag, the user could potentially be exposed to your photo and engage with it.
Instagram gives you a limit of using 30 hashtags but I recommend you use maximum 20. To make a look more tidy don’t use hashtags in the caption and use put them in the first comment instead.
What you can do is save a list of hashtags in Evernote or your preferred notes app and everytime you need to use hashtags, just copy and paste them in. Then you can just change the ones you want. It saves a lot of time doing it this way.
It can be hard to find popular hashtags in your niche. Good thing there’s a website for that!
Use web.stagram.com to search and browse popular hashtags. This website also brings up popular instagram users as well as popular hashtags.
Going back to our golf example, if you just enter golf in web.stagram it will bring up all the popular hashtags for golf by amount of photos that use that specific hashtag.
Hashtagsforlikes.co is another site similar to web.stagram which helps you find a list of popular hashtags. Hashtagsforlikes.co sorts out the popular hashtags and in popular niches such as fitness, entertainment and motivation.
If you use it directly from mobile you have the option to just copy and paste the hashtags directly from the website.
Displaypurposes.com allows you to find related hashtags just by typing one keyword. For example, if I was to type in basketball, it would bring up all related hashtags.
Not only that but it shows the relevance of those keywords and the popularity. Pretty nifty tool.
You want to aim for hashtags that have less than 1,000,000 posts in total for the specific hashtag. This would mean less posts are competing for the hashtag, so you have more of a chance of showing up in the top 9 posts for that hashtag.
You can also use hashtags with more than 1,000,000 posts but try finding more hashtags with less than 1,000,000 posts.
Have a look at what hashtags your competitors are using a borrow them for your own posts. Don’t just use them all but take a few and implement them with your own hashtags.
Some popular hashtags regardless of your niche are:
#love #instagood #me #cute #tbt #photooftheday #instamood#iphonesia #tweegram #picoftheday #igers #girl #beautiful #summer #instagramhub #iphoneonly #follow #igdaily #bestoftheday #happy #fashion #fun
Use the above hashtags sparingly as too much of them will just make your posts appear like spam and they won’t be as effective as ones that are targeted hashtags.
Ideally you want to find targeted hashtags. You want to use a mix of hashtags that are broad (e.g #sports) and narrow (e.g. #minigolf)
Above all experiment to which ones work best and which hashtags don’t work best for you.
Instagram Engagement Groups
Engagement groups are basically a bunch of people who like and comment on each others posts at before a specific time so they can convince Instagram’s algorithm to boost their post and get featured on the explore page of the Instagram app.
If you can get featured on the explore page you have the chance to potentially get a lot of eyeballs on your account and posts. So that equals more followers and likes.
A downside can be you won’t get genuine people liking and commenting on your posts because they genuinely care or like your content. Because of that you might get spam comments like ‘Nice post’ or ‘Looks great’ however some groups do require you to leave valuable comments.
If you don’t actually participate in these groups, you will get kicked out of them so beware!.
You might be asking how do I get into Instagram engagement groups. Well, it’s pretty easy. You can do a google search for ‘Instagram engagement groups’ and just look for different engagement groups suited towards you.
Another place you can look at is Reddit. If you look in the Instagram subreddits you should be able to find plenty. Just Google it.
If you have a Facebook account you can search Instagram Engagement groups on Facebook and it will bring tons of different Facebook groups regarding this.
Most of the Instagram engagement groups or ‘engagement pods’ communicate using the messaging app Telegram.
Some of the groups require you have a minimum amount of followers but others are more liberal on the accounts they allow in.
Once you’ve downloaded the Telegram app just use the above list and choose a group to join. You’ll be able to send a request to join and the admin will be able to approve or not.
If that’s not your cup of tea, you can create your own engagement groups and invite other people to them to engage in them.
It’s the same principle but it would be with people you know better.
Partner up with Influencers
Partnering up with influencers is a great way to get more followers. I recommend partnering up with micro-influencers at the start. They are the ones who have a few thousand followers to 100,000.
What you want to do is find micro-influencers who are passionate about the niche you are in and have at least 20,000 followers.
Micro-influencers usually post about the product just for a free product. Some might ask for payment but more than likely not.
Us
So if you want to leave the headache of growing an Instagram account to us, we will grow your following organically, create engaging content and manage your account fully.
Me and my team are social media experts and know what we are doing having grown tons of Instagram accounts from 0 to hundreds of thousands of followers.
If you’re interested get in touch with us.
Here is what not to do:
Buying followers & likes
Never ever buy likes or follows. It does your account more harm than good. Those followers that you will get do not engage with you so what’s the point of having them as followers. It’s just a waste of money.
When you have about 50,000 followers and only 30-40 likes per post, it doesn’t really look good to other people and they won’t follow you.
I highly suggest you keep away from buying followers or likes and anyone that tries to sell you them is just trying to pocket some money from you, no matter how good he makes it sound.
Bots
Bots are basically automated software that like, follow and comment for you based on prespecified barriers that you set. So you can set the bot to set who to follow, what to like and what to comment on and it will do it for you automatically. They can even auto DM for you.
In theory this sounds amazing, and sounds like it can take a lot of your plate. But in reality it’s not that good. The reason why is because Instagram is cracking down on these bot programs and any account that they think is using bots to grow their account will get banned and closed down.
Instagram want people to actively engage with other accounts humanly without using bots as they believe it ruins the experience of Instagram.
So if you’ve spent all this time trying to build an account up and you decide to use a bot to boost your followers and Instagram notice this and close your account down, all your hard work is wasted.
The reason Instagram is cracking down on these bots is because they want people to naturally interact with each other and using bots just ruins the experience.
Fiverr
Fiverr is an online marketplace where you can buy and sell services. On Fiverr there are loads of sellers who will take your account and help grow it naturally. They do this by liking, commenting and following like minded people who may be interested in what you have.
They charge about $50-$60 for a month’s management and some even promise you to get an increase of 1,500-2,000 more followers. Not bad for $60.
To be honest Fiverr isn’t all to bad, there are the good sellers but its getting hard to differentiate. Some sellers do not do it humanly themselves and will try automating by using software. Stay away from those sellers.
Conclusion
They are some ways you can get more followers on Instagram. You just have to put the work in, have a plan and be consistent in your efforts.
Never buys followers or likes. It will ruin your account and you’ll just have wasted your money. Don’t buy bot services either as it can have a negative effective on your account.
Instead grow your account organically using the methods in this article. Not only will you be able to get more followers but you’ll be able to get more sales and leads.
If you want to learn more about growing your Instagram account and getting more sales and leads from it then check out the book Master the Art of Instagram Marketing: Get New Customers, Gain Tons of New Followers Rapidly & Make Bucketloads of Money.
I hope you found this article useful and if you did why not share it with someone else.
