Instagram is one of the most prominent social media platforms, a pinnacle for entrepreneurs and industries like Affiliate Marketing. For this reason, getting more followers on Instagram has been the top priority for every person looking to establish a solid presence for their business or entrepreneurship, or just to be popular.
We are going to teach you how to get more followers on Instagram with the most effective strategies that are being used today in 2024.
Why are the followers on Instagram so important?
Followers on Instagram are basically a success rating from a company’s perspective, being the first thing they will look at if they think you might be a good option to promote their services or join one of their campaigns, along with being an indicator of “how many people trust on your content” according to your account’s topic, which will influence on the companies’ decision and on more people following and seeing your content.
It’s also important to keep in mind that Instagram will boost your content depending on how much influence you have on your niche and how much engagement comes from your followers, this is why having followers from your topic/niche is vital as this will also boost your campaign success if a company gets interested in you due to them interacting with your posts.
What’s needed to get more followers on Instagram?
The first step before trying to attract followers to your account is to align your profile accordingly to the strategy you’re following so it can actually catch their attention and, consequently, make them part of your audience.
In order to design a great account you first have to think about the nickname, it would be one of the most important aspects to effectively get more followers, it must be related to the topic or niche that you will be working on. It must be simple, catchy, memorable, and preferably with a keyword related to the industry.
Bear in mind that nicknames and usernames/names are two separate things, in the following example the username is “wilderness.cooking” and the name is “Wilderness Cooking”, the name can be your real one, or just a name related to the topic of your choice, both will have influence on the search results inside and outside of the platform.
Every element of your profile will be crucial in designing a great account, that includes the avatar, that should fit within your niche, your photo if it’s about blogging, or a logo related to the topic. The bio description should indicate your occupation or interest, along with highlighting what you will be posting and attaching links to other contact sources, like your email, Telegram, Whatsapp Business, or a Linktree URL, remember that you have 150 characters to type into it.
Once you have created and designed your account properly, you need to post content accordingly within your topic/niche. Research other accounts on your topic and analyze their posts, add your own touch to the content in order to cause the mythical “WoW” effect to attract more followers, although, keep in mind that you can cause that effect with emotional or informational content, see what your competitors aren’t doing, and try to exploit those flaws.
First steps
You need to understand your target audience and your competitors, and to do that you need to do your homework:
- Analyze your competitors, find similar accounts in your niche, see how their content is being posted, and how their followers react to them, and study the hashtags they’re using.
- Search for highly relevant accounts, the volume search for the hashtags related to your topic, and how much activity they show.
- Be attentive to how the accounts interact with their followers.
At this point after setting everything up correctly and analyzing the things we mentioned, you can proceed with converting your profile into a business account, allowing you to add several elements that will help you highlight your business and get access to the account statistics:
- A Contact button is added to the profile, where a phone or email can be added.
- Category selection. It will help tag your accounting depending on the type of industries it falls on, helping you inform new followers what your account is about.
- Profile Statistics: A complete analysis of your audience, including impressions, engagement, likes, profile views, and more. A great tool that will help you analyze if your content is working.
After setting up all this, you’re ready to start promoting your account or content, whether organically or paid. But we will focus on doing it organically. The best way to get followers on Instagram is by following a certain set of rules that will help you maintain the account’s activity and appeal:
- Work constantly on creating new content.
- Monitor your followers’ activity and interact with them, talk with them.
- Schedule your post so you don’t have to create new content every single day and you never run out a day without posting.
- Alternate between image and video formats.
- Always prioritize engaging content.
- Never forget to optimize and study new hashtags.
How to get followers on Instagram for free?
The main difference between the free and paid methods to get more followers is the time it takes to achieve results. Free strategies always take longer than just paying, nevertheless, the free and organic way is better in the long term, as it doesn’t depend on complex ad campaigns or a budget. Below you will find some of the best strategies to attract more followers on Instagram:
Conversations
This is a simple method that focuses on directly interacting with your audience, whether by comments or DMs, this will work better depending on your account’s niche, but talking directly with your followers will increase their fidelity as they will feel close to you as you’re helping them and showing interest on them. And it will also put you in an “expert” category from their perspective.
This will be also your best method to drive sales, as most people need to trust the seller of the product/services they’re interested in, remember that people don’t buy the product, they buy the attention they get. Do not try to sell something right away, just talk with them, and the topic will pop up eventually. Focus on always replying to their comments and replying to your DMs.
Contests
If your account promotes a product or a specific popular service, organizing contests with that product as a prize will boost your followers as it’s a great advertising strategy. Set a few conditions asking them to tag their friends, post content tagging you, or reposting you. Just keep in mind that this will not retain followers, great content will.
Interacting with your competition
A method that most people ignore, whether by pride or laziness, is to interact with your competitors, posting a comment cheering up or saying something interesting about the post’s topic will attract attention from their followers, talking with you, or your own competitors talking/following you.
Pros:
- Getting several new followers on your account along with the hype generated.
- More traffic is attracted to your profile.
- Several formats can be used to participate in the contest and promote your profile.
Cons:
- Massive followers decrease after finalizing the giveaway and not posting interesting content.
Hashtags
Hashtags are a followers’ magnet, as they will classify your content so Instagram can show them to the right people. Nevertheless, they can’t be used recklessly, there are a few rules that must be followed to not abuse them and get the opposite results:
- Don’t use all the popular hashtags right away, and do not post more than 4-5 hashtags on your post as it makes your post disappear into the Instagram sea. Pick your hashtags carefully and use the ones most relevant.
- Analyze the hashtags and use the one where you have more chance to highlight, it’s better to use a hashtag with a 20K search volume, than one with 5 million.
Always analyze your competitor’s hashtags and adapt them to your own content, as it will help you promote your content easily.
Pros:
- Best and easiest method to get to the top on Instagram posts and to not-followers.
- Custom hashtags are a must for branding.
Cons:
- Choosing hashtags manually can be one of the most difficult tasks if you’re not familiar with it. Nevertheless, you can use services like inflact.com or ahrefs.com.
PR Collaboration
PR is an aspect that most people tend to forget or not pay enough attention to, it’s one of the best strategies to gain more followers on Instagram for free and in a short time. And it will help you get followers already interested in your niche.
This strategy is based on the exchange of audience between another account with the same topic as yours, contacting them and scheduling 1-2 advertising or informational posts, where you tag your partner and they make a post, reel, or story about you and your post. This will provoke an exchange of your and their followers, following you and following the person you’re partnering with.
QR Code
Since Instagram allows accounts to be searched via QR codes, this is something that has been boosting up business and accounts like crazy. Go to your settings and select QR Code to get yours, which can be printed and used to do traditional marketing strategies like hanging them up at the door of your establishment.
This feature has created several new ways to promote an Instagram account and get more followers, for example, recording a video for another platform and including the QR code in a corner, or adding it to the product itself. This will act as a passive method to attract followers, and it can be used everywhere.
Newsletters
Newsletters are the standard when it comes to advertising strategies and fidelity. This isn’t used to just sell things or spam your social media accounts but to actually offer valuable information content, or an advantage to those who are reading them. For example, if your niche is cooking, you can talk about a tasteful turkey recipe, and include the recipe exclusively for those in the newsletter.
Joining relevant communities
Social Media growth is about collaboration, so the best way to gain relevance and attract new followers to your Instagram account is to join communities related to your topic and post exclusive and new content there, attracting even competitors and users already deeply interested in that niche. This will help you to redirect followers from one platform to another (Yandex, Medium, Facebook, Threads… etc).
Being present on other platforms and adding your social media accounts will help you get traffic from other sources and will help you get more followers passively.
Conclusion
We have analyzed several free ways to help you get more followers on your Instagram account, you can choose what’s optimal for you and what you’re looking for according to your goals.