Everybody under the blanket of sun knows about Instagram. It has slowly but steadily crept into people’s lives. Don’t you agree? Right this moment when you’re reading this article someone somewhere would have posted an image on Instagram. Instagram is mainly used by people to stay connected with their family &friends or maintain their social media presence.
Even brands have also seen the benefits of social media and are using social media to interact with their customers. If you’re wondering how social media will help your business? There is so much a social media account can do, it can boost your online presence, help you interact with your clients and help you in reaching a new business, promote your products or services and delight your customers.
But to attract new customers you must have a huge following, which takes some serious efforts. For any business to grow it takes a lot of planning and efforts, same goes to increasing your followers. If you’re wondering how to create and maintain a follow-worthy Instagram profile, then here is how you do it.
Optimize your Profile
Creating a profile doesn’t end your job there, in fact, your job starts from there. You must optimise your profile when people visit your website they must understand who are you? And what you do? You can attract followers by using industry-related keywords in your profile. Give your potential followers a reason to follow your page. Your bio defines the personality of your brand, so make sure you add all the necessary information with a hint of personality.
Use images that are not blurry, If your brand is more popular by its logo then use the logo as your profile picture as you see more people can recognise your brand and start following. For username use your brand or business name. If you wish to make any changes in your profile, you can simply click on edit profile and make changes. Remember to keep your profile public, if you want to turn off private account settings then click on the gear icon, open options and turn off the private account.
Edit Images
Instagram is all about images, as you see, it is a platform that inclines more towards pictures. Most use professional photographers to take pictures, while others simply use their smartphones to click pictures. It’s completely up to you but make sure that your images do look professional whether they’re taken by a professional or your smartphone. Instagram provides you with a wide range of filters to pick from. You can use these filters to make your images stand out. Choose the image you want to upload from the camera roll or gallery then simply try different filters on the image and play with the intensity of filters and choose a filter that makes your image stand out.
Designate a Team
If you have a team managing your social media accounts, Designate a minimum of 2 people only for Instagram. If you plan on allowing one person to maintain multiple social media platforms, it can simply prove as the wrong move in the long term. The audience base is different from one social media platform to others, so if you one have one person maintaining multiple platforms they may commit mistakes, which may cost you. Also, social media platforms like Instagram moves fast, so your team must always be ready on toes. They must perform research and curate content carefully to increase your reach and followers.
Captions & Hashtags
On Instagram, not only your image but captions and hashtags are also important. Write beyond one-liners. You can make your captions funny and quirky and descriptive. If you only post simple and informative captions it may get boring, so make sure to post something that keeps your audience interested and look forward to your posts.
Remember, your main goal on Instagram is to increase your followers and attract new customers to your brand. Get as creative as possible. Be quirky, funny, ironic and keep your audience interested in your brand. Hashtags are important as they help in attracting new followers. Use hashtags similar to your caption, other than obvious hashtags, use dedicated hashtags for your brand. With dedicated hashtags for your brand will stay with the audience for a long time.
Influencer Marketing
Research for influencers on Instagram and collaborate with them. Collaborating with influencers will help your brand to tap into their audience, which may increase followers to your profile. Follow their profiles, build connections and maintain good relationships with them to become their favourite brand. Influencer marketing will do great benefits for the brand as they can attract more customers and drive more traffic to your website and increase your sales.
Consistency
Maintain consistency in your profile, be it in your Instagram style or posting. Most people follow you because they like your content and are looking forward to your future posts. See that you post consistently. Maintaining a consistent theme in your Instagram will create uniformity in your profile. If you deliver the same type of content every day then you’re followers will increase, as you’re giving them what they’re expecting. Use your brand colours in your themes, it will maintain the consistency of your profile and familiarize your audience with your brand.
Promote
If your brand is quite active on all other social media platforms then use it for your benefit. You intimate your followers on other social media platforms about your Instagram account. Your loyal fan base will follow you on Instagram too, which will help you in increasing your followers. Cross-promotion will undoubtedly help you, as your followers from other social media platforms can follow your Instagram. You just have to inform them about your Instagram account in a post, don’t forget to provide them with your username.
Final Thoughts
Technological Advancement and changing times have changed the way people conduct business. Now brands are mainly concentrating on getting closer to their audience and the best way to do it is social media platforms. Instagram is one such platform which can increase sales and drive traffic to the website. So increasing followers is one of the main steps in making your Instagram success.
To gain more followers you must optimise your profile, use creative captions, hashtags. Using influencers will allow you to venture into a new audience and lastly engage in conversations with your followers in comments, repost their mentions of your posts so that you can tap into their audience. Increasing followers on your profile will act as proof that people are becoming more and more interested in your brand.
