Grow Your Instagram Follower

Instagram is the fastest growing social network in the world. Launched just 3 years ago, the network already boasts over 300M monthly active users.

If I’ve convinced you to start using Instagram for your business, let’s get into how you can build your own engaged following.

Use #hashtags

This has been beaten to death on marketing blogs, but I still feel the need to cover it. When used correctly, Instagram hashtags are extremely effective. Hashtags helps users find your content by grouping them with other photos tagged with the same hashtag. This helps to get visibility and targeted views from other like-minded Instagram users. Here are 3 ways I use hashtags:

Create a brand. A branded hashtag is specific to your business. I suggest you use your business name or slogan in all of your posts (i.e. #automateyourmarketing or #moz). A brand that does a great job of utilizing hashtags is KitKat. With every post they encourage followers to use “#haveabreak” and create giveaways for those that abide. This helps spread brand awareness and skyrockets sharing and user engagement.

Trending hashtags. These are hashtags based on what’s going viral at that moment. When you come across a trend that’s related to your business, engage in the conversation by posting content using the hashtag. This can put your message in front a large, highly engaged audience. This technique requires a little bit more effort because Instagram doesn’t currently show what’s trending. However, you can use the same trends on Twitter and Facebook (found on the side of your feeds) to join in on Instagram.

Niche specific. Finding related hashtags takes some digging. Head to iconosquare.com and type in a keyword related to your business. The platform will return a long list of related hashtags and their associated volume. From these you will be able to build a list of relevant hashtags to use in all of your posts.

Since you’ll be posting from a mobile device, we suggest you keep a note pad with your hashtags in them. This will allow you to copy and paste them into each post and save you the hassle of typing them out each time.

Link accounts

When posting a photo or video, Instagram offers the option to push the content to 6 other social networks: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Flikr, FourSquare and Mixi; I strongly suggest you take advantage of this. Not only will it save you time posting on other accounts, but it will allow you to cross pollinate your followings.

When you push content from Instagram to other networks, the post shows as coming from Instagram. This is an easy way to leverage your followings on other networks instead of blasting “follow us on Instagram”.

Linking accounts is simple to do – all that is needed is the login and password for the 6 accounts listed above and you can begin pushing content with each Instagram post.

Use your website

As an SEO, I specialize in driving organic traffic. I drive thousands of unique visitors to my blog each month so I was easily able to leverage my website to grow my business’ Instagram account from 200 to 3,000 followers over the course of 6 months. I did this in 2 ways:

• I added a simple Instagram follow widget to the sidebar of my blog. If you’re using WordPress or Drupal for your blog there are dozens of free plugins that do this for you.
• Instead of just uploading images from my desktop to my website, I uploaded images to my Instagram account and then embed those images in the blog post (see image below). This simple distinction drew a ton of awareness to my Instagram account and a huge boost to my following. Embedding images is simple:
• Access your Instagram account from a PC. Click the image you would like to embed on your site
• Click the 3 little dots in the lower right hand corner of the image
• Click ‘embed’
• Highlight, copy the code and paste into your HTML

Like and comment

Admittedly, this method requires a significant time investment on your part. However, if you have an intern you are under utilizing, this is perfect. Essentially what this method entails is interacting with like minded users by liking and commenting on their content. The key here is to find users that fit your target demographic and actually engaging with their posts, not spamming them.

The best way to do this is to search for content by hashtags. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer – what type of hashtags would they be using?

-socialmediatoday.com