Channel Eye has joined forces with Jo Buchanan, the Founder of TwitTwooYou, a business growth strategic consultancy centred on getting brands noticed.
In the last marketing masterclass series article, we shared five top tips to grow your Instagram organically. But there’s more! In this week’s marketing masterclass series article, we give you five more top tips to help you grow your followership on this platform.
With ten top tips to follow, even trying out a few of them should help you grow your community on this social media channel.
And don’t forget, the bigger the audience, the more likely you will notice more visits to your website and even potential sales and enquiries too.
1. Give them what they want
In the first part of this blog, we spoke about making sure you post consistently and ensure your content is well thought out and not random in style. Posting at random times with ill-thought-out content will only serve to alienate your followers and could even lead them to unfollow you.
Instead, deep dive into your Instagram Trends to find out which of your posts are generating the most engagement. If you can, categorise these posts and then, if, for example, you see that your people’s stories are generating the most attention, do more of these and less of those that get you very little attention.
To take your analysis one step further, you could even invest in Instagram Analytics to track, benchmark and analyse your content.
If you’re still stuck, why not look at what kind of content your competitors are getting the most engagement with and follow suit? We’re not saying you should copy what they are doing, but if you find that your competitor is getting the most attention from a how-to blog, then look into what kind of value-added content you could generate and share on your profile.
2. Start conversations
One of the best ways to grow your followers is to engage in conversation with your audience. Nowadays, customers are trawling a brand’s social media presence over conversing with their website to decide whether they want to buy from you. If they see you engaging actively and attentively with your customers; offering guidance, tips, tricks and kindness, they are far more likely to buy from you.
If you are lucky enough to receive comments from customers, make sure to answer or respond to them as quickly as possible. Take care of your customers on Instagram and this will help improve brand loyalty and potential sales too.
3. Showcase your Instagram profile everywhere
In our first blog of a similar title, we talked about discoverability and making sure your Instagram profile name matches as close to your brand name as possible. But that’s not where this should stop. How are people going to find your Instagram profile if you don’t promote it?
Creating visibility and awareness is one of the best ways to get discovered. If you truly want to get more Instagram followers, let people know where to find you. You could add social media buttons to your website and blog to help promote social shares across all your networks as well as show people where to find you on Instagram.
Another great way to promote your Instagram profile is to promote it on your other social media channels. For example, if you feature on Twitter and Instagram, why not promote your Instagram profile on your Twitter page? Make sure, however, that you’re not just asking for a follow. Instead, you should try to promote unique content on your Instagram so users have a reason to follow you there.
4. Enhance discoverability with hashtags
If you’ve never added hashtags to your social media posts, you’ve been missing a trick! Hashtags aid the discoverability of your profile and will help grow your audience, as people seek out other profiles that talk about topics that they are interested in.
The secret to good hashtag use is to use hashtags that are not too overpopulated. What we mean by this is to find a hashtag that isn’t used too much. If you start adding hashtags that are really popular it will be hard to get noticed amongst a sea of pictures, tweets and posts. What’s more, don’t use too many! Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags on any one post.
There is a great free tool called all-hashtag.com that helps you to identify the most popular hashtags based on keywords.
If you are hosting an event, creating a unique hashtag related to your event is a great way to combine all your social media content in one place.
5. Make your followers smile
If you ask yourself the question, will this post add value to my audience? Will this post make them smile or laugh? Will this post generate some kind of emotion in my audience? And you can honestly say yes, then these are the types of posts to publish.
You see, we buy from people/brands we like and if you leave us with a warm and fuzzy feeling when we view your posts or when we engage with your friendly customer support team, we are far more likely to follow you, talk about you, recommend you to friends and peers and even buy from you.
So make your followers smile. Make them happy. Consider your followers as you would your friends. Pepper in a few posts that not only align with your brand values but break up the monotony of pushing a product or service. Why not post a few inspirational posts or memes once in a while? Or share a fun photo from a recent team-building event that made everyone else in the office laugh?
If you read our last marketing masterclass series article, you now have ten top tips to help you increase your Instagram followership. We’re not expecting you to follow all ten, but if you try a few, you should start to see your audience grow.
This is a sponsored article.
