Growing on Instagram in 2021 is wildly difficult and I’m not going to tell you that by “just posting every day” you will grow your page instantly – that’s not how it works. However, there are some little tricks that you can use to organically grow your page. Let’s get into it!
1. Pick and define your niche and direction
Please, please don’t roll your eyes. I know everyone always says this; The reason for this is that it is super important. When people land on your Instagram page they should know what it’s about straight away. If people arrive at your page and are confused, they will not follow you or even worse: unfollow you. You need to be clear about what your content is about and stick with that.
2. Produce high-quality content and offer value
Posting about your day is not enough. It’s important to produce high-quality content that offers value to your followers, which in turn will get likes, shares and will be saved. Likes, shares, and saves are indications for Instagram that your content is of high quality and that it’s well-received by its users. Therefore, they will push it out to other people and with this, you will reach more people.
3. Get featured on other pages
With this, I mean getting featured on pages of brands or theme pages. Brands and theme pages are followed by highly engaged people – people who really like this brand/theme and its content. Imagine your niche is fashion and you get featured on a Fashion Inspiration page.. Your page will be exposed to a whole new audience that loves fashion. Want to make the most of it? Make sure to interact with everyone who engaged with your repost.
4. Engage with your followers: ask questions
By engaging with your audience you will be able to build a community and a cheerleading team. This is super important because Instagram will show your content to your cheerleaders first. If they engage, Instagram will push it out to more people.
5. Use new Instagram features – Yes, reels
Instagram wants its new features to be successful. Therefore, they will purposefully push out content that is using their new features. This means that when you use those new features, chances are high that Instagram will prioritize this over other content. Right now, the new feature is Reels. However, they will launch new features in the future – you just have to make sure that you’re using them.
6. Analyse Insights and adjust your strategy
To access Insights you will need a Business account. Once you have it, it’s an amazing (and free) analytics tool. The most amazing thing Insights does is telling you what kind of content works the best. Once you’ve figured out what type of content works the best, you’ll be able to post more of it. Alongside, your Insights will tell you when your audience is active – which are the times that you should post.
7. Show up in Instagram Live
And not only show up on Instagram live, show up with someone else who is relevant to your content. By going live with someone else, all your and their followers will get a notification that you’re Live. This means that you can reach and engage with a lot more (relevant) people and that you might get more followers.
8. Be consistent
Consistency is key when it comes to Instagram growth. In order to be consistent, you can batch create content. This means that you dedicate a day to create multiple posts. Once you’ve done this, you can then pre-schedule your posts via content planning apps such as Later, Hootsuite, and Planoly.
9. Make your content stand out
It’s super important to produce content that stands out. Your content should grab people’s attention and make them stop scrolling. Some examples of content that stands out are content that features a human, news, quotes, and step-by-step carousels.
10. Share your content on other channels
With other channels I mean anything other than Instagram. This can, for example, be another social media channel such as Pinterest, your website, or simply an email you’re sending. By sharing your content on multiple channels, you’ll be able to send more people to your Instagram page.
