How to get more Instagram Likes and followers | how to increase Instagram followers and likes | how to increase Instagram followers for business
Instagram has become a cornerstone of many brands’ social presence, driving profitable traffic to land pages, growing conversions, and building an engaged audience.
If your Instagram presence isn’t quite as robust as you’re hoping, it might be time to learn how to sharpen up your strategies for getting real, organic followers on Instagram. The larger your audience grows, the more opportunities you have to engage with users and create unique experiences for them.
The organic distinction is important: sometimes brands take the easy way out when trying to get more Instagram followers. Pay for likes and follower sites are everywhere, but these shortcuts are never worth it, as the Instagram algorithm regularly gets updated to weed out paid low-quality accounts and interactions.
9 Ways to increase Instagram followers and Likes
In this article, I’ll share tips that will help you get genuine Instagram followers organically.
I won’t touch on paid advertising options that are available as well; however, may not be desirable as they’d require financial investment in ads.
I won’t talk about the “hacks”, because most of them are fake and will have more damage to your account in the long run.
Instead, I’ll share tips for getting Instagram followers that will benefit your business growth.
Reassess your current Instagram strategies
The problem is that not getting the desired results might underlie in your existing Instagram strategies.
It’s always a good idea to perform reviews of existing activities and see how they contribute to the results.
The Instagram Audit has helped many of my clients to understand their existing strategies and see what may be improved to optimize for better results.
As brand owners, we are often too preoccupied with the perfect delivery of our message, often forgetting or neglecting multiple other factors that may influence our performance and results.
For example, many brands neglect their audience, which negatively impacts their Instagram follower growth. Yes, you read that right — your existing audience has an impact on your prospective future growth.
Determine who your ideal audience is
As with everything in marketing, your Instagram account should have a target audience in mind. Your visuals, captions, profile, bio, and hashtags must speak to your target audience.
I recently audited an account of a paint company, that struggled to get new followers and drive traffic to their website. One of the issues was that their content (which was gorgeous) didn’t speak to the right people.
In their case, they could be creating for: homeowners, interior designers, painters, or artists — as these are the people who likely need paint.
It’s very hard to target ”everyone” immediately, thus I always propose to choose one or two niches and predominantly work on creating content within them first.
Once you start noticing results, you can start expanding into other niches.
Optimize your Instagram account
Once you know who you are targeting, you should look at your Instagram bio. It’s one of the most important parts leading to your Instagram growth.
See your brand’s Instagram bio as the “homepage” of your account or even a business card of your business. It’s one of the first things that’ll help your prospective followers decide if they want to follow you.
I always prefer using short bullet points to write my Instagram bio. In this way, the text is easily digestible and quick to read.
Make sure to have a professional image, proper username, call-to-action, and at least one way to contact you. If you prefer being contacted via direct messages (DMs), state that in your bio.
Make sure to include search terms in your bio or user name. I recently audited an account that belongs to a home baker. Adding “Artisanal Desserts” has increased account reach as the account was ranking in the top 5 positions in the search results.
Always think of one keyword that best describes your business and make sure to add it into the bio — it’ll make your brand more discoverable via search.
Prioritize Reels out of all content types
I cannot emphasize it enough. Reels are the latest Instagram trend and they can help your account reach explode. Literally — I’ve worked with brands that saw 2000%+ growth in reach after introducing Reels into their strategy.
Reels tend to perform so much better and currently, they are the best way to get higher exposure. Exposing your content to more audiences will lead to a higher number of followers and a better engagement rate.
If you’ve posted some Reels in the past, you may have noticed that your Reels receive above the average number of likes. It’s because Reels are super trending now.
Make sure that your Reels fall into one of these pillars: Entertaining, Inspirational, and Educational.
Engage with other Instagram accounts
One of the most important tips for getting Instagram followers is engagement with other Instagram users. We are expected to be social on Instagram, which means that commenting, liking, and sharing the content published by others will help us grow our own accounts.
The easiest way to engage is to reply to the comments under your own posts. However, this isn’t sufficient anymore. I always recommend my clients allocate at least 30 minutes a day and genuinely engage with others.
For example, if you’re a foodie blogger, you may engage with the content published by other foodies. A sincere comment, like, or even DM can grow your reach exponentially. Be careful though, don’t overdo it. Instagram is very particular with spamming and any over-engagement may actually harm you.
It’s not entirely clear what the actual limits are, however, I always follow the limits shared by The Preview App — they seem to make sense and are logical.
Forget the follower count, instead, concentrate on the engagement rate
I know, this tip for getting Instagram followers contradicts the purpose of this whole article. But it’s actually true and very important. Many of my past clients concentrate on follower count. In fact, very few want to increase their engagement rate, until I explain the importance of it and how it’ll correlate to the increase of followers.
Instagram is very particular about delivering the best content to its users. It’s a no-brainer as high-quality content makes users stay longer on the app and consumer more of it.
But how does Instagram determine what content is of high quality?
It uses an engagement rate. Posts that receive a lot of likes, shares, comments, or saves are deemed to be of high quality. Therefore, it’s important to get the most engagement as quickly as possible after the publishing of your post.
Therefore, I always recommend my clients prioritize engagement rate as their primary metric, only followed by follower metrics.
Have human elements in your posts
Having people in your posts and Reels can dramatically improve your performance. Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs researchers looked at 1.1 million photos on Instagram and found that pictures with human faces are 38% more likely to receive likes than photos with no faces. It’s old research, but the results are still valid.
Once in a while, try adding smiling faces or a host to your Reels to boost the performance. When we see humans in the content, the content naturally becomes more relatable.
Tell a story with your captions
Did you know that Instagram has been used as a place for microblogging? Pretty cool, huh? But many users still treat captions as something that’s not necessary and don’t plan ahead.
Even though Instagram is a highly visual platform, captions plan an important role. Instagram has become a platform used for microblogging. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Why should content creators use multiple platforms (social media, blog, newsletter, etc.) if they can have everything in one place?
Instagram allows you to write long captions (up to 2,200 characters in length). Make use of all that space. Share your personal experiences and stories to give more value to your audience.
Don’t underestimate the importance of captions. Whether you use your captions to share how the image or video was made, give advice, or explain your feelings or experiences, they can add value and help your audience connect with your brand better.
You should also have calls to action in your captions, which can help boost your engagement. If you want people to like your posts — state that in your caption. If you wish them to visit your website — explain what they’ll find there and why they should visit it.
Another thing — if your captions are engaging and people spend time reading them, it signals to Instagram that your content is of high quality. Content that people spend time on is often favored by Instagram algorithms and is pushed to more eye-balls.
Do housekeeping on your followers
Like every social media platform, Instagram has tons of fake accounts that are usually bots. There’s a huge difference between an Instagram account with fake followers and genuine one. It might be tempting for you to accept all followers and be excited when the number of followers increases, BUT you should be careful and avoid fake followers by all means.
A good rule of thumb is to clean your followers’ list on a regular basis. You want to remove all those followers that seem fake and never engage with your content. What’s the purpose of keeping them?
This tip for getting more Instagram followers may seem contradictory as well, as I am asking you to remove followers. But in reality, it’ll help you get more genuine followers in the long run.
Remember when we spoke of engagement rate? It’s all related. Followers that never engage with your content drag your engagement rate lower. As a result, you should remove them and increase your overall engagement rate.
A simple and less painful strategy is to look at new followers. If they seem legit (have a profile picture, don’t follow thousands of accounts, have some content posted) keep them. However, if they seem fake, remove them from your followers’ list immediately.
More tips for your Instagram growth
Developing an Instagram strategy takes time and may require help. Knowing dos and don't can help you reach your goals faster and be more efficient in executing the best practices.
I’ve written extensively about Instagram marketing and below are some of the articles that you may also find useful:
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