Instagram ranks 4th among the apps with the most number of users and has over a billion monthly active members. These statistics alone should convince you that the social media giant is the place to be if you want to reach a wide audience. But how does a small brand get noticed in a platform where big-name brands still dominate?
The digital world puts everyone in a fairly equal playing field. Sure, a big budget can get you a team of experts and plenty of ad eyeballs. But with the right combination of Instagram tools, your one-man marketing team can be just as effective.
You might think that Instagram Business has enough features to help you effectively grow your brand, it’s far from the most efficient.
We’ve done our research and come up with the best Instagram tools that can help you grow and engage your followers:
In this article
1. Woorise
Woorise is a must-have Instagram tool for any business that wants to grow its following and presence on the social media platform. The tool offers a vast array of features such as; an easy-to-use campaign builder; a bio link, which allows followers to navigate and find important content easily; and a powerful analytics dashboard that helps you understand what works and what doesn’t. You can even create your own branded landing page in minutes without having to hire a developer! But among its many features, one that makes Woorise stand out is its ability to make running giveaways and contests so much easier.
With Woorise, you can simply select from contest templates and watch your campaign go viral. If you decide to run a simple “like, follow, and tag” contest on Instagram, for example, Woorise can help you validate the entries. It also has built-in 1-Click pick winners feature to save you from the tedious task of manually exporting all entries into an external sheet and using an online randomizer — do it all in one place.
2. Instasize
No matter how high-quality and unique your product is, you won’t succeed in a platform like Instagram if you don’t produce fantastic content. Thankfully, with Instasize, it doesn’t have to take a whole production or a professional camera to achieve this. Simply download the app on your smartphone, choose from its 100+ premium filters, and your photo is ready for posting in a tap.
To elevate your posts, you can add a unique background from the app’s library. Utilize the app’s text overlay feature to create a photo or video that stands out from the crowd. Paired with one of the app’s latest layering tool updates, you can produce winning content easily.
Take a look at the Instasize Instagram page for some inspiration. Browse through high-performing posts from competitors and industry-leading brands, and quickly make it your own with the help of a trusty photo and video editing app like Instasize.
3. Canva
Studies show that brands that value and put great emphasis on their design and branding, perform better than brands that don’t. Now that most businesses are migrating to fully-digital operations, good design has become more important than ever. But the reality is not every small business owner will have an eye for design or a budget to hire someone who does. Knowing this, Canva created a platform that makes design accessible to everyone.
Canva allows you to choose from their robust library of templates optimised for your social media of choice. Templates on Instagram, for example, are already the right size for posting.
The templates are categorized according to events, seasons, or trending topics. All design elements are ready, all you need to do is change the texts to fit your branding and desired message and upload your image to make it original.
What’s best about Canva is that you’re not forced to take the ready-made templates as is, you are free to tweak the colors and elements, and add your own twist. The Pro version offers extra features such as resizing and adding transparent backgrounds, which makes content creation even easier.
4. Hootsuite
As a brand, you’re likely to be handling multiple pages. On top of creating your day-to-day content, you will have to be consistent about your posting times and respond to queries and comments from all channels. Without a tool like Hootsuite, chances are high that you’ll miss out on other important tasks.
Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts in advance, respond to customers, and monitor all your social media streams in a single dashboard. You can even add a stream to follow hashtags or keywords that are relevant to your brand so you can jump in on the conversation and gain more followers.
With the data gathered from Hootsuite analytics, you can determine how your posts are performing and what type of content works best for your audience.
5. Kicksta
While great content can surely rack up your follower count, the challenge lies in visibility — how do you get non-followers to see your content? Enter Kicksta.
Kicksta promises to get you real followers who are already interested in the type of content you produce. The Instagram tool works by liking photos of users who follow similar accounts to yours on your behalf. Once an Instagram user gets notified, they might be inclined to view your account. If your photos and content are something they’re interested in, they will hit on follow.
Using Kicktsa is different from buying followers or likes. Kicksta will only engage with real users who have a high potential of reciprocating engagement and potentially become your paying customer.
6. SocialFox
Starting up on Instagram will mean a lot of trial and error. While Instagram Business has a basic analytics tool that can help you pinpoint your high-performing and non-performing posts, SocialFox can provide a deeper dive into your audience and provide more comprehensive insights including the best times to post and story completion rates.
The SocialFox dashboard can give you a full picture of your followers including their age range, gender, and location. You can also track your competitor’s page to understand what type of posts work best for them. Armed with this information, you can create content that specifically targets your audience personas and have already proved successful by other brands in the industry.
7. Instaboom
Using its artificial intelligence software, Instaboom is able to automate your account’s engagements with other Instagram users — such as likes, comments, and story views — to achieve organic growth. This saves you hours in a day and cuts your time spent doing repetitive tasks while seeing little results.
The Instagram tool optimizes its strategies to ensure that you get better results as time progresses. No follower or interaction is bought, after taking a look at your profile, the Instagram user will decide whether or not they want to follow you.
If you’re a one-man team, having Instaboom will help you focus on the more important task of creating awesome content.
8. FourSixty
For the longest time word of mouth marketing has been the most effective way to get consumers to support a brand. In the world of social media, this appears in the form of user-generated content (UGC). Compared to regular branded posts on Instagram, UGC generates four times more clicks. FourSixty turns UGC into stunning content you can use for your page and ads.
No need to sift through the hundreds, if not thousands of tags and mentions you receive daily. The platform’s aggregator engine will place the best and most relevant content at the top so you can put it to work immediately. It uses an automated rights management system that allows you to secure the rights to your customer’s photos in a click.
9. SocialRank
Before looking to build your followers, it’s important to understand your current list. With the Instagram app alone, it’s quite difficult to identify your most valuable followers. It’s an extremely manual process that can take days if you have a few hundred. This is where SocialRank can help you. The app gives you a granular view of your followers by ranking the list from top to bottom based on each’s number of followers and engagement rates.
With this data and list in hand, you can form partnerships and create potential brand ambassadors out of followers who already know and love your brand.
Using SocialRank, you can analyze and understand the followers of your competitor to help you create more targeted content and ads.
10. Hypeauditor
Influencers or content creators are everywhere. In the past, the choice might have been as simple as choosing someone within budget with the highest follower count. But with thousands of “influencers” popping up every day, you have to be more discerning than that.
Hypeauditor boasts a huge database where you can find the exact influencer that matches your criteria. You can filter based on the influencer’s follower count, audience demographics, category, and more. Filtering can be as specific as finding influencers who have mentioned specific brands or hashtags.
Without Hypeauditor, you can easily make the mistake of partnering with an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, none of whom can even afford your product. Many brands fall into the trap of hiring the most famous celebrity to reach a wider audience. Apps like Hypeauditor can connect you to micro-influencers who charge a fraction of the price of a big celebrity but have a solid following and audience that are more likely to take action.
11. Keyhole
Data, charts, and the task of analyzing can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what to look for. Keyhole produces easy-to-read reports that can help you track and measure the performance of your campaigns in real-time. This includes live metric updates including follower count, comments, likes, and Instagram Story views.
Having access to real-time data allows you to pivot and make changes to your campaign on the spot to ensure maximum results and high returns.
12. Yotpo
Yotpo understands the power of UGC, not only does it help you generate more leads and followers, but utilizing UGC also saves you from having to create content from scratch. Instead of having to privately message every single user, Yotpo has a rights management tool that makes it easy for brands to collect and showcase photos from their top customers legally. These content can be turned into high-performing Instagram ads that will increase follower count and convert followers into loyal customers in no time.
By using Yotpo’s Instagram Integration feature, you can turn your top content into a beautiful shoppable gallery to speed up the buying process.
13. Tailwind
Without a proper tool, planning content on Instagram can be a cluttered, and overwhelming process. Tailwind makes it easy with its built-in content planner which features a user-friendly drag-and-drop grid. The Instagram tool has a Smart Scheduler and Hashtag Finder to ensure you get the maximum amount of engagements.
For inspiration, the content planner has ready-to-use post ideas customized for your business and industry.
The tool also has a smart.bio feature which collates all your important links into a single branded landing page where you can convert Instagram traffic into paying customers.
Unlike most post scheduling platforms, Tailwind allows you to schedule Instagram Stories, posts with multiple photos, and even hashtag comments. If you’re looking for an Instagram marketing tool that’s more than just a regular post scheduler, then Tailwind is your best bet.
Get Started
Before choosing an Instagram tool to work with, you have to align it with your brand’s priorities. Do you already have a graphic designer? Will you be including video content as part of your strategy? Are you running multiple campaigns? Not every brand will need the exact same thing. It’s important to do your research and if possible, subscribe to a free trial before diving in. Find out which one works best for you before committing to any cost.
There are many ways to get followers on Instagram, and thankfully, it does not work like traditional advertising where budget dictates success.
While a high follower count might look good, we don’t recommend buying bots or fake followers.
The promise of having thousands of followers in seconds may be tempting, but the risk of getting your account suspended is never worth it. All great brands take time and effort to build. With the right Instagram tools in your arsenal and some determination, you’ll get there.
