15+ Tips & Hacks to Get More Instagram Followers

Are you satisfied with the number of your followers on Instagram? 

This might be the problem of many brands and individuals on all social media platforms, especially Instagram. They’re not getting as many interactions as they expect.

One of the most important metrics in social media marketing is the number of followers. Brands are spending masses of money and time in order to get more Instagram followers and, as a result, increase their sales.

In this post, you’ll learn 15 simple tips on how to increase your Instagram followers and generate more leads.

1. Run Instagram Giveaways

Running an Instagram giveaway perhaps is the most popular and fastest way to increase your Instagram followers. An Instagram giveaway allows you to offer a giveaway prize for free in exchange for an Instagram like, comment, or other pre-determined requirement.

When done correctly, Instagram giveaways can help you establish your brand on Instagram, cultivate a loyal following, and share your impressive products or services with a larger audience than you could organically.

Running your own Instagram giveaway will help you to:

• Attract followers faster.
• Entice both current followers and prospects to engage.
• Build stronger relationships with your existing audience.
• Tease an upcoming product or feature release.
• Encourage followers to share and submit user-generated content (UGC).

Running a successful Instagram giveaway requires planning and a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish as a result.

Woorise is a great tool that can help you organize and track your Instagram giveaways. With Woorise, you can run a powerful Instagram giveaway and view all the entrants on your dashboard. You can even add multiple social actions asking your audience to follow you and engage with your other social media accounts.

2. Focus on SMART goals

Setting clear goals and sticking to them is key to a successful social media marketing strategy. Instagram marketing is not an exception at all.

To build a brand identity on the platform, you need SMART goals and metrics to know what you should do and what not to do.

If you know what you’re looking for, you won’t waste your time and money on unnecessary matters. A set of clear goals will unite all your activities and will definitely help you attract more followers to your professional Instagram account.

Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. When you focus on a certain amount of followers, engagement rates, leads, etc. you will automatically align all your effort to reach them.

If you define your goals wisely, you’ll find it easy to analyze your performance and figure out your weaknesses and strengths.

So the first step in getting more Instagram followers is defining and focusing on SMART goals.

3. Write a cool Instagram bio

Instagram bio is a great chance to broadcast your main message. You need to speak with your audience like a human and start building a long-lasting relationship with them. 

It’s also a unique opportunity to insert a link to your website and redirect your visitors to sales pages.

You can give a good user experience to your visitors by writing a cool Instagram bio and encourage them to follow your Instagram.

Instagram bio is also a perfect place to include your top hashtags. So make the most of Instagram bio to increase your followers.

4. Target niche audience to get organic followers

Instagram marketing is all about targeting potential customers and building sales funnels. So you need to know your target audience who are more likely to buy from you.

If you feel that your Instagram followers are not sufficient, you might be targeting the wrong guys. Please avoid reaching out to anyone you see on the platform.

You need to sort your potential customers in terms of age, gender, career, and other important characteristics. Then you can focus on their interests and try to align your marketing strategies accordingly.

Fortunately, there are a handful of tools that help you target niche audiences and get more organic and engaged followers on Instagram.

Remember that getting a limited number of real Instagram followers are better than having a large circle of irrelevant followers.

5. Avoid buying Instagram followers

Instagram marketing is so hot that many individuals and brands try to buy followers to get ahead of their competitors.

You must know that increasing the number of followers will not solely result in more sales. Higher engagement rates and a long-term partnership with your audience is much more important than the number of Instagram followers.

Try to reach out to organic followers through the right channels. Organic followers are most likely to be interested in your content, and therefore, you will not lose their support easily. In the following article you can learn more about the pros and cons of buying Instagram followers.

Fake followers, on the other hand, will cause a significant decrease in your engagement rates after a while. This will also damage your brand’s reputation if your audiences recognize that you’ve bought fake followers.

Last but not least, buying Instagram followers is against the platform’s terms of use, and it can get your Instagram account banned.

6. Generate informative, trendy, and visual content

After all, content creation is the most important stage in online marketing, especially when you have not enough followers.

You don’t have any choice but to create relevant content for your community and make them believe you’re a thought leader.

Your content should encourage your audience to follow your posts. So you need to share unique and educating content so that users feel that they need your upcoming posts.

Try to include the most recent trends in your content to appear like a source of industry news. For example, you can timely post about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on your industry and your own brand.

Visualization is also necessary on Instagram because it’s a multimedia-based social media platform. Apart from feed posts, Story, Live, IGTV, and Reels are all useful features for sharing visual content on Instagram.

Accounts that use video marketing properly get more followers on Instagram. So you have to take advantage of this marketing feature on Instagram to make the most out of it.

Including a bit of fun and entertainment in your posts can also work miracles. Remember that the majority of Instagram users are youngsters, and you need to entertain them on the platform to keep following your account.

7. Find industry-specific hashtags and create branded hashtags 

Even the best content can be ignored if you can’t put it in the public eye. Please do not forget about Instagram hashtags as they play a vital role in getting your posts discovered in searches.

Instagram allows 30 hashtags in a feed post and 10 hashtags in a story. You don’t need to fill your posts with hashtags. But please ensure that you’re using all the required hashtags to be discovered in the search results of as many related keywords as possible.

You need to think about different types of hashtags. Industry-specific hashtags help you to be discovered when your community members search a specific word.

Branded hashtags help your brand be recognized by niche audiences on Instagram. General hashtags like event-related hashtags also make people believe you pay attention to social events, and increase your chance of being followed.

8. Create an Instagram feed theme 

You need to generate this content based on a consistent style and theme. It’s good to define a suitable Instagram feed theme to get the attention of visitors and make them follow your Instagram account.

Instagram feed themes make your 9 grid feed more attractive and encourage visitors to follow your account.

Of course, the theme should be relevant to your niche. For example, if you have a restaurant, your feed theme should be something like this:

These kinds of feed themes make visitors recognize your niche immediately and increase the possibility of being followed by them.

9. Take advantage of user-generated content

Of course, content is king, but generating content is not such simple. With Instagram users interested in high-quality images and videos, it’s hard to draw their attention to your account with mediocre posts.

Generating compelling content requires time and money, and not all brands can afford to do it. Fortunately, there is a simple but applicable way to overcome this problem.

Sharing user-generated content on Instagram can greatly help you in this regard. Along with providing lots of fresh and original posts, this method has some other beneficial aspects. More than 80% of brands use UGC in their Instagram marketing.

When you share your followers’ content, in return, they will also share your posts with their followers. This will significantly expand your outreach and help you increase your Instagram followers.

Also, user-generated content can usually get higher engagement rates because it’s more transparent.

You can run a UGC hashtag contest to make your branded hashtags viral. By offering some prizes, you can get more followers and make them generate quality content for you.

10. Schedule your Instagram posts

When you want to get more followers, you have to try to put your posts in the eyes of more Instagram users.

Remember that every user is following many accounts and their timelines are full of posts. So you need to increase the chance of getting exposure by posting at the right time.

In fact, you have to post when the majority of your audience is online. This helps you get higher engagement rates by your current flowers, and as a result, increases the visibility of your posts on the explore page.

The best time to post on Instagram depends on several factors, including industry, region, and current circumstances.

For example, COVID-19 caused a significant increase in the usage of social media and a change in peak hours.

The best option is to use Instagram automation tools to schedule your Instagram posts.

Designed to save you time, Vista Social is a leading social media management tool that allows you to schedule your content to your Instagram profile with ease.

The best part? Vista Social isn’t just limited to Instagram! You can plan and schedule your posts to Facebook pages and groups, LinkedIn company pages, Reddit profiles, YouTube, and Pinterest.

11. Cross-promote with top social networks

Each social platform has its own features and can brad cast your brand message differently. Surely, you can’t reach all potential customers simply with a single platform like Instagram.

Cross-promoting your Instagram content with other social media platforms is a great way to increase your outreach.

In other words, you can redirect many audiences from other platforms to your Instagram account and add all your social audience to your Instagram followers.

Remember that cross-promotion is a bit different from cross-posting. You need to adjust your Instagram content with the template and style of the platform you’re cross-promoting with.

In this method, users will be redirected to the main post to read the whole post. To make it work well, you just need to make sense of urgency in your audience to encourage them to visit your Instagram account.

Last but not least, social media benefits to SEO will increase with cross-promotion on all your social accounts.

12. Engage at a personal level

Engaging with your audience is of great importance when it comes to keeping your followers.

Remember that when you create a long-lasting friendship with your existing followers, they will interact with your posts better. This will put your content in the eyes of their followers and increase your chance of getting more followers.

Try to engage with niche communities to reach out to more users and increase your followers. You can give them share, like, and comment and expect them to do the same for you.

It’s good to take a friendly tone of voice when speaking with your audience to make them feel comfortable. This tone should be used constantly, whether in your Instagram bio or in your posts. In fact, you have to prove that they’re part of your brand story rather than a customer.

13. Establish a partnership with niche influencers on Instagram

Influencer marketing on social media is a great way to increase brand awareness and to reach out to more people.

Influencers have a huge following, and their endorsement can greatly help you to be discovered and followed by new users.

You need to sort niche Instagram influencers in terms of followers, engagement rates, and price. You can use social media tools to find niche relevant influencers on Instagram. Then, you can collaborate with them according to your budget to reach out to more audiences and get more followers.

Remember that the more organic your partnership appears to Instagram users, the higher ROI you’ll reach.

If you don’t have a considerable amount of budget for influencer marketing, you can start with Nano-influencers instead of Micro-influencers. You can offer these influencers some benefits like discounted prices instead of money and ask them to be your brand’s advocate.

Finally, it might be useful to hear that many influencers on Instagram have cut their rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a perfect time to reach out to them and leverage their influence to get more Instagram followers.

14. Analyze your performance constantly

Knowing your weaknesses and strengths is a critical matter in every task, and Instagram marketing is no exception.

You have to track your marketing results constantly to know if you’re performing well. Of course, you can’t expect an increase in your followers when you have poor performance.

Instagram Insights is a great analytics tool that enables you to recognize your best-performing content. This will help you know which type of content is getting more attention and which one is not.

Then, you can optimize your content generation strategy to get higher engagement rates and more followers.

15. Use online polls to get feedback from your audience

A direct relationship is always the best way to keep your existing audience and even get more followers.

Social media polls let you know the opinion of your followers about anything you share. Of course, if you want to get more Instagram followers, you’d better know how your existing followers feel about your content.

Try to constantly get feedback from them and respond to any negative, positive, or neutral comment.

Along with online polls, you can use Live videos to get your followers’ comments online and respond immediately.

16. Run A/B testing on Instagram

Sometimes you will face a dilemma on which item you should use in your social media content to get maximum interactions possible. Social media A/B testing is the best way in this regard.

You can change important items like hashtags, videos, images, colors, captions, tone of voice, etc. in your content and post them on Instagram. Then, you can analyze interactions to know which item appeals to your audience.

This method is widely used by brands on Twitter and Facebook, but you can apply it to Instagram as well.

When you become familiar with your existing followers, you can improve your content and draw the attention of more followers on Instagram.

Final thoughts

With more than a whopping 1 billion global followers, Instagram is a great channel for reaching out to your audience. Of course, getting more followers on this channel is an important factor in your final ROI. Some useful tips and hacks were mentioned to help you get more followers on Instagram for your business.

Of course, this is a time-sucking task, and you need to be patient on this journey. So do not try to know how to get 1k Instagram followers in 5 minutes. Try to avoid pushing too hard for it, or you’ll face opposite results.