it is everyone’s goal to grow their Instagram account fast, it isn’t an easy task. According to Mention, 52.35% of Instagram followers have less than 1,000 followers. The next largest segment is 1,001 -10,000 followers at 37.41% of Instagram users. In total, less than 10% of Instagram accounts have more than 10k followers.
In this post, we will cover 9 actionable strategies that actually work to grow your Instagram account. These are the same strategies that all the major Instagram agencies use to grow their client’s Instagram account rapidly. Whether you are a business account, a personal account, or a theme page, all of the tricks provided here will help you build a massive Instagram following fast.
1. Have A Great Instagram Theme Aesthetic
This is step one when it comes to building out your Instagram page. Your Instagram aesthetic is going to be the first thing people see when coming onto your Instagram page. Having a consistent feed that uses the same colors and theme may oftentimes be the deciding factor on whether someone will follow you or not.
How many times have you seen a page and saw some posts are selfies, others are infographics, and others are videos of cats and you have no clue what’s going on? Now, how many of those pages did you follow? Probably not too many.
Having a great Instagram theme is one of the easiest things you can take control of today that can help the overall social proof of your Instagram page. So, how do you create a great Instagram page?
Well, this will vary depending on what type of Instagram page you have. If you have a business account your theme will probably be centered around your product. Click here to see some great business Instagram pages and their layouts.
2. Have A Posting Schedule
It’s no secret that Instagram wants to promote pages that post consistently. The question is, “What is consistent?” At a minimum, if you seriously want to grow your Instagram account fast, you should be posing at least once a day. It is more important the bigger you get the more you post but in the early stages, under 1,000 followers, you should never miss a day of posting.
Now this will change depending on if you are an Instagram theme page or personal page. If you are a personal account it is okay to go as low as three times a week. However, if you are an Instagram theme page, let’s say you post cute kitten videos, you should never ever miss a day.
The reason why you want to post so consistently is that it gives you that many more chances of having a post go viral. By viral, we mean it can either show up on Instagram explore page or
Instagram’s Top page. The explore page appears on the same page as the search function. The Top page for hashtags shows some of the most popular posts tagged with that hashtag. See our visual of each.
Being on either page allows you to grow your Instagram followers fast. Think about it like you were playing the lottery. You increase your chances of winning the lottery the more tickets you buy. In this scenario, consider your post to be like lottery tickets. The more you have the more likely you will win.
In the hashtag portion of this post, we will talk more about what types of hashtags to use in order to have your content go viral. But for now, you should get really serious about making sure you’re posting at least once a day. If you are a personal account, no less than three times a week.
The best way to follow a consistent posting schedule is to create a schedule and use a bot that posts for you. We personally use Later as our tool of choice. Instagram only allows the use of certain bots and will punish your account if you use bots that aren’t part of their Instagram Partner Program.
3. Use The Right Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the most misused tools that Instagram has. If you run a health and wellness Instagram page you’ll see a lot of small accounts, under a thousand followers, use the hashtags #wealth, #health, #wellness, #happy, etc. The reason why so many accounts use these hashtags is that millions of people search these hashtags daily.
The issue is, there are multiple Instagram pages that use these same hashtags. when you use the hashtag #health, you’re competing against Instagram Pages like WebMD and Women’s Health Mag. Each of these Pages having millions of followers and getting tens of thousands of likes per post.
Instagram can only show so many different posts on its top pages for hashtags. How Instagram decides to place posts on the top results for a hashtag is how many likes, comments, shares, and saves they receive. So if you have a post that only has 30 likes and you’re going against a post that has 30,000 likes then it is very unlikely that you will show up as a top result for that hashtag.
On top of this, since so many other Instagram pages are using the same hashtags you immediately get pushed down in the search results. So not only did no one see your post because you used a too popular hashtag, but it also gets immediately shoved down to the bottom of the feed because there’s a new post with that hashtag every couple of seconds.
4. Always Have An Instagram Story [With Stickers]
Having the red circle around your Instagram logo is essential to establish credibility among potential followers. The red circle around your Instagram logo indicates that you have an active story.
When someone first comes to your Instagram page they cannot see the last time you posted. They would have to click into an image to see that. Having the red icon above your logo notifies the potential follower that you have been on the platform at least within the past 24 hours. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have been able to post a story.
5. Work With Micro-Influencers To Reach A Larger Audience
The keyword here is “micro.” If you are trying to grow your motivational speaking brand through Instagram, do not reach out to Tony Robbins asking him to shout out your Instagram page. Not that he doesn’t want to support you, he just doesn’t have the time. He also probably doesn’t even manage his own Instagram page at that.
The trick to getting influencers to give your post a shout-out is finding those below a hundred thousand followers but over ten thousand followers. Within this range, accounts are big enough to have a decent following, but not so large that they’re going to charge large sums of money for a shout out.
One thing you’re going to want to be looking for when deciding which micro-influencers to work with is their engagement rate. The way you can calculate this is to look at how many followers they have and look at how many likes they receive on each post. You want to find people with an engagement rate of at least 10%.
If they have 10,000 followers they should be getting at least a thousand likes on their post. Anything less shows that they don’t have an engaged following.
Once you found an Instagram influencer that you want to work with, DM them and ask them how much for an advertisement. The rates will vary depending on which niche you’re in. The best way to figure out a good price is to reach out to multiple influencers and see what the average costs are.
However, if you’re going after someone under a hundred thousand followers it should never cost you more than twenty bucks for them to repost your content onto their page.
Allow Them To Give Away Something Of Yours To Get More Followers
A common question we get is, “Can I work with micro-influencers for free?” Usually, the answer is no. Listen, if someone put in the effort to build a big following it makes that they wouldn’t want to give it away for free. However, if you’re going to ask them to give you anything for free you have to come at it with this mindset: What can I give them that is 10 times more valuable than what I’m asking of them?
Most people won’t do things for you out of the goodness of their hearts. But they will do something if there is an incentive for them to do so. Do you have an ebook that you charge for that you will give away for free to their followers? Will you offer a free consultation to their followers if they let you post something on their page?
Giveaways are great but they usually only work for Instagram pages that have an established following. By letting them use one of your products or services you can let them offer something to their audience which helps them build engagement while also helping you get more followers. This can be seen as a win-win scenario for both parties. Just make sure that you are providing more value to them than you are asking to receive.
6. Use Follow For Follow To Grow To 1k Instagram Followers Fast
This strategy has a lot of controversies. People say this strategy doesn’t work because people don’t follow you back or that they don’t engage with your account. The issue isn’t that this strategy doesn’t work, but that most people do it wrong.
The follow for follow method was introduced as a strategy to help you gain more followers. The theory behind it was the more people you follow the more likely it is some of those people will follow you back. The more people that follow you back leads to the more potential likes and comments you can get, which in turn helps you grow your Instagram account fast.
Where people go wrong with the strategy is that they just go follow any and everyone. This is the wrong way to go about it. If you’re going to use the follow for follow strategy, you need to make sure you’re following people who already engaged with content similar to yours.Let’s say you had an Instagram account in the workout niche. Find someone else within that niche with a similar to a slightly greater follower base than you.
Go into this person’s Instagram account and follow everyone who has liked their photos. This assures us of two things.
The people you’re following already like content similar to yours
It shows that these followers are okay with following accounts of similar size to yours.
If you are in the entrepreneurship space it wouldn’t be smart to do this strategy with Gary Vees Instagram. Gary Vee has over 10 million followers. Odds are there are people who follow him simply because he’s an influencer. Not because of the content he puts out.
You should use this follow for follow strategy to get your first thousand followers. Before you hit a thousand followers Instagram will usually let you follow anywhere from 200 to 400 people a day. Assuming that about 10% of people will follow you back, you should be able to get 1000 followers within two months.
When To Unfollow people
You also should never unfollow someone right after you follow them. Only use the Instaclean app after giving yourself a 24-hour period of not following anyone. This assures that you are not unfollowing people that you just followed.
Unfollowing works very similarly to following. You can only unfollow anywhere from 200 to 400 people a day. Do not try to exceed this amount ever. Instagram will start to notify you if they feel like your account is committing suspicious behavior. Although these warnings are harmless, enough of them could result in Instagram blocking your account temporarily. That’s why if you ever get a notification from Instagram saying you’ve exceeded their following limits, stop following/ unfollowing for the next 24 hours.
When To Stop Follow For Follow
You should stop using the follow for follow strategy at around 2,000 to 5,000 followers. This is because in this range it becomes possible for one of your posts to go viral. Also, if you aren’t unfollowing those who follow you back, by the time you get 5,000 followers you will also be following around 5,000 people. This is very close to Instagrams 7,500 limit and it also just looks unprofessional.
Instagram will also cut back on the number of people you can follow and unfollow a day after you have over 1,000 followers. After your first thousand, Instagram limits you to follow and unfollow only 100 to 200 people a day.
When this happens, you’re going to want to change your follow for follow approach. You no longer are going to just follow those who like the post of similar content. You’re going to want to follow those who like similar content, as well as like and comment on their most recent post.
The reason for this is that the more engagement you give someone when you follow them the more likely they will follow you back. In the beginning, we don’t care about this because we can follow hundreds of people a day.
Once you go above 1000 though, we need to increase the likelihood that the people that we follow will follow us back. That is why we start to engage with them more.
Once you get above 10,000 followers, that’s when you can start unfollowing those who have followed you back. At this point, you should have a large enough audience who will follow you regardless if you follow them back or not.
7. Be The First Comment On Large Accounts In Your Niche
Have you ever looked at a big account in your niche and saw a comment that had hundreds of likes on it? Not by a celebrity but by a regular person. Usually, the reason why you’ll see comments with very high likes on a post is if they are the first comment on that post.
By being one of the first comments, you’re shown to everyone who clicks into the comment section of a post. If the comment is a good and substantial one it will usually get a lot of likes. These likes usually mean nothing as it doesn’t help your Instagram account grow fast. However, it does give you a perfect opportunity to follow people who have already engaged with you.
If you start becoming the first comment on popular Instagram pages and getting a lot of likes on your comment, you can go in and follow everyone who liked your comment. This will increase the odds that they follow you back. How do you become the first comment on large accounts?
8. Use Story Ads To Grow To 10k Instagram Followers Fast
Once you hit 1,000 followers your next big milestone is going to be 10,000 followers. This milestone comes with a tangible benefit of allowing you to have a swipe up feature on your stories. The swipe up feature is the only way to get a direct link from your Instagram to your website.
So, how do you get your first 10,000 followers on Instagram fast? The keyword here is fast. If you follow all the steps you use to get 1000 followers you will still eventually hit 10,000. However, we want to do this in the least amount of time.
If you really want to do this in the quickest amount of time you have to invest some money. This should cost no more than $5 a day. The best way to go from 1000 to 10,000 Instagram followers is by using Instagram story ads.
Instagram story ads are a perfect way to reach a new audience and show your Instagram page to potential followers. As we said before, Instagram stories already have high engagement rates. If you can create an enticing Instagram story, you can see high conversions of people following you.
The best Instagram story ads are in the format of a 15-second video. In that video, you should briefly introduce your business, introduce what type of content you post on your Instagram, and then finally a call to action telling them to follow your Instagram page. To see a video of how this is done, check out this video by Jordan Platten where he walks you through how to create a successful Instagram story ad.
9. Use Instagram Analytics To Optimize Engagement
Which of your posts get the most engagement? Do you know? If not, it’s really easy to figure out. All you have to do is go to your home page and click on insights. From there, click on content interactions. Under content interactions, you will be able to see which posts get the most likes, comments, shares, and saves.
What you want to be looking for is what are the recurring themes? Do posts with your face in them do better than posts without? Do post with a long caption do better than a post with a short caption? Is there a certain post that does best when you use a certain hashtag? These are all the things you want to be looking at when you start looking for themes in your best performing posts.
Key Takeaways
With these 9 tricks, you are more than ready to grow your Instagram account fast. Regardless of what type of Instagram page you have, if you follow these 9 steps you will see massive changes.
We made sure not to talk about generic advice that doesn’t really help you grow. Everything we provided here if used properly will help you not only increase your engagement but increase your following.
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