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The constant algorithm updates have made it hard for marketers to grow Instagram organically. Many brands and creators deal with reduced engagement from their audience, and they look like they don’t have a strategy to increase their follower count.
It is so aggravating that many users are turning to third-party apps that guarantee to increase your Instagram account’s size through automatic engagement. In fact, fake Instagram followers are noticed by the Instagram algorithm and can cause limitations for your account’s access, or even lead to getting your account entirely disabled.
But how do you increase your Instagram followers organically?
In this article, we’ll explore several tactics to help you grow your Instagram account organically and improve your engagement to unprecedented levels.
Streamline your marketing with an efficient social media strategy template.
Why Do Instagram Followers Matter for Your Business?
You are here because you want to grow Instagram followers organically.
Now, the actual questions about organic followers are:
- Why are Instagram followers significant?
- Why do you want to turn real followers into an engaged audience?
- Why do companies place such a high value on their Instagram follower count?
To answer these questions, here are some of the reasons why Instagram followers are important:
- To gain access to potential customers
- To help you boost brand recognition
- To assist you in making insight-based marketing decisions
1. Gain Access to Potential Customers
Organic Instagram growth is gaining new followers through non-paid marketing tactics.
And gaining more followers means that more people have heard about your brand. Therefore, having a large audience means that more people will see your content, so you will have more opportunities to convert.
Because brands understand how having a huge Instagram audience will affect their ability to generate cash, they use various techniques to increase their followers base as much as possible.
2. Help You Boost Brand Recognition
A highly followed Instagram business account can easily lead to brand awareness and recognition.
You can establish your brand in the Instagram business community by gaining followers. Your brand will appear more trustworthy as you gain more followers. A brand becomes way more reliable if their business profile is followed by a large base of users.
Here are some tips on how to increase brand recognition on Instagram:
- Develop your Instagram strategy
- Have a constant visual branding
- Maintain your tone of voice
3. Assist You in Making Insight-Based Marketing Decisions
There are many ways for Instagram followers to express their preferences. This is great for businesses because knowing which of your products or services are more popular helps you predict your future decisions more accurately and determine how to use your resources for more significant revenue.
Instagram can be a fantastic analysis for more effective business planning. You can gain access to data that by leveraging polls and questions in stories or creating a dedicated survey and linking it as a bio link for your audience.
10 Strategies to Grow Your Instagram Followers Organically
Understanding why a large following is essential is only the first step of the process. This section will dive deeper into how you can grow organically and effectively on Instagram.
These are our tips on how to grow your Instagram account:
- Optimize your Instagram account
- Schedule Instagram posts
- Optimize your Instagram posts
- Cross-promote your accounts on different channels
- Use Instagram Stories
- Go live on Instagram
- Post Instagram Reels
- Create Instagram challenges
- Organize an Instagram giveaway or challenge
- Collaborate on feed posts and reels
1. Optimize Your Instagram Account
Growing your Instagram following can be easier with an optimized Instagram account. First things first, it is recommended to have a business Instagram profile, so you can further gain access to your Instagram insights, such as reach or engagement rate.
Next, you need to make sure that your Instagram handle and profile name are easy to find, so that users who are specifically looking for your brand on Instagram can follow you.
Incorporating a few keywords into your handle or username can improve your discoverability when potential customers search for terms specific to your industry.
Additionally, keywords in your Instagram bio are crucial if you want to grow your Instagram account organically. Tell other Instagram users about you and your brand by using the 150 characters allocated for your bio. You can always leverage AI and automation to save up all the hassle. For example, an online bio generator can generate a unique Instagram bio for you and your brand in seconds.
In addition to encouraging new users to follow your profile, this will help the algorithm rank you higher and put you in front of your target audience.
If it applies to your brand, include a location as your final step. If you have a local business, you can easily benefit from this since it can help you increase your local following and make it simpler for customers to find your physical location.
2. Schedule Instagram Posts
A consistent posting schedule can help your followers find your content easier and gain more reach and engagement on your Instagram posts.
These are the best posting times on Instagram in order to generate engagement:
| Best day to post on Instagram | Worst day to post on Instagram | Best time to post on Instagram |
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What Are the Best Days to Post on Instagram?
The best days to post on Instagram are typically during the mid-week, especially on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with Fridays also being a popular recommendation.
It makes sense, right? Midweek is when most people are in the flow of their routines and could use that little social media break to scroll and engage.
What Are the Worst Days to Post on Instagram?
The worst days to post on Instagram are Saturdays and Sundays. The weekend days consistently show lower engagement, possibly because users are more likely to be out and about, swapping their screens for some real-world adventures, which means your posts might not get the love they deserve.
What Are the Best Times to Post on Instagram?
The best times to post on Instagram are early in the morning (6 AM – 9 AM), at midday (12 PM – 2 PM), and in the evening (5 PM – 6 PM). These times align well with common daily routines—morning check-ins, lunch breaks, and evening wind-downs—making it more likely for users to engage with content.
What Are the Worst Times to Post on Instagram?
The worst times to post on Instagram are late at night and very early morning, specifically from 12 AM to 4 AM. During these hours, most users are likely to be asleep or less engaged with their social media feeds, leading to lower visibility for your posts.
Learn when and how often to post various content types, from fun to educational and more.
Although frequently posting can be time-consuming, a scheduling tool like SocialBee can make this challenging task more manageable and increase productivity and efficiency. With SocialBee, you can create content, craft your posts with captions ready to go, schedule your preferred time and day and just let the software publish your posts.
It’s really that easy to keep your Instagram schedule up to date. Start your 14-day free trial now!
3. Optimize Your Instagram Posts
Optimizing your posts can be a game-changer for growing organically on Instagram. But what does it mean to optimize your content?
Instagram’s analytics can help you understand which content performs best based on your target audience. Engagement data such as likes, comments, and saves can help you find viral posts and then recreate posts similarly.
But what does it mean to optimize your Instagram posts?
- Respect the ideal image sizes and aspect ratio
- Write a captivating caption
- Add relevant hashtags
- Use product tags
- Add location tags
Optimizing your content needs a lot of trial and error, but when you understand what works for your target audience, you will end up attracting more and more people to your profile who can become potential customers.
4. Cross-Promote Your Instagram Account on Different Channels
Promoting your Instagram profile on other channels can be an excellent way to grow your account organically while building a stronger connection with your audience.
The simplest way to do so is by sharing your content or redirecting your followers from other social media platforms to your Instagram account.
For example, you can post complementary content on TikTok and Instagram, redirecting your TikTok audience to your Instagram account. Or you can even post the same content on both TikTok and Instagram Reels!
Customize your post for each platform with SocialBee’s variations!
Alternatively, you can include links to your Instagram account in the Facebook page’s About Us section. Why? Well, this is where your Facebook followers—both old and new—expect to find it. Similarly and effortlessly, you can also reshare your Facebook stories on Instagram stories.
5. Use Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are a feature that many brands neglect when it comes to growing organically on Instagram. However, Instagram Stories can play an important role in your journey to increase your conversions. And you can even save them on your profile for a longer period of time through Instagram highlights!
You can use stories to showcase your brand’s behind-the-scenes life, your product’s production, or even your launch event.
Instagram Stories also provide tools such as polls, questions, and links that can help you optimize your content, get closer to your audience and build a better relationship with your customers. You can add shoppable tags to your stories, or you can share promotions and limited discounts in order to turn your followers into conversions.
Plan your Instagram Stories ahead of time with SocialBee.
Start your 14-day free trial today!
Here is how you can share Instagram Stories with SocialBee:
- Choose a content category and click on “Add post to this category”
- Upload your Story content
- Click on the mobile phone icon at the bottom right corner of your text editor
- Once you receive the Instagram post notification, make sure to open it
- Tap on “Share Post”
- Click “OK” once you receive a confirmation that your caption has been copied
- Choose the “Story” option and share it with your audience
6. Go Live on Instagram
Going live on Instagram is an effective way to get in front of your audience immediately. When you go live, your brand’s icon comes first in the stories bar, and every follower gets a notification to enter your live stream.
You can combine that with a collaboration with another brand to cross-promote your accounts and get into each other’s audience. This can be a game-changer, especially for brands that leverage interviews with relevant influencers and can help you drastically increase your followers.
Pro Tip: When you go live, you can pin a comment at any time, and the best way to leverage this feature is to pin your CTA, where you can guide your viewers into the next step of your sales funnel.
7. Post Instagram Reels
Short-form video content is becoming huge as TikTok is becoming bigger and bigger. Instagram’s answer to that is Instagram Reels, an excellent way to grow fast and organically as they try to push this new feature as much as possible.
Instagram Reels are short, easily discoverable videos that can be shared on the app to provide inspiring, instructive, or entertaining information. They are presented in a vertical manner on a scrollable feed, making it simple to “digest” them.
Instagram Reels can be posted as stories or regular feed posts and can last up to 90 seconds.
The best way to approach reels is to find out what other brands and influences are doing. Popular and trending songs play a huge role in that, and if you want to succeed with this strategy, you need to be on your toes to identify what is currently trending to recreate it using your brand’s voice.
Here are some tips on how to create high performing reels:
- Ensure your video is high quality
- Use trending sounds
- Include close captions
- Add fun transitions
- Hop on trends
- Remix other reels
- Recycle your stories and existing video clips
- Add timed text to Reels
- Make Reels shoppable
8. Create Instagram Challenges
Many brands found success using challenges to grow their Instagram followers. GoPro, for example, has the “Million Dollar Challenge,” where you have to create content with their latest camera, post it online, and if you get selected, you get a portion of the end prize.
This strategy made GoPro increase awareness of its products and, most importantly, create a community of loyal customers. Moreover, with this challenge, they also got access to high-quality user generated content. If you don’t have the budget to create such an extensive campaign, there are different ways to approach the same concept.
For example, you could create a challenge that pushes your audience to create content, and the winner can get your products or services for free. Your audience could create photos, product demo videos, animations, etc., that will reach more people as part of a snowball effect. In the end, you will be able to generate more Instagram followers.
9. Organize an Instagram Giveaway or Contest
The same concept with the challenge strategy; you can use Instagram to host a giveaway or a contest in order to generate organic growth. Most brands ask their followers to follow their Instagram accounts and add as many of their online friends to participate.
As an incentive, the brand offers products or other lead magnets that will hook their audience and make them want to participate in the contest. The downside of this strategy is that many followers will leave your account after the giveaway as if they were there for the prize and not your content.
This is normal; that’s why you want to create giveaways and contests that will help you get followers with similar characteristics as your target audience.
10. Collaborate on Feed Posts and Reels
Did you know that you can create content with other accounts and post it simultaneously on both feeds with the same caption, hashtags, and tags?
Recently, Instagram allowed this opportunity for every account, and it can be an exciting feature to get in front of a new audience. You need to communicate with an account in your niche with a similar audience as you have, and then create content together. This type of content can help you gain a good amount of real followers if you collaborate with relevant influencers when posting.
One of the accounts posts the content and adds the other account as a collaborator, meaning both names appear on top of the post, and both audiences get notified that there is a new post.
It’s Time to Grow Your Instagram Followers Organically!
Growing your Instagram is challenging if you don’t have a clear blueprint of what works in 2023. This article guides you on creating a strong Instagram account and succeeding in a saturated platform.
However, each Instagram account is different, and you must test different strategies and parameters to understand what works best for your audience. Give some time for trial and error, and always try to add value to your followers to make them feel special.
What next? Analyze your Instagram insights and create, edit, and schedule your posts.
SocialBee: Your AI-powered Instagram management tool
About the author: Alex works at Moosend as a content writer. He took a chance and moved from his professional architectural career to the field of digital marketing and hasn’t looked back. He enjoys traveling to new areas throughout the world in his spare time.
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