Instagram for Small Businesses: How to Get More Followers

Instagram

Are you trying to get more followers on Instagram? 

Whether you’re new to using Instagram for your business or you’ve been on it for some time now, there are several ways to grow your Instagram following. 

With its high popularity and always evolving business features, Instagram is a great, but competitive, platform for brands. Users on the app are happy to follow and interact with brands, which is why so many businesses are eager to perform well on the platform. 

These are our top tips to help you stand out against competitors and gain a larger, more relevant, audience: 

Upload Consistently

You can almost double your follower growth rate by moving from less than one post per week to 1-7 posts a week. If you find you don’t have time to post consistently throughout the week then pick a day every two weeks to sit down for a few hours and make content. Then use a scheduling tool like Later.com or Hootsuite to schedule all the content to upload. This will help keep you posting consistently.  

Use Hashtags!  

Make sure to use hashtags on all of your Instagram posts to help increase your reach and get more followers. Take advantage of location tagging too. There are plenty of free tools and websites like Display Purposes to help you find the right hashtags to use. You can also take a look at competitors and see what hashtags they’ve been using to reach your target audience.  

Follow Local Businesses  

It’s up to you to decide who you would like to follow on your business account, but we always recommend following local businesses and organisations from your community. Remember you don’t need to follow back every personal page that follows you. You can of course go ahead and do so if you would like to but while some users might appreciate this, others likely won’t for privacy reasons.  

Share User-generated Content

By sharing user-generated content (UGC) you encourage more to be created and let users feel appreciated and seen by your brand. It shows a more caring side to your brand and allows users to make deeper connections. 

Collaborate with Others!

Consider reaching out to other brands and partnering to help reach new people. You can try brand takeovers, featuring in each other’s posts, going live together from your accounts, offer product or service bundles together, or more. Just make sure that it makes sense for you to be collaborating with this brand and that you have similar values and audiences.   

Implementing some of these tips should help you get more followers and increase your audience’s engagement with your brand.  Many of these tips can also be applied to most other social media platforms.