Before starting The Defender, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Instagram. and that i just thought of it because the platform crammed with endless selfies and pictures of food. But now, Instagram is one among my favorite social media networks, and it’s one among the three that we use for the blog. So, after falling crazy with Instagram, my question became, “how do I grow our following?” and that i thought, there has got to be some secret that I’m missing. i used to be uninterested in seeing blog posts about being successful on Instagram that gave an equivalent points about writing a killer bio, cultivating your Instagram aesthetic, which darn follow-unfollow method (can you sense my eye roll?).
So today, I’m sharing with you the six Instagram secrets that other bloggers hardly share. Keep reading to seek out the practices that have helped us grow our account organically.
Building Engagement
If you haven’t noticed, engagement is everything on Instagram. With the new algorithm, posts are ranked consistent with the comments that they receive. Comments are now more valuable than likes. And Instagram is incredibly particular. Comments are only factored into your post’s ranking if they’re longer than three words. So if someone leaves their favorite emojis or “Love this!”, it’s as if you didn’t receive a comment in the least.
But why is post ranking important? Well, you’ve also need to confine mind that a user’s Instagram home feed now mimics Facebook. Posts aren’t appearing in chronological order anymore. The feed only displays the content that it feels the user has taken interest in. The new algorithm affects the power of both your followers and non-followers to seek out your posts.
However, there’s no got to fear. Here are three great strategies to assist boost your engagement:
1. Ask a question in your caption, or request some information from your audience.
It’s a no brainer that folks enjoy talking about themselves. together with your next caption, take the time to construct an easy-to- answer question, and you ought to definitely see a rise in comments.
Bonus tip: answer your comments during a timely manner. If you’ll respond immediately to the comments you’re getting into the primary hour of your post, that helps Instagram realize that your post is pretty important thanks to all of the activity.
2. Engage together with your current followers even as often as you seek potential followers.
Ok, remember how I just said that Instagram’s algorithm will affect both your followers and non-followers? Your posts won’t show abreast of your followers’ home feed if they are doing not regularly interact together with your brand. So, if you’re employed on getting new followers all the time and never interact together with your current following, you’re actually doing yourself a disservice. Keep your brand on your followers’ minds by regularly liking and commenting (can you guess which is more important?) on their posts.
Bonus tip: If you’ve got some downtime before your post is scheduled to travel out, spend that point interacting together with your followers. once I did this before posting, as usual, it doubled our engagement.
3. One among absolutely the best ways to extend the quantity of engagement on your posts is with comment/engagement pods.
A comment pod may be a group of Instagram users who comply with like and discuss any of the user’s new posts as soon as they see them. Comment pods are helpful because, with them, they assist encourage other users (outside the pod) to go away comments of their own if they see that people are already interacting.
More people are beginning to study comment pods, but it is often hard to seek out a pod for your specific niche. Don’t be afraid to require the initiative to start out your own (that’s what we did and it really is rewarding). this will be done by direct messaging other account owners that post content associated with yours and asking if they might wish to join your comment/engagement pod. confine mind that if you host your engagement pod on Instagram, it’ll only allow you to feature 15 pod members. If you’d wish to host a much bigger pod, your other options are to make a Facebook or Slack group.
Building Your Following
Now that we’ve covered the way to increase your engagement on your posts, let’s discuss how you’ll grow your following.
1. Follow active users.
If you’re already watching accounts almost like your own for followers (and we hope that you simply are), take it a step further than randomly following people thereon account’s follower’s list. Instead, follow the people that have already demonstrated that they’re active. Meaning, you’d follow the people that are literally liking images and/or leaving comments. These people are going to be more likely to also show love on your posts once they’re following you. And whatever you are doing, please don’t resort to the follow-unfollow method. It’s just plain icky.
People catch on quickly to what you’re doing, and it gives your brand a nasty impression.
2. Explore relevant hashtags.
One strategy that we like to use to seek out new followers is by exploring hashtags. This method, when done correctly, offers an excellent return. Choose a hashtag that you simply normally place in your post’s caption or comments, and confirm it’s one that really attracts your ideal audience (we’re talking more about this next). like all pictures that catch your eye and leave genuine comments once you can. attempt to put aside a minimum of half-hour each day to explore hashtags (and once we say explore, we mean typing that hashtag into the search bar and searching through the pictures that come up). This strategy alone is what helped us to start out increasing our following quickly.
Finding Your Audience
Now you recognize the way to get more engagement on your posts and the way to grow your following. But how exactly does one find the audience that you’re trying to find on Instagram?
You’ll find your audience through hashtags. Here is our greatest tip for utilizing hashtags:
Use hashtags of moderate popularity for your posts. an error that we see bloggers and business owners make countless times on Instagram is using hashtags with overflow million-lifetime posts. for a few reasons, people believe that using those immensely popular hashtags will help them grow their following quickly. and truly, the other happens. once you use those mega hashtags like #life, #photography ,#quotes you’re making it much harder for people to seek out your content, because thousands of individuals are using those hashtags an equivalent moment you’re.
A best ways to using hashtags is to possess the bulk of your hashtags between 80-500K lifetime posts. These are large enough to understand that they’re being searched/used regularly, but also sufficiently small for your content to face out and for people to seek out your posts before they’re lost within the feed. We recommend dedicating about five of your hashtags for fewer than 50K lifetime posts. Especially if you’re utilizing our tips for engagement, you’ll see that with these smaller hashtags, your post remains within the top posts for extended.
That gives people the chance to seek out your content easily. Please don’t think that folks on Instagram aren’t searching hashtags to seek out content. We started The Defender Instagram from zero, meaning that the sole way people could find our content was from hashtags. and that they did.
We hope that you simply learned some new tips from this post which you’ll begin implementing them today. Which strategies have worked the simplest on Instagram for you? we would like to listen to from you! Let us know within the comments below!