Instagram does not require any special introductions. Most of us have been using to follow friends, upload stories and posts. It’s a really popular social networking service, possibly one of the most active ones around. If you are someone who has recently joined Instagram, you might not have a follower count like the celebrities or popular brand hands. This means you might get few views, likes and comments. You might have a hobby or interest that you want to showcase to the world. Getting recognized on a social network is a skill by itself, but it is not difficult. If you’re focused, you can quickly get popular on Instagram, but you need to find ways to reach out to your audience and this article covers it all.
Create a powerful profile
Your profile gains attention only when it’s unique. The first thing is obviously your profile name. It should be simple yet catchy, so that people can easily recall it. Besides your username, there is also a Bio section – a short description of your profile that is likely to catch the attention of people. This reflects on your main profile screen, right below your profile photo. You can use it to write about your interests and insert links if any. These could be links to you blog, other social media handles and contact information. This might help followers with common interests view your profile and follow you.
Run contests and promotional campaigns
For individual Instagram profiles, conducting contests or creating promotional campaigns may not be important. But if you are running a business, then yes. These are some ways to increase your presence and promote your own brands and services on Instagram. Of course, this requires thoughtful planning as well. Before you start with any contests or campaigns, there are certain Instagram terms and policies you need to follow. Click here to understand them. Some of the important ones are –
Terms and eligibility requirements such as age, residency registration, etc are must.
You should not inaccurately tag anyone or force your audience to tag in the contest.
Once you have gone through Instagram’s terms and policies, you need to think about the theme of your contests or campaigns, decide attractive prizes and also the entry requirements. To get more people to view it, you can then choose to add your contest or campaign photos in a feed and your profile story. If needed, Instagram business users can opt to run promotional ads within the app. You can find more information on it here.
Using active hours and scheduling posts
If you run an individual account, and want to increase follower count and get more views to your stories, you must be disciplined in regularly posting them. Also, you can choose to create a close friends list, which make it easy to share photos and videos with your closed contacts. You can even keep a track a number of likes for your stories, by simply swiping up on your story page.
If you own a business account, you get access to the people engagement statistics. This data includes details of active hours and days. This is something you can’t do in an individual Instagram account. In such cases, you might consider using third-party apps to check active hours and accordingly schedule your posts on Instagram. For example, if you post a story late at night, it is likely to appear top in the feeds the next morning when the page is refreshed.
Being involved using engaging captions and tags
Your posts and stories need a context and the reason you add a caption. Whether you post personal stories or run contests, the captions used can be detailed or short, but they should convey your message clearly. Use questions or call to action captions to get people in conversation, and be sure to answer them.
Additionally, there is hashtags feature in Instagram. As an individual Instagram profile, you can follow popular hashtags and use them in your posts. By doing so, your posts can be viewed by a large number of people following the same hashtag. If you have registered for a business account, using your own brand hashtags is important. This can help you keep a track of who has seen, liked or commented on your posts. If you use the most common tags such as #food, it can be difficult to track many people who use the same hashtags.
Use Instagram features creatively
There are several features added to Instagram that can be used while making posts. You can add question mark or music stickers in your stories and also when responding to followers. Another ways of creating curiosity and excitement among your followers is by adding an interactive countdown sticker in stories. To do this, you need to name your countdown event, add end date and lastly, set colour of the sticker of your favourite.
Similarly, there are poll stickers and emoji slider stickers to get opinions from your friends. There are other sticker options available such as current time, weather, location and many more.
Post your stories on multiple accounts
Posting your stories on other social networking services such as Facebook can help increase the number of views. To start with, you can first link your Instagram account to Facebook. Click here for the step-by-side guide. Instagram even recently added a feature that lets users publish posts to multiple accounts at once. It is useful for marketers and social media managers to send across the same piece of content to multiple accounts of a brand. This new feature will be rolling out soon on iOS devices.
With an ever increasing Instagram user base, gaining attention of a crowd is not really easy. These were some of the basic ideas worth trying out. You can even choose to do some promotional events or run ads within the app. Instagram already have creative tools built-in, but you can choose to be more creative and innovative by using third party add-ons available online. Instagram constantly receives updates, so you may need to keep an eye on what’s new and trending that will truly help make your presence on this vast social network.
