Actionable tips, tactics and ideas on how to grow organically on Instagram. Boost your presence and engagement on one of the largest social platforms.

Instagram now boasts a user base of over 400 million active users. It’s no wonder why so many content creators, businesses, websites and brands endlessly seek info on grow on Instagram. From social status to sales, the Instagram app is one of the biggest platforms in the world for gaining exposure for anything and everything under the sun. There are plenty of people, influencers and companies that see much higher social stats & viewership on Instagram than on any other social platform… making it arguably the most powerful.

I read articles on how to grow Instagram followers all the time and there are some good tips to be found here and there. But, for the most part the info out there is extremely mundane, overly redundant and not to mention out-dated. There are even courses and training packages that you can purchase for growing Instagram but they cost green money. Which is why I decided to write this as an up-to-date guide for everyone who wants real-life insight on actionable ways to grow on Instagram after the algorithm change, from someone who has grown numerous Instagram accounts to tremendous heights.

Content

If you want to have the best opportunity to increase instagram followers then you have to be absolutely subjective about your account. Reverse engineer what it means to have a great account in your niche or space, and don’t get romantic about your account simply because it’s yours. There is a broad range of things that you can do as a blanket rule of thumb to grow your account. But, each space is different and there are specific things and nuances that you can do to grow in each field. Only you can know what works in your particular space on Instagram.

Content Strategy

It’s important to develop some sort of content strategy for the types of images that you post on your account. This is where it’s vital to know the biggest accounts in your space and what works the best. If you want people to follow you, you have to give them a reason to follow you in the first place. If your account isn’t interesting enough to follow then you’re already setting yourself up for failure. All the other factors don’t matter if your account isn’t great.

Think ahead and have a vision for what you want your account to look like, and the types of photos/videos that will bring you success. You want people to arrive at your account, see the pictures and then convert into a follower because they see that your account is great and will provide value for them.

Photo Posting Tips

Take tons of photos. Its much easier to choose a great photo to post when you have a lot to choose from. Be picky about posting the great ones and delete everything else.

Use natural light when you take photos. Start taking photos and you’ll see the difference.

Some accounts and brands like to show office culture and the human side of what they do.

Post news and other exciting events.

Post product photos.

The photos that draw the biggest response on Instagram are the pictures that trigger some sort of emotional response.

How-To videos are huge on Instagram (and social media in general). You can now post videos that are up to 1:00 min long on Instagram.

Use apps to help your photos stand out. I strongly discourage using any of the tools or filters in Instagram if you want to stand out from the crowd. And you do.

Don’t use photo filters on things like product images and other instances where you want to show things for what they actually are.

Experiment with things like lighting, flash, and other settings on your camera.

White space in photos isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It showcases things better in photos and gives your pictures some room to breathe.

Give credit where credit is due. Don’t post other people’s photos without giving them credit.

DO NOT use reposting apps. They add things to the post that really lack professionality. If you want to repost an image, simply screenshot it on your phone and then post a caption giving the owner credit. Or use InstaSave.

Watermarking your images is a great idea if you have a logo and the content is original.

If you are posting a large rectangular photo then be mindful of how the square thumbnail will look on your profile. Only post rectangular posts if the sqaure thumbnail is going to look okay.

Curate your posts. Don’t only take into consideration the quality of each individual post but take a step back and see how each post fits into your profile as a whole. Yes, each post is important but it’s also important to maintain quality aesthetics for the account overall. This is how people see your account when they first arrive.

Profile Picture

It’s very important to have an attractive profile picture because in most cases, along with your username, this is the first thing that potential followers will see show up in their notifications. Include an appropriately proportioned logo, if you use a logo. Also consider what color to choose as a background for your logo.

Account Bio

You want your bio to be short and to the point. It’s not a good idea to drag on and on in your bio… nobody will read it [or follow you]. The faster that potential followers get the idea of what your account offers, the more likely they are to follow you.

Also keep in mind that using your domain as a link is much sexier than using a link shortener like bitly. (If you want to use a short link, I recommend purchasing your own domain. You can install WordPress on the domain and use a plugin called pretty link to create your urls. Then just use a redirect to your main site for this root domain so that people don’t see it as a WordPress site.)

Finding The Big Accounts In Your Space

I like to have a folder set aside in Google Drive specifically for all of my Instagram notes. Create a new spreadsheet file for the list of accounts in your space. You can rank them by the amount of followers after you build the list.

Open up Instagram and search for a keyword related to your niche or space.

Tap on a user of your choice.

Tap on the arrow next to the follow button on their profile and it will show you similar users.

Using the search function, find as many accounts that are in your space as possible and then list these accounts in addition to all users listed in their suggested users…. And then those users’ suggested users.

After you have brainstormed your entire list you can rank them by follower count.

Another way to do it is you can think of all the big brands in your space (or google them) and then search for them on Instagram, or get their info from their website.

Photo Captions

The best way to get comments on your posts is to include an open-ended caption for the photo with some sort of call-to-action or question. Examples of these are…. “Tag a friend” “Do you plan on buying this when it releases?” “Which one is your favorite?” “Pick two things that you want in this image!” …I think you get the idea. Interaction on your photos is also a factor if the post will appear on the explore page on Instagram or not (more on that in a sec).

Post Timing & Frequency

There are blanket rules that can be applied when it comes to the best times to post on Instagram. Latergramme (now “Later”) provided a nice chart on the best times to post on Instagram. While this chart is good knowledge to have, keep in mind that posting frequency also matters a lot especially since the algorithm update. The best Instagram accounts usually are posting for all different time zones.

You can use tools like Later to help remind you to post. You can create posts in advance and have them ready to go. You can load these posts and set the app to notify you whenever you set it for and it will send you everything for the post in the notification. All you have to do is tap a button to approve the post. It makes posting lots of Instagram content super easy.

Consistency

To get interaction on your posts, your followers have to see your posts. As a general rule, the more that you post, the more likely that you are to be seen on your follower’s timeline. Makes sense, right?

One of the most important things that you will learn from this article is this….

If you stop posting frequently (or as frequently as you have been), it will hurt your engagement and the amounts of views that your posts will receive.

When you don’t post often, Instagram doesn’t bother showing your followers your content as much as if you post consistently. I have learned this the hard way on a few accounts. It’s Instagram's way of keeping their platform. If you stop posting, the platform stops showing love.

Instagram used to be a simple time based feed showing you posts in chronological order of when they were posted. This is how Twitter is setup and even Facebook when they started out. However, Facebook (owners of Instagram) have changed the direction of the platform and are now using an algorithm to determine what posts you see on your timeline and when. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually a good thing.

Algorithm Update

The new Instagram Algorithm is designed to show users the content that they are most likely to enjoy and interact with in their feed. They do this by showing the posts of the users that you interact with the most, at the top of your timeline. Time of the post is also still a factor in where the post appears on your timeline but it is not as important as showing you the posts of the users that you interact with the most, first. You still see the content posted by the other people that you follow but it is secondary to the content that you interact with.

Back to consistency. Before the update, if you posted a lot you could be seen for obvious reasons. But now after the algorithm update it’s even more important to post quality content and very often. Why? Think of each time that you post as a campaign with the end goal of trying to get your followers to interact (like/comment) with that post. The more people that you can get to like and comment on your post, the more people who will be engaged to your content on their timeline… and thus you will keep growing in interaction with each post. The Instagram algorithm actually rewards you for receiving interaction on your posts by distributing your content at the top of your followers’ feeds. But only the users who interact with your posts.

The Explore Page

The explore page is the tab on Instagram that shows you content that is essentially trending, but it is tailored to show you content based on your account and the people you follow too. Popular content is content that gets lots of interaction in a short time frame. In addition to lots of interaction, it also matters who the people are that interact with the post. The more reach that the person has who is interacting with your content, the more push it has for the explore page. If you can get influential users to interact with your content, you’re on your way to the explore tab. If you can get influential users to interact with your content quickly after you post it… even better.

How To Land On The Explore Page

Now that you know the factors that influence which posts lands on the explore page, you can take action in helping your chances. One way that you can help get interaction by influential users is by tagging high profile users in your post. This step is tricky and it’s a slippery slope between tagging users and annoying users with your tags. You have to be careful and i’ll show you how.

Creating A User Tag List

I like to create another spreadsheet file in my google drive Instagram folder to create a list of users that would be good to tag. Instagram allows you to tag up to 30 users per post. The idea is that you tag these influential users in the photo… the user gets a notification that they have been tagged and then interact with the photo by liking or commenting. Then your photo rises in the explore page as these users interact with your post.

You can search for users the same way you that I showed you in the previous step. As I am brainstorming this list, I take down the username as well as their follower count and quickly figure a very rough average like count per photo by looking at 3 or 4 photos. After I have brainstormed a list of users that I think have at least a decent reach I start rearranging this list in order of follower count/average post likes. Users with the most followers and highest average post likes are at the top and users with the least amount of followers and lowest average post likes are at the bottom. Obviously users that share a similar follower count are sorted by their average post likes and so on.

You are not finished with the list once you have created and sorted it. You now must go through these users and experiment to find the best 30 users to tag on your posts. The best 30 users are the users who are not annoyed by you tagging them and are highly likely to respond by interacting with your post. The only way to find out is to start tagging these people. If anyone you tag ever expresses annoyance, discontinue tagging them immediately. The last thing you want to do is be a pest to anyone on Instagram.

Like-4-Like

If you are in a network of Instagram users in your niche then a powerful move would be to create a like4like network where you can all like each others posts upon request. You can do this on Skype with an instant messaging group. Whenever someone in the group requests a like or posts a link, everyone in the group goes and likes the post sending it a big social signal boost. Kind of a grey-hat method, but still a powerful technique that people use to get instagram followers.

Hashtags

Hashtags are nothing new and most everyone understands how hashtags work at this point. Despite many people operating like spam with hashtags in this day and age, they are still extremely powerful if you are using them correctly. At the end of the day, users are still using hash tags to search for content so its still a viable strategy for getting followers on instagram.

Finding Hashtags

There’s a good chance if this isn’t your first day using Instagram then you can probably come up with at least 3 hashtags in your niche just off of the top of your head. If you can’t, then that’s ok too. A tool that I like to use is an app called tags4likes. It’s essentially a directory of Instagram hashtags broken down by niche. If you can’t find your niche there’s a good chance that you can find a niche that overlaps with your niche and find a few relatable tags. The tags4likes app is not going to be your crutch for all of your tags. It’s only a starting point to find tags in your niche.

A good tag is one with that has a lot of photos posted to it. However, keep in mind that there is kind of a ceiling for the number of photos posted to a hashtag before the hashtag becomes useless. The most popular general tags on Instagram aren’t even worth tagging because there’s almost hundreds of photos being added to these tags every second (#love, #follow come to mind). I recommend only using the popular hashtags that are related to your niche, don’t go too broad and miss your demographic.

Once you find a few good hashtags, you can find other tags by browsing the photos posted to a tag and looking at the other tags posted to the photo by looking in the comments.

Again I like to create another spreadsheet file in google drive for brainstorming this list.

Each time you take down a hashtag make sure to take down the photo count posted under that tag as well.

Once you have a big list of tags, go through and rank these tags by photo count.

Now that you have your spreadsheet of hashtags ranked by photo count, create a new document in google drive. You are going to create two lists that you can easily copy and paste the tags to your photos whenever you post them.

Separate the tags in each list by a space like you would in Instagram. Each list will look like its own text block.

On your ranked spreadsheet list copy the first tag to the first tag block, then the next popular tag to the second tag block, then the next to the first, next to the second, so on and so forth until you have two lists of 30 hashtags that are fairly similar in reach.

Now you can copy and paste one of these tag blocks every time that you post on Instagram. I alternate between each list every time that I post so that I am constantly posting under all of these hashtags.

How To Structure Your Hashtags

Another way to combat the spamminess of hashtags is to be mindful of how you place the tags in your post. Never ever post multiple hashtags in the caption of your post. This is a big no-no and one-way ticket to alienating your followers into not caring about your posts. It’s very unprofessional.

Always include a meaningful comment for your caption like I talked about earlier. When you place your hashtags after the caption as one of the first comments it will hide your big ugly block of tags when more people comment on the post.

What I like to do is post my big ugly block of tags as the very first comment (after the caption) but I only post 29 instead of 30 tags. And then in the comment directly after the big ugly block of hashtags I will put one single hashtag that is extremely targeted to whatever the post is about. This way it hides the big ugly block and the users only see one tag but it isn’t spammy because it’s clearly tailored and thoughtful to the post.

Creating Your Own Hashtag

It’s always a good idea to come up with a custom hashtag that you create for your account. You will probably want to use the name of your account as your hashtag in most cases. Having your own hashtag helps with branding, helps with creating a community around your account and helps you build buzz around what you are doing. You can use this hashtag in your caption calls-to-action and tell people to post the tag on their photos.

It’s important to go through your hashtag page and reward the people who used it by liking and commenting on their post. One thing that I see lots of accounts do to promote the use of their hashtag is reposting a random photo that used the tag. This creates incentive for users to use it because it gives them an opportunity to possibly be shouted out by your account. Make sure you display it so users can see the tag. Don’t hide it in your ugly block of tags. Don’t be afraid to put it at the end of any of your captions or post it as the first comment after your big block like I talked about in one of the last steps.

Promote Your Instagram On Your Other Social Platforms

I know, I know. This one seems painfully obvious but you would be surprised how many people don’t even bother! If someone follows you on one social network, why wouldn’t they follow you on another? You can leverage your other social profiles for followers and at the very least these users can pad your engagement and follower stats. If you want people to do something, you have to ask them to do it. So use calls-to-action on these platforms to push for them to follow you on Instagram.

If you don’t have a website or any other link that you are promoting, you can network your social platforms via bio links. So for example when you’re trying to grow, link to your instagram in your twitter bio, Facebook bio, and my other social platforms.

You can also apply marketing rules and tricks on each platform just as if you were trying to drive traffic to a website. Just replace the website with your Instagram profile or specific post link. You can drive traffic to an Instagram post just as easy as you can drive traffic to a blog. I can tell you that there are not many people who think like this and it’s a mistake. Social networks are extremely powerful for driving traffic…. The traffic doesn’t always have to be driven to a webpage.

Experiment with different ways on how to do this and what works best for you. For example on Twitter there is multiple ways that you can link to an Instagram post.

The most boring way is to simply tweet the link to the Instagram post with no other text.

Include the caption of the post with the link to the Instagram post in the tweet.

Attach the actual image in the tweet and link to the Instagram post.

Attach the actual image plus the caption in the tweet and link to the Instagram post.

Crop the image and turn it into a rectangle optimized for Twitter with a link to the Instagram post.

If its a video, you can attach the video to the tweet and include a link to the Instagram post.

Also if its a video, you can turn it into a gif image, post the gif on twitter and include a link to the Instagram post.

You can also get more characters into the tweet if you convert the link using bit.ly or another link shortening service. This will also hide the fact that it’s a link to Instagram.

These are just some examples but you can see there are plenty of different ways to link to your Instagram posts on every social platform. Play around with engagement and analytics on each platform to find out what converts the best for you.

Post Notifications

If you can get your followers to turn on post notifications for your Instagram profile, then you are one step ahead of the game. Keep in mind however that there is an art to this. A popular complaint about the algorithm update was the storm of Instagram users who were begging their users to turn on their post notifications via an ugly profile screenshot how-to.

I don’t recommend doing the whole profile screenshot thing and pointing to the notifications button. Don’t devote a whole Instagram post to asking your followers to turn on your post notifications. This is intrusive to their timeline and it doesn’t provide them any immediate value (even if they are getting value by receiving your notifications.) Even if it converts into people turning on your notifications, don’t do it.

You can post your regular content with your optimized caption like you normally do… and then at the end of the caption you can put something in parenthesis like (Go to our profile and turn on post notifications to get updates on more posts like this!). I wouldn’t do this on every post though because it can get annoying fast.

You can ask your followers on other social media profiles to turn on your Instagram notifications. When you are doing this you asking them to follow you in addition to asking for them to turn on your notifications. Again though… don’t be a pest about it.

The Following Process

People always want to know how to get more instagram followers but they never correlate the process to getting seen first. Before you can convert someone into a follower, they have to know about you. My favorite way of getting seen is by following the followers of my competition. Nothing grabs a user’s attention like being followed by a great account with a big following. Plus you’re reverse engineering your target demographic.

Follow people that follow an account similar to yours.

Those users see you in their notifications and get curious enough to click on your account.

When the users click on your account, you want to be interesting enough for them follow back. If your account is better than the account you targeted, then your follower conversion will be even better.

Following Ratio

To maintain the great aesthetics of your account, you will want to be mindful of your following to follower ratio. This is a huge factor when it comes to converting the traffic that you will be getting to your profile, into followers. It looks very spammy and uninviting when a potential follower clicks on your account and they see that you are following way more people than are following you. It’s a huge red flag. You want your follower count high in the thousands (and higher!) and your following count low.

There are tools that you can use to help you unfollow users that i’ll share later. Make sure to wait at least 3 days before unfollowing a user. The majority of these users that you unfollow will not be unfollowing you if your account is good enough. Most users won’t notice anyway.

Make sure that you whitelist the popular users in your niche so that you don’t unfollow them and only unfollow the people that you are trying to attract as followers. The more followers that you have and the better your following to follower ratio is, the more likely that people are to click the follow button once they land on your profile. (you can buy followers and other things to help with appearance and help speed up follower conversions)

Instagram Followers Who Interact

There is a trick that I use to attract users who will not only like and comment on your photos routinely, but they will also do it fast which is huge for the explore page algorithm.

This was easier before the algorithm update, but go on your feed and find a fresh photo that was posted within the last 5 minutes by a big account in your niche.

When you click on the likes of this photo you will see countless users who are quick to like when a photo is posted.

Follow these users in the same way that you follow the followers of your competition. You can do the same with fresh comments as well.

Show Your Instagram Followers Love

If you want your users to interact with you, nothing is more welcoming than a big user who interacts with his followers. Be friendly and reply to comments, this goes much farther than you might expect. Your users will feel like family when you interact and reward them for interacting with your posts. Also, don’t be afraid to follow back the people who interact with you the most. Another thing that goes a long way is liking and commenting on your follower’s images and posts, even if you don’t follow them. If you aren’t going to follow someone back, the next best thing is to check out their profile and take 5 seconds liking and personally commenting on a couple photos. These users are 10 fold more likely to interact with all of your posts from there on out. You don’t have to do this to all of your followers obviously… but every now and then it can do a lot for engagement.

Friends In High Places

It’s extremely important to be on friendly terms with the big accounts in your space. You need to get on the radar of these accounts for positive reasons. When the big accounts follow you, like your posts, comment, etc it’s big in terms of branding, but it’s huge in terms of social signals to Instagram for reasons that we’ve already talked about like the explore page, but also interaction in general.

We already talked about making sure that you follow these accounts and keep them whitelisted to make sure that you don’t unfollow them. But you would be surprised how far liking and commenting on these accounts will go. It get’s their attention, they arrive at your account…. And if you’re doing the right things then they are going to follow you. If you have a great account and it looks the part in addition to playing the part of a great account, these influencers will follow you and be your friends. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t be afraid to shoutout these users with zero expectation of anything in return. I’ll show you a way that I landed a few big fish followers. If you are in the day to day of your niche then you are aware that there is probably a stream of news flowing. These influencers often land in these news streams for various things. Sometimes there can be a negative connotation or something they talk about that they have dealt with in the community. Sometimes even in the Instagram community! I find these as opportunities to show love to these accounts within the context of whatever the negativity it is. So to be specific, repost a photo of theirs and in the caption you can put a positive spin or reverse the negative opinion that they are dealing with. Show them love and make them feel good… the return will be positive even if it doesn’t result in an instant follow. Be genuine though, don’t show fake love just to get a follow. That’s weird.

Interact With Photos In Your Niche

Outside of following followers of other accounts, you can interact with the posts that are associated with your niche to get to your desired demographic. You can find these posts under the hashtags that you found in the previous step. Like and comment on these posts but don’t be spammy or a nuisance. Don’t tell people to follow you. Make the comment framed around the post so they don’t think you are a spammer. The more personalized that you make your comments the better chance that the user clicks on your profile to check out if you’re worth following.

Shout-4-Shout

Another reason that you want to stay on good terms with the accounts in your space is a thing called S4S. Shout For Shout’s (or Shout4Shout or S4S) are extremely powerful in leveraging other accounts for their followers.

The way it works is you and another account partner together and you post a shout out for their account in exchange for them posting one for yours.

Depending on how many followers each of you have, it can drive a tremendous amount of targeted traffic to your page in a short time.

A good rule of thumb for this is to reach out to accounts that are at the same stage as you in terms of following and engagement.

Buying Shoutouts

If you are unable to find any accounts to partner with for a S4S collab, then there are accounts that you can reach out to that charge for posting shoutouts. In most cases you should be able to find one of these accounts in your niche, but don’t be afraid to to reach out to other accounts outside of your niche. It just won’t be quite as targeted as you’d like but any shoutouts are still powerful for gaining followers. If you see an account that has their email in their bio then there’s a 95% chance that they will do a shoutout for you. Never reach out to accounts asking for a free shoutout or for nothing in return. Nothing annoys me more than receiving messages like that.

Paid Ads

According to social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk, Instagram paid ads are one of the highest ROI’s in term of marketing investment that is available in the world right now. The beauty of Facebook advertising (Instagram ads) is that it gives you the power to reach any demographic that you could possibly want. You can drive traffic to a website, market a product, or in this case use it to get instagram followers. Here is a beginners guide to advertising on Instagram.

Hold A Contest

Another method for growing Instagram followers that is gaining a lot of traction with brands is holding contests. You can incorporate your hashtag in this as well to explode your custom hashtag that you created.

Hold a contest on Instagram where you give something away (the more valuable and relatable to your niche, the better) by posting a promo image with the contest details.

Have the requirements of the contest be that they have to follow you, they have to repost the image to their Instagram page, and they have to include the caption that you provide with your hashtag.

Give the contest enough time to work before you end it.

A trick that you can use is to include in the rules that users can “only” repost the image up to 3 times a day. This suggests to users that they will have a better chance if they post the image more than once PER DAY, which explodes everything even more.

These contests are tremendously powerful because if you think about it…. each user who enters the contest is posting the image that tells all of their followers to follow you. Once you start to think about how many followers each user who posts the image has, you start to understand the scope of just how powerful this can be.

Be A News Source

For some niches there are accounts that act as news sources and break info on certain products and other things. But if you’re in some of these niches, you know its mainly a few accounts reposting a few sources.

A very underrated tactic to bring light to your posts in these niches is to embed your post on related forums in your own news threads. There is a large demographic of people out there who get their news from other users posting threads on forums. I have seen tremendous interaction and follower growth by spreading my newsworthy posts on lots of related forums. Its also huge for branding yourself as an authority in your niche on these forums.

There are also users in some niches who are authoritative news leak sources for the big blogs in the space and they use Instagram as their sole platform. If you can find an in to be a source for these news leaks in your space, reach out to the blogs that post your news and start giving them value to where they want to cite your Instagram page or post as a source.