Social media is an integral part of growing your brand’s presence online. If you’re looking to boost your Instagram following in 2024, here are 9 simple things you can do to up your Insta following this year.
Make and Follow a Content Calendar
If you want to take your Instagram account to the next level, you need to make a content schedule. Consistent posting is one of the best things you can do to grow your account organically. Instagram tends to favor accounts that are posting regularly, especially if you’re posting good content daily or every few days.
Once you make the schedule, you have to actually follow it if you want to see any benefits from it. As obvious as that seems, it’s more difficult than it sounds! Be sure your schedule is doable so you can maintain it indefinitely. If you make your schedule too strenuous, you won’t be able to keep up the momentum.
Using a tool like Notion can help you set up your email marketing calendar and follow it consistently.
Do yourself a favor and plan out content to post ahead of time. Don’t count on feeling creative every day. A good tip is to draft multiple posts in a single day, and then publish them slowly according to your schedule. That way you won’t have to count on making new content daily. Instead, you’ll already have posts prepared and ready to use whenever you need them.
Post at the Right Times
Without making any changes to your actual content, you can get more attention on your posts simply by publishing them at the right times during the day.
Statistically speaking, Instagram posts are most likely to get attention when they’re published in the late morning or early afternoon during the weekdays. Weekend posts tend to get less attention.
This isn’t universally true, but it holds up in most industries. Make sure you’re following the time zones in the area where your target audience is rather than your own time zone.
Stagger your post times a little bit, but keep them within a certain range in the sweet spot if you want to get the best chances of having your content in front of your audience.
Know Your Data
Instagram gives a lot of analytics to business account holders. Since it’s free to make a business account, you should set yours up immediately and start taking advantage of the analytics gold mine there!
Analytics for your account will show you numbers about engagement, story views, audience demographics, growth, trends, popular content, and a lot more general traffic statistics. You can use this data to make highly targeted content, boost what’s working, change your post times, and refine your posting strategy over time.
Social Boost
Work with a proven Instagram marketing agency to boost your following organically.
Using an Instagram marketing agency can be helpful to get your account off the ground. If you don’t have the time or expertise to manage your analytics and use that information to guide your decision-making, an agency can do a lot for you. It can be worth the investment to get your account to a higher level this year.
Write for Your Audience
Do you know who you’re talking to with your posts? Are you writing things specifically for them, or are you just writing generally? You need to be addressing your audience directly with what you’re posting.
This requires you to know who your audience is and who you’re targeting. Defining your target market is going to help you grow since you can more easily make content that will be relevant to them.
Take the time to carefully define your target market. This might take a little bit of work to do, but the payoff will be worth it! From there, use this target market profile to shape your content. Small shifts in topic and tone can make a major impact on your following as you appeal more to the right people.
Engage with Your Audience
Audience interaction is a great way to make your account feel more personal and less like a distant corporate entity. If you’re not creating an authentic presence with your Instagram followers, you may need to rethink what you’re doing.
Responding to comments, making content on requested topics, writing personalized captions, and commenting on other posts are all good ways to engage with your audience on Instagram.
Another way of engaging with your audience is by sharing their posts and stories. Boosting others in your Insta stories is a great way to add more life to your profile while also communicating to your audience that you’re listening and interested in what they have to say.
Boost Your Posts
While you can’t buy followers, you can take your most successful Instagram posts and help them reach a completely different audience by boosting them. When you boost a post on Instagram, you’re given a variety of options to add CTAs to your post. These can be anything from linking out to your website or purchasing something from your post immediately.
Boosted posts are paid for on a CPC basis, meaning you shouldn’t do it unless you’ve got a strong CTA you want to push. Your CTA can be anything, even asking for people to follow your account. Make sure it’s something you’re willing to pay for, and that you’re prepared to handle any responses you may get!
Note: You can also boost Instagram stories, but boosted posts consistently do a better job of reaching new people than boosted stories.
Check Your Hashtags
Hashtags actually play a stronger role in your Instagram posts than you might think. They are one of the best ways to reach new audiences organically on the platform, no matter what type of content you’re posting.
Hashtags are useful for people searching for content on specific topics, but they’re also helpful for getting Instagram to categorize your posts correctly. Using a few broad hashtags mixed with more specific hashtags is a great way to put your content in the right spaces to get noticed.
Similar to website SEO, hashtags alone won’t transform your posts and boost your audience overnight. But, getting in the right spaces and slowly ranking well in different hashtags related to your niche will help you get discovered and bring in new people in the long term. It’s a super simple strategy that sets you up for long-term success and growth.
Don’t Get Boxed in
Although Instagram’s algorithm favors consistency, you don’t want to get stuck in a rut. Every once in a while, you need to throw in some content that’s a little unorthodox. Even if you have some misses with this surprise content, it’s always a good idea to push the envelope and stay creative.
This is how you ensure you won’t get left behind when there are algorithm changes or shifts on the platform. If you stick too closely to one formula, it will be difficult for you to adjust when things change around you.
Another benefit is that by tapping into new types of content you get the opportunity to put your posts in front of a new audience. Your main posts are likely to reach a similar audience each time, but you can use these experimental posts as a way to get in front of new people and bring them into the fold.
Make time for something simple and creative on your Insta at least once a month, as long as it’s relevant to your brand and niche.
Collab and Conquer
Collaborations are a powerful tool on social media, especially if you find the right people to mix with. The best collabs are with other brands or creators in a similar industry to yours, without being direct competitors. (Although, it’s a bit of a flex to collab with your competitors as well, if they’re up for it. Grow together!)
Present creators with collaboration opportunities that will be mutually beneficial. Make sure they’re getting something out of the deal as well, especially if you’re collabing with smaller creators. This can come in the form of free products, collab content for their channel, affiliate commissions, promotion opportunities, etc. All collaborations should be a win-win situation, especially since this can help you make connections to work together more in the future.
Collabs are a great audience-building tool. If you play your cards right, you can attract people from the other creator’s audience to watch the content. Once you’ve gotten their attention, it’s up to you to give them a reason to stick around and hear more of what you have to say.
Are you ready to kick your Instagram into high gear in 2024? Start doing these 9 things and you’ll be on your way to a larger, more engaged following in no time!
