Defining your Instagram growth strategy is one of the key factors to growing your account.
Instagram opens a lot of possibilities for businesses and marketers to promote their products. It’s one of the best platforms out there to get new customers and engage with them.
Over 90% of Instagram users follow a business, which means that if your business is there and has good content, chances are, you are already reaching someone.
Many businesses are on Instagram, but they don’t have an Instagram growth strategy for the most part. How do you reach and engage with more people?
This is a question every single user asked before.
Let’s go through some strategy tips that are working great in 2021.
Should you use an Instagram growth strategy?
Yes!
There are lots of good strategies that will boost your business or professional profile, and without a good strategy, you might feel like your growth is stagnant.
To get things going, you need to be creative.
Here are some tips on how to develop your Instagram growth strategy to expand your reach:
Hashtags matter
Hashtags are really important, but if you don’t know what to do with them, your post might not reach many people at all.
They help people find the content they are interested in, but, they can also help you boost your engagement and how many people you reach with each post.
If you use hashtags such as #photography or #business, posts would show up on the Explore page, but for a really short time.
This is why you must use hashtags relevant to your niche.
Display Purposes is a great tool to find hashtags related to your content, get creative and start finding new hashtags.
You have a limit of 30 hashtags per post, however, that doesn’t mean you should be using all of them.
If you use up all of your hashtag slots, your profile might look like spam, and this could even cause a shadowban, affecting your overall engagement.
Recent studies show that using fewer hashtags is actually healthier for your engagement.
You could see this as communicating with the algorithm and telling it exactly what your niche is.
The ideal number is somewhere around 3-5 relevant hashtags, as this will guarantee that your audience is the right one.
Create aesthetically consistent content
Having a brand identity is a big part of your Instagram growth strategy.
It is key to making sure your audience knows who you are, this shows your public that you have well-thought content and quality of your product or service.
This also includes having a profile bio that provides essential information such as your website, working hours, and how to reach you.
If you sell products, be sure to have great photography and advertisement that presents your brand philosophy.
Take Etsy as an example:
For a more in-depth guide, consider checking our article on how to use Instagram templates to boost your profile.
Follow a posting schedule for your Instagram growth strategy
If you don’t have a posting schedule, you should start researching the best times to post content.
Around 500.000 Instagram users are checking their feed every minute or so. This means there are people out there who could be checking your content every few minutes.
Since 2019, Instagram is showing content based on your interests, as the algorithm notices any relevant changes to your viewing pattern, what you see a month from now might be different.
This means that your audience will see your post if it’s related to a subject they are interested in (hashtags they used or interacted with), or if they already interacted with your page directly in the past.
To get optimal reach, you need to know when your audience is the most active, and then post your content at that time.
According to a study by Sprout, these are the best posting times on Instagram:
- Best times: Tuesday 11 a.m.–2 p.m., Monday through Friday 11 a.m.
- Best day: Tuesday
- Worst day: Sunday
This is a good place to start, however, each audience might be different, so you should definitely be engaging with your followers to find this out.
Engage with your audience
Engaging with your followers is mandatory for a good Instagram growth strategy. It’s great to have interesting content, but you need to keep in touch with the people who follow you.
You need to reply to comments and encourage them to share your content and interact with it as well, but remember to keep a casual tone that is genuine, you don’t want generic or pre-made responses.
If you are engaged with your audience, this also means you can use that to your advantage using user-generated content. Encourage your followers to post pictures to their stories and tag your page, create a hashtag for your brand so that customers can follow content related to the brand.
Users love showing up in their favorite brand stories, so repost the content they tagged you in, and this will surely increase your reach.
Another option is asking users to review your service or product, you can then post their picture to your feed and share the review!
A great example of user-generated content is Buffer, an Instagram scheduling tool that constantly posts its user’s content:
Influencers are part of a great Instagram growth strategy
Certainly, influencers are a huge part of marketing strategies nowadays, and you should be using that to grow your brand too.
Over 65% of Instagram users follow at least one influencer, this means that a great marketing campaign with a well-selected influencer can have an impact on your growth.
You should definitely consider reaching out to influencers that match your brand identity and work on a marketing campaign as part of your Instagram growth strategy.
Here is one of the best examples we can give you:
In 2021, Ontario Beef won the Influencer Marketing Awards in the Low Budget category.
Like many stores, Ontario Beef struggled as covid hit the world hard, and like many other businesses, they had to reinvent themselves.
With a low budget, the company was able to develop an amazing experience for its audience.
Videos from influencers were the focus of the campaign and certainly generated awareness and engagement.
We’re on a quest to find the most mouthwatering burger made with delicious Ontario beef. Follow along as our host Andrew Gunadie (aka ‘Gunnarolla’) challenges four top grill masters to create truly one-of-a-kind recipes as they compete in The Ontario Beef Burger Battle! There will be lots of secret ingredients, irresistible spices and unexpected toppings but there will only be one winner!
Ontario Beef Burguer Battle, 2020
As a result, the well-thought and developed recipes were a success and the campaign brought lots of new customers as well as a huge boost to their social media reach.
Think outside the box
There are no perfect recipes to grow your brand, and you should always be changing your Instagram growth strategy to adapt to the current state of the market.
Do research, communicate with your audience to understand what they like and think of your brand and you should have a starting point.
Above all else, be creative.
Red is the content creator for this blog, working directly with the Nitreo team, he aims to help clients and Instagram users to optimize their content and metrics. He is also a photographer obsessed with urban photography and portraits, so you can expect a few posts about Instagram photography from time to time as well.
Red has worked as a Portuguese translator and interpreter for over 7 years, he also felt really weird writing this bio in the third person.