If you’re struggling to grow your audience on Instagram, you may have missed out on a few simple tricks to gain more reach. Though followers may not be directly proportional to sales (you can learn more about this here), having a good following establishes credibility and trust.
Instagram has loads of features that we often overlook and take for granted. You have stories, different types of posts, sharing, and so much more.
But before we get into that, take a step back and reflect on the bulk of your posts. What do you usually talk about? Do you always talk about what you’re selling? Discounts? Promos?
Of course, those are attractive, but if you meet someone who’s constantly selling, how does that make you feel? You’d probably slowly back down and leave. Similarly, your audience would do the same. To them, it may seem like all you’re up for is their money. This may also impact the number of reaches your profile gets.
Of course, those are attractive, but if you meet someone who’s constantly selling, how does that make you feel?
With those points in mind, here are 3 simple tricks to turn more heads to view your profile.
#1 Create Shareable Content
Let’s first define what “shareable content” is not: It’s definitely not JUST selling. Shareable means that your audience finds that the post is valuable, that it helps them in some way, and therefore is worth for them to share.
Instagram is heavy on photos. So that’s exactly what you should focus on. If the bulk of the content is on your captions, then it might not serve its purpose, because it’s too long, and this will most probably make your readers skip. It's not what the majority of them go to Instagram for. If you could have the long caption be presented on the carousel, simplified and summarized, that would be great too.
If your post is long, then consider using Carousels. Instagram allows for 10 slides, so make sure to utilize its full limit. We’ve prepared a guide on how to make effective carousels that can retain your audience’s attention here! It's not all about looks and aesthetics.
This entirely depends on what sort of content you're going for, and what sort of audience you have in your followers' list.
Think about it from your audience’s perspective. What are their interests? What do they want to know? What do I offer that can pique their interest? Why would they want to share this post with their friends? How does this post help them in any way? if it doesn't, how can I create value?
If you’d like to know more about how to make shareable content on carousels, we’ve made a post about it here! To summarise, shareable content must be valuable, relatable, and has a good CTA.
#2 Repost On Your Story
Stories are a surefire way of having your profile appear on top of the screen of your viewers. Your posts, however, will stay as long as you keep them, and may often sink underneath other people’s posts on their homepage.
Stories only last for 24hrs, so there’s really no harm in making use of them.
Once your shareable content is posted, be sure to share it and click on “add to profile”
This gives you a story with a preview of your latest post. It’s also clickable, and it brings the viewers directly to the post.
It’s like a reminder or a mini announcement to your followers that you’ve posted something.
Play around with the stickers too! There are some really funky ones that say “click here”. It's really up to personal preference at this point.
Reposting on your story gives you a boost to the top of the page to bring in more clicks to your profile.
#3 Use Relatable Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the most underrated features of Instagram. Each post is limited to 30 hashtags on the caption. That’s plenty of keywords to put to specifically target a certain group.
Hashtags help push your post into a specific group. Instagram now allows you to “follow” hashtags. Posts from that group will then appear on the homepage, even without them following the profile.
Your hashtags must be relatable to your post. A common mistake that people tend to do is to put a string of random popular hashtags that are totally unrelated to the post, in hopes that they get viewers anyway.
This is a short-term solution that causes long-term problems. Attracting accounts that are only randomly interested in you would do more harm to your engagement. You want to keep those who are truly interested in your content in your followers' list for better engagement.
If you’re planning to attract more eyes, then consider using this formula:
5 popular hashtags - in the 100k to millions range
5 moderate hashtags - less than 100k
5 niche hashtags - less than 30k
5 local hashtags
Why does this work?
Consider the popular hashtags as a boost of the post to many screens. If you're lucky, this will help you get a few people to be interested. However, the con is that other users are also using this hashtag, and chances are your post will be buried within minutes.
Moderate hashtags may have your post stay for a few hours before newer posts come in. This has a better chance for other users to engage with your post.
Niche hashtags will last longer. This entirely depends on how good your content is. Niche hashtags have people who are highly interested in a very specific cluster. If someone follows this hashtag and your post is a top-rated one within the hashtag, then your post might just pop up all the time.
Local hashtags are for penetrating the audiences near you. This makes a lot of sense especially if you are targeting local users for your business.
And finally, an optional move would be to include branded hashtags. Come up with a few branded hashtags of your own and included them in the pile. This can help in categorizing your posts in organized clusters for the ease of your viewers. Let's say you have quotes-type and photography-type contents. #Yourbrandquotes #Yourbrandphotos would already be sufficient. That way, your audience can click on either one and get directed to a list of that specific type of content.
Bonus Tip
Post at the right time. If most of your viewers are active after working hours, then schedule the post to be exactly within that time frame. This gives a higher chance that your followers are actually active and online during the time of posting, meaning you'll get a higher possibility of a fruitful engagement.
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Let us know if you found this post helpful. And if you haven't, feel free to check other blogs for more tips on Social Media, Branding & Design from us at AiCreativv.
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