With over 2 billion monthly users, Instagram can be a lucrative place to market your business—or start an influencing career. At the same time, the engagement rate for Instagram posts can be abysmal, at just 0.6%. That means fewer than one in 100 people who view your post will like, comment, or share it.
Gold Rate
Tuesday 21 Jan. 2025
But don’t let these statistics discourage you. They only mean that you will need to build a strong following on Instagram if you want to leverage its benefits.
But how to get more followers on Instagram? Read on to find out.
Zero In on Your Niche
If you’re already running a business, you might be thinking this should be a piece of cake. You just have to see what your existing clients use and like and do the same thing, right?
Wrong.
While your customers are a great start towards finding your niche, you will need to work double time to determine how to serve your content uniquely. As such, finding your niche is all about making a personal connection with your followers. Go beyond how your products and services help your customers and leverage your unique mission statement to influence (pun intended) your post style and what exactly you share on the platform.
For influencers, finding a niche can be a bit easier. After all, you don’t need to abide by previous brand guidelines and are building one from scratch. You can afford to experiment with different styles until you find something that you both excel at and that has the potential to gain a following that can be marketable. On the flip side, you will need to do some research to determine the right type of audience. Usually, those will be people with similar likes and interests to yours, making it relatively simple to create a personal connection.
However, don’t go overboard with switching things up. If you don’t show consistency in your style, followers will quickly notice that you’re trying to chase trends and might not have something original lined up that’s worth checking out.
Focus on Quality
While there’s a certain charm in Lo-Fi work, Instagram posts generally have high production values. You need to get the lighting and focus perfect to ensure you grip the viewer from the get-go.
This means you will need to invest in equipment such as cameras or a filming studio to get the pro look. Alternatively, you can master an editing program to create seamless transitions or intriguing visual effects and cuts.
Additionally, pay special attention to your Instagram profile and, more specifically, the Instagram grid. There’s no one-size-fits-all style for the grid to look stellar, but use your best-looking images and create a cohesive style that shows high quality from a glance. You can use a single backdrop for all your grid images, design a checkerboard or a puzzle effect, or play with color contrasts and complements to design a beautiful grid.
If your marketing tactic relies on Reels, remember that you need to work against the relatively short attention span of online users. Even if longer Reels might provide more opportunity to showcase your style and creativity, users will scroll through if they don’t get hooked within the first 7-15 seconds. If your behind-the-scenes work is a bit too “pedestrian” compared to your regular images, it might get overlooked.
Make the Most Out of Your Time
While the Instagram algorithm prefers relevance over sheer freshness, when you post can significantly influence how much engagement you receive from your audience. That means you need to post when people tend to be on Instagram to ensure your posts are viewed while they’re still new.
Based on statistics published by Hootsuite, here are the best times to post (Pacific Time):
- Monday to Friday: Between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
- Saturday: Around 9 a.m.
- Sunday: After 5 p.m.
In general, most people tend to scroll through their Instagram feed on their lunch break on weekdays, before they start on their chores on Saturday, and when they get some time to unwind on Sunday. Additionally, Wednesday at 11 a.m. seems to be the best overall time to post.
However, even if you decide to post at odd hours, make sure to create a schedule and stick to it. You may need to experiment with different posting times for a few weeks before you find what works best for you (especially if you target a global audience). Luckily, you can use an Instagram post scheduler to help you here. A few excellent options like Hootsuite and Sprout Social allow you to customize a posting schedule and provide detailed analytics on the post engagement.
Find the Best Hashtags and Keywords
In a way, Instagram functions similarly to Google when it comes to searching for new content. If someone puts a few words into the search bar, the algorithm will pick up the most relevant keywords in the search query and suggest channels that contain them. That’s why you want to incorporate keywords into your post descriptions and profile to nudge the algorithm to identify your content correctly.
But, unlike Google, Instagram users can also use hashtags to make it more likely to get noticed.
Hashtags can vary greatly in terms of user engagement and search traffic, so you need to be careful which hashtags you use. For example, the #travel hashtag is incredibly broad and highly competitive, making it unlikely for any given post to be shown to a wider audience. However, using #traveltoitaly significantly narrows down the search parameters of the audience since they have to be specifically searching for the term or have closely related terms in the search history. Mixing between a few general hashtags and more specific ones gives you the best chance to get more followers on Instagram via the search options.
Don’t Be Afraid to Use a Jumping Board
Starting from an empty Instagram screen can be daunting. Even if you create a few excellent posts, it might take a while to drive up engagement enough before the algorithm takes over and starts promoting you to a broader audience.
One solution forhow to get more followers on Instagram quickly is to buy followers. With a few hundred high-quality followers on your profile (meaning followers with a posting history and generally similar likes and interests), your account gains much-needed credibility to stand out.
When someone checks your account, they see that you took the time to craft quality content and have a following, making them more likely to hit the follow button. It won’t take long before the follow count grows organically, with the algorithm using the information on new followers and how they engage with your content to recommend your work to even more people.
