5 Tips For Growing Your Instagram That Nobody Really Tells You

Ok, the secret of Instagram revealed is… Oh wait, sorry, there isn’t one!

I always thought, “one day I’ll finally understand the Instagram algorithm and understand how so many huge bloggers grew so quickly,” but in reality, times have 100% changed from the post a photo a day and gain 30K followers in 3 months. It’s just not realistic. And honestly, it won’t really happen unless you already have a massive account and tell your followers to go follow your new small one. This is how a lot of “home” Instagram accounts happen - fashion, or travel bloggers recommending people to their other Instagram account and gaining loyal followers rapidly. Realistically, the chances of new or smaller bloggers getting this kind of engagement and following quickly is slim. I know, sounds depressing, but don’t be disheartened.

Instagram has seriously changed in the past few years, but so has the content being shared and the amount of people sharing media online. We just need to adapt to the times, put hard work in and stay motivated.

Yeah, yeah, ok but Gemma, what are your actionable tips!! Read on to find out…

Establish legitimate relationships and friendships with people on instagram

This is essential to not only growing but enjoying your growth process. If you do not have people that you genuinely connect with who you can bounce ideas off of, share recommendations, support each other and lift each other up, then you will not enjoy what you do and people will feel that through your page. It’s important to establish relationships like you would offline, as you never know what connection someone may have, what insight they can give you, how much they could end up being an offline friend or just so that people know who YOU are through your page.

You can do this by reacting to people’s stories, commenting on posts you enjoy, sharing tips with people who are seeking advice or even a cheeky slide into the DMs. This is how Yasmin and I first met and now we’ve turned into offline friends that can help each other succeed.

Engage with your existing followers

These are the people who have been with you, who may be new, who really have chosen to follow your account because they enjoy your content. These are the people who will appreciate your engagement with them and who you could even form offline relationships with, who could share your content, who will continue to engage with you — if you engage with them.

Something that I make sure that I do is respond to all the comments on my posts. You’ll notice bigger bloggers may not do this because they will automatically get around the same amount of engagement on every post anyway. If they do respond, it will increase their engagement rate and entice people to interact more with their page as they are now a “real person” and not just a page. This is the same for smaller accounts (like me), and it’s something that makes me happy (1) because the comments are usually really lovely (2) I can find out more about the person who is part of my audience and (3) because someone took the time to engage with what content I’m sharing. I think this is really necessary in order to sustain your existing following AND grow.

Engagement with new accounts is essential

Communication with your existing list of accounts you follow is important, but in order for new people to find you, you need to maximise your reach which can be done through engaging with accounts who do not yet follow you. It’s important to know who would be best for you to engage with by figuring out the type of audience you already have.

Let me also clarify that by engaging I mean liking and commenting.

For example if you post loads of photos of food, you wouldn’t go engage with car fanatics as they likely will not be interested in following you (although they might, but your success rate will be much lower) and should instead find likeminded people who would be engaged followers for you.

Sometimes your explore page can be helpful with this, but I would recommend steering clear of large accounts that have high engagement on their photos as they likely will not follow back and likely none of their followers will look through the comments for new people to follow. Instead, focus on smaller, similar accounts to your own. Think, would I follow me if I were them?

Spend time researching hashtags that will perform well for you

Once you have started posting, it’s important that you learn the game of hashtags.

Image topic hashtags:

For example if you are sharing food photos, before you post, type in your search bar food or recipes and see what kinds of hashtags are recommended and how many posts there have been under it.

Location hashtags:

Be sure to use some location hashtags so that people around you or near where the photo was taken can potentially see it, as well as people interested in the location. For example, if I live in London but I went to a restaurant in Canterbury, I may add #visitkent or #visitcanterbury as these are hashtags that people visiting may use to look for places to go. People in Canterbury will likely also be looking for places to eat on Instagram so I could also add #canterburyfood although it does have a significantly smaller following, my image may get more direct engagement from that audience.

High ranking hashtags:

Big hashtags are important because they will have many people following them, meaning your image could come up on their feed without them being a follower (yet). The likelihood with hashtags with millions of posts is that yours could get lost, so be sure to only choose a handful of really big hashtags to use that would suit your photo.

Brand hashtags:

This is a great way to potentially get reposted on a brand account or have a brand notice that you use their product. Check your favourite brands to see if they have any hashtags that they have created to keep track of posts using their product or tagging their brand so you can get noticed.

Lastly, do your research on hashtags. It’s slightly luck but also very much data backed. After sharing some different hashtags on a few different posts, see what performed well. If you don’t check your insights, you won’t know what direction to take next and could end up in a hashtag rut.

Share on your stories

This has to be my favourite tip because it’s so relevant. A lot of bloggers rely heavily on their feed and engaging throughout the day for their following to grow, and while this may work for some, this is a surefire tip to increase your profile views. Profile views can convert into followers, so the higher your profile views, the more people could be looking to follow you.

Stories make a huge difference. Someone once told me, and I will never forget “you post too many stories, maybe cut back and people will be more interested” and, boy oh boy, was he 100% wrong. You know what? He doesn’t post a lot of stories, and his growth is slow, so maybe that’s karma for the bad advice? I don’t know.

Anyway, moral of the story is: SHARE ON YOUR STORIES.

Share yourself, share your posts, share things you love, share things your followers will love, and BE GENUINELY YOU. People like to know what’s behind the feed and your stories are the perfect opportunity for a more candid look into who you are as a blogger. You are not just the photos on your feed or your caption, you have a personality, you have interests! This also gives people another chance to engage with you, find common ground, and relate.

Since starting to post more on my stories (once I said NOPE to the guy who told me to cut back) I have found so many fun new friends, gained followers, found more people to talk to — I’m such a chatterbox — and feel like my personality has come out more from behind my curated feed.

Besides your feed, your stories are something that can draw someone in and keep them interested even when you’re not posting often and are a key component to keeping your engagement up!

Hopefully these tips were useful and you’ll find yourself gaining some more followers from these tips! If you’d like to know more about being an Instagram blogger, read my blog post Things I Wish I Knew When I First Became An Influencer!

Slide into my DMs if you have any questions, and if you loved this and want to see more - leave me a comment below!

7 Questions Answered: What I Wish I Knew When I First Became An Influencer

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