Instagram is a social media platform that gets everyone excited, considering the extent of leeway it gives you in showing off your creative skills when taking a picture. However, mastering the art of attracting loyal followers is another issue on its own.
If you are struggling to see positive results from your activities on the site, or even attract a following that is large enough to generate profits in traffic to your landing pages, it may be wise to consider getting followers for Instagram and building high trust levels with them.
The good thing with Instagram is that it gives you a level of influence other platforms will not. Once you begin getting a larger audience that enjoys your work, you will get more opportunities to interact personally with your users, as well as creating unique experiences with them.
Why you need to consider Instagram as a builder of loyalty
Brands may not think of the platform as a major source of followers and influence. The other extreme may be that the brand is desperate to get followers, so they take shortcuts when getting a large follower base such as using Instagram bots.
However exciting the prospect may look, this option does not work in the long-term. Services that encourage you to pay for likes and followers are everywhere you look, but to build high trust levels with your audience, it is much better to follow a more authentic route.
You may need to keep this fact in mind before paying for followers: statistics show that about 48 million accounts on Instagram are fakes, making up about 8% of total users. That means that when you have fake users that are following your page, they will not go to your landing page, make purchases, or refer other people to your site. This effort therefore seems to be a useless endeavour. In addition, the risk of getting caught and losing the gains you may have made are high,and your reputation suffers damage. That is why it is a better idea to grow your audience organically.
What are some tips to grow audiences organically and build trust?
Optimizing your account
Treat Instagram as you would your business website. Think of your bio section in terms of a ‘homepage’ for your account, and make sure you optimize it.
Optimizing involves putting aspects such as a profile image (even if it is the brand logo), a proper username, a bio, and image captions. Otherwise, people may not verify whether your account is real or not.
This may not seem like a deal breaker, but many brands unfortunately do not put their bios or even links to landing pages. Because you cannot use links in Instagram posts, this is the only chance you have of driving people to your site and advertise your services.
Make sure your username is friendly to search engines as well. For instance, you can shorten your username if the name of the business is long, but ensure it is something the audience can recognize. Avoid using special characters such as hyphens or numbers in the username, and treat it as you would a website name.
In addition, you may not be sure where you need to link your account to. You can try product pages that have a direct relation to hashtags or keywords you use frequently on your Instagram account – this will make the experience cohesive for the user who is moving from your account to your site.
Consistency in content
Not only does this relate to the consistency of your account and the pictures you post, but also relates to the frequency of your posts.
Among the worst mistakes you can make when trying to build your brand is posting content irregularly. You do not want your Instagram followers to forget that your account exists; make them remember and make a posting schedule.
The general rule is that brands should post a few times per day (a maximum of five daily posts), though you can post once or twice. Whatever you decide, keep it as consistent as possible.
Remember that daily active users on the site are a large number, possibly about 200 million. When you cast your net wider, you can get their attention and reap great rewards from engaging with them.
Schedule advance posts
With the news about consistency, you may wonder what content you will make for your Instagram feed, or when you can post it.
Instagram fortunately has tools to assist brands and business people to build their following on the site, and they advise you on the best times to post through using algorithms that show you when the site is most active. This will help you to schedule your posts effectively, and at the same time encourages you to plan ahead for your content.
Once you achieve a certain level of consistency in posts, the audience will follow through, and your visibility increases steadily.
Knowing differences between fake and real followers
Even though it may seem fitting to buy Instagram followers, this method fails to work out eventually, since the detriments will be more than organic growth peaks.
Fake followers on Instagram have certain attributes that should act as warning signs. These are aspects such as inactive accounts that have very many followers, the accounts have no ROI, and create very little buzz yet seem to have many followers.
Real followers though? They can comment on your posts, like them, or even engage with other users. These are the accounts you should strive to get.
Encourage people to check out your Instagram
You can list your website and other social networks to encourage other people to check out your account, otherwise, you will not gain new followers.
If you want to get discovered, the usual business principles apply – you need to create awareness about your brand. Cross-promoting your social media accounts also helps, but above all you need to ensure that your content stays visually appealing and gives people a reason to follow you.
Conclusion
Growing followers organically on social media may take a long time to achieve returns, but it is a better option than buying Instagram followers, especially with brands that are only establishing themselves to a wider audience. This will in turn, breed trust and will encourage more people to follow your brand.
