Instagram is a highly effective platform for growth. And there is a big variety of tactics that help to improve the performance of this network. They differ in many points, but however, there is one thing that any marketer would prove to be common for all of them. It is the reach. Of course, good numbers can be reached with the help of paid services, where you can buy 25 Instagram followers or 2500 if you need it. Though, numbers alone cannot provide continuous growth, which is why you should maintain your organic flow. The post you are going to read is highlighting the top effective techniques to increase your reach on Instagram. Let’s go!
Know your hashtags
Hashtagging is an art that you should wield if you want a better reach. When Instagram was launched, the first try to gain the attention of followers was to put in long lists of general tags. People believed that the more is the better, and included not their posts a whole lot of general hashtags, and with time, it turned out that this is the wrong way to go. Such practice only led to the loss of the posts in the depth of daily flow of images with the same words in the list, e.g. instalife, instagood, fun, life, and other general ones.
Instead of gathering an unnecessary long-read of useless tags, concentrate on the ones that are specific to your industry, are not too general for it, and don’t add more than 10 of them.
Know your target audience
To hit the best spot, you must understand what your potential followers like, and what would trigger their attention. You will have to do research and find out what are the following characteristics of your audience:
- Age
- Profession
- Gender
- Occupation
- Time spent online
- Approximate schedule of living
These points can define what would be the most engaging for your followers. Also, you will be able to adjust your posting schedule according to that knowledge, more on that in the next paragraph. And what you must realize from this one is that knowledge is power.
Consistency of posting
Another technique that is important in getting a better reach on every social media and especially on Instagram, is nailing perfect timing and gaining impeccable planning skills. For sure, by now you can ease your life with the help of automatic planners. But you will still have to accumulate a big amount of fresh content and know when you should upload it. In case you have a Business Profile on Instagram, you can define a perfect time for loading posts with the Highlights tool. This is an analytical instrument that shows the data about the behavior of users on your page.
Enforce your Stories
Stories are a huge help if you want to improve your rates on Instagram. Since the introduction of this feature in 2016, it has evolved into a perfect attention grip. The main principles of using stories are:
- Post many Stories. Every new uploaded Story pushes your account icon into the beginning of the list in the interface of the user’s newsfeed.
- Entertain your viewers. Stories offer a lot of options that allow you to engage and retain your audience, such as: questions, polls, countdowns, quizzes, challenges, hashtags, and reactions.
- Use Stories for social listening. The same features that serve for entertainment, can also be a great instrument for gathering feedback about users’ experience.
- Have fun. This format of posts allows you to be yourself and demonstrate your personality to its fullest. This is what makes a connection between you and your audience.
Find inspiration from other bloggers
Any industry that is represented on Instagram, has a range of influencers who are now sitting on top of the platform. You can watch their profiles and understand what are their best strategies and how their followers react to different kinds of content. Even though you cannot see the analytical data of other profiles, you can still evaluate the situation by reading comments, looking through the number of likes, etc. even though recently Instagram has changed their policy and the exact number of likes is hidden, you still can see the approximate amount of them.
Have a good mix of different types of content
Just like on any other social platform, the content is king on Instagram. And you should have a wide range of topics that are related to your niche, and a few more general ones, e.g. ecological situations, or socially meaningful events in the world. Also, don’t forget to dilute the image content with video, as this is believed to be the dominant kind of content on the internet. The variety of posts will keep up the interest of your followers, and also please the Instagram algorithms.
User-generated content as your weapon
If you want to increase your organic reach, you must encourage users to create stuff with your profile as the main inspiration. In the case of personal blogs, your primary goal would be setting challenges and specific hashtags, that would define your community and make it stronger and closer. Also, you can collect digital art that features you. This method is not much known among influencers, because it is quite rare. But if you get some, you should share it immediately, at least in your Stories. For business owners on Instagram, you should concentrate on getting many reviews of your product. This would be the best UGC that you can get.
Go live!
Live videos on Instagram are appearing at the beginning of the Stories line, and remain there as long as you are on air. This is a great opportunity to increase interest in your profile and communicate with your followers. When you go live, you can easily engage with the viewer through text chat and split-screen. An additional bonus is a fact that you will be able to gather user’s opinions about you and later adjust your strategy accordingly to the feedback you get.
Make it personal
One of the greatest things about Instagram is that to become successful, you basically should be yourself. Sincere and open-hearted persona is rather engaging to viewers. Remember that you should not try to change and rebuild your lifestyle and character. Any lies are noticed by the audience, even if they don’t show it. But if you step too far, the consequences can be dire for you.
Conclusion to the things mentioned above
Increasing organic reach is a built-in task to other goals that you have. Using the mentioned tips and strategies to develop your performance on this platform, and the reach will jump up without any specific effort to it.
