How to Increase Instagram Followers

1. Post consistently (at least once a day)

How to Increase Instagram Followers

Visual marketing tool Tailwind studied more than 100,000 Instagram profiles in 2017 to understand how posting frequency affects follower growth and engagement rate.

They found that the more often you post, the more likes and followers you get.

According to the study, profiles that posted seven or more times a week (or at least once a day) get more likes and gain more followers faster than those that post less frequently.

Here’s the impact of posting more:

You can almost double your follower growth rate by moving from less than one post per week to 1-6 posts a week. You can more than double your follower growth rate again by moving from posting 1-6 times per week to once or more per day.

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The key takeaway: Post consistently on Instagram. Brands that get into a regular flow with Instagram posts tend to see the best results.

With Instagram’s algorithmic timeline, consistency feels like a key element to getting your posts seen and appearing at the top of the timeline. If your posts are shared on a regular basis and picking up good engagement, then our hunch is Instagram’s algorithm may place your posts near the top of your follower’s feeds

Reach your audience with consistent, high-quality content — start a free 14-day Buffer trial now.

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2. Try videos, live videos, and Stories

While Instagram started as a photo-sharing network, it has grown beyond just photos. With features like videos, live videos, and Stories, brands can now create many different types of content to engage their fans and grow their following.

Here are a few compelling reasons to try posting these new content types:

• The average engagement for videos is growing faster than the average engagement for images3

• When you go live on Instagram, you will appear right at the front of the Stories feed4

• Fifty-seven percent of brands believe that stories have been “Somewhat effective” or “Very effective” as a part of their social media strategy.

Free resources:How to Create Beautiful Instagram Stories (and 10 Amazing Templates to Use)
Here’s All You Need to Know About Live Video on Instagram Stories:
A Video Marketing Guide On Creating Epic Content for Social Media

3. Study and use quality hashtags

We’ve explored hashtags a lot on the blog, but it seems that nowhere on social media are they quite as important as on Instagram. The right hashtags (and location tag) can expose your image to a large and targeted audience, and Instagram users don’t seem to get hashtag fatigue in the same way they might on other networks.

Due to its popularity, it’s even possible to follow a hashtag now!

Simply Measured did two studies and found that Instagram posts with both hashtags and a location tag get the highest average engagement6

. In other words, hashtags could be your best bet for growing a fast following on Instagram.

For example, check out one of our recent top Instagram posts, where we used ten hashtags and a location tag:

While Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags per post, TrackMaven found that nine hashtags seem to be the optimal number for getting the maximum engagement7

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With free Instagram tools like Display Purpose, Focalmark, and AutoHash, you can easily get quality, relevant hashtags for your Instagram posts. For instance, with Display Purpose, simply type in a few words about your image and it’ll recommend the top hashtags to use.

4. Share user-generated content

In a year, we grew our Instagram following by almost 400 percent  – from 4,250 to 21,000 followers. And a large percentage of this growth was a result of us embracing and sharing user-generated content.

The easiest way to think about user-generated content is this: brands taking the best-of-the-best user content from around the web and featuring it on their own social media or other platforms while giving credit to the original creator (user).

At Buffer, we started the hashtags #BufferStories and #BufferCommunity to showcase the unique stories of our users. These hashtags have opened up a huge variety of content options from curated stories of digital nomads to social media tips from marketers.