3 Tips to (Realistically) Grow Your Instagram Following [Video]

In this video, I provide three tips to realistically grow your Instagram following as a small business or solopreneur.

TRANSCRIPTION | Hi everyone, Karen Coons here. I’m a marketing coach and CEO of Digital Hugs Marketing, a full-service marketing agency in Naples, Florida, but we pretty much serve the whole world. So if you’re interested, check out our website, digitalhugsmarketing.com.

Today, I’m going to talk to you about three tips to grow your Instagram following. Now, I’m not talking to you from the perspective of an influencer or anything like that. That is a full-time job, those people do get paid for their promotion and endorsement of products and so they do work on that full time. I’m here to talk to the local service providers, the local businesses, the online businesses even, I’m sure you can take some tips from this, but we don’t have a full-time schedule to be dedicating to our social presence and our following.

So what we have to do is carve out time in our regular schedules to do that because it is important. It is important to show up on social media these days, and specifically Instagram. It is one of the most used platforms these days, and it’s favored by many different age ranges. So you’re getting a broad reach there.

Anyway, the most favored industries on Instagram today are fitness and fitness wear, fashion that goes along with that somewhat, and then makeup as well. I’m sure you see those tutorials all the time and the list that I read didn’t include food, but I’m sure that that’s a big one as well. Or maybe that’s just me, that follows all those crazy food shows, making the burgers that are like this high. Anyway, that’s my thing, I guess.

But my first tip for you today is going to be content. You’re going to need to publish content consistently and What I’m going to recommend is three times a day. Three times a day. There are certain times that are more peak, but studies have shown more recently it really doesn’t matter when you share, just spread it out through the day. If you’re scheduling, your social media scheduling apps should suggest certain times. I use Buffer and it does do that. It creates a schedule for you and you can tailor it yourself in your settings. So you want to share content that is valuable to your buyer persona. In some way, you don’t need to share tips all the time. You don’t need to share facts. You don’t need to share promotions all the time. People on Instagram favor faces, favor faces, kids, dogs, anything, yourself.

So here’s just an example. If you’re a local lawyer, let’s say a female lawyer and you’re a little fashion savvy, and you’re going to meet a new client and you’re trying choose maybe yourself between two or three different outfits. Put those outfits on, take pictures of yourself, selfies or whatever. I would suggest getting a tripod, even for your cell phone, you can use your cell phone for your camera, that’s fine, or an Osmo or something like that, that you can set up and you can take quick shots of yourself. They don’t need to be super professional and they don’t need to be Photoshopped, not Photoshopped better.

Then just put them on a carousel and have people scroll through them. Say, “Scroll through to help me decide on my outfit for my next client meeting.” Whether you get an answer before your meeting or not, you’re creating engagement on your actual feed and people like to see that. Especially women out there, actually men as well, like to actually help you with those decisions.

So content that you can share, of course, is yourself, pictures of yourself, doing things for your business meeting, with your clients, your staff, or whatever it happens to be. Don’t just share staff photos all the time of what your staff’s doing. That’s not necessarily engaging for most people to check out about a company. They don’t want to hear about just your company all the time. They want to get inside the lives of the people. So you can do social media takeovers or something like that on your Instagram, where you let a different employee profile their lives, something like that. There’s so many different options, but when struggling with content, know that people want to see inside your life, your personal life as well, they favor faces, animals as well. Then also things that they’re familiar with.

So if you maybe take a weekend, a Saturday, a half a day or something, and you’re going to go out with your family anyway, and you’re going to be in a downtown district or at a landmark, make sure you take a lot of pictures there. You can share them on your feed and you can tag that place. The restaurant, the landmark, the park, whatever happens to be, you can tag that and then hopefully the owner of that restaurant or such will share your content. Then you have access to their network as well. Whether it’s on their storyline or on their regular feed post. So that’s always a good idea.

Events as well. You can find events on Facebook, just search under upcoming events, whether it’s you do once a day and you say, “What’s the events for that weekend?” Then tag those people in it, use their photos on their event page. They won’t mind if you’re promoting their event for them. Take pictures of clients, client success stories. You can also use fancy little graphics that are made in Canva.

I use Canva, there’s other ones out there that you can use, or you can create them yourself if you’re more savvy in that sense. So you’ll have a nice mix on your feed. So it’s always good to have it looking … your feed set up professionally. If you want, alternate between a graphic and photo, graphic and photo, or two, two and one, three, three and one, two, something like that. Just have some kind of consistency in your timeline with your content.

That’s number two, don’t be afraid to follow people. So number two is follow people, follow people. I believe gone are the days, or actually don’t even care at this point, whether people will judge you for the amount of people you’re following, as opposed to the ratio of those following you. Who cares, really? If you’re going to send out a direct mail campaign of like 5,000 postcards, do you think that one person getting it’s like, “I wonder how many other people got this?”

It’s about visibility for your company. It’s about a presence and creating that for yourself. So who cares? If you’re following 5,000, 10,000 people and you have a thousand people following you, well, it’s giving you a better shot at people actually finding out about you.

How are they supposed to find out about you? Yes, hashtags are great, but they’re only one piece of the pie, so make sure that you follow people. So my suggestion is that you go to people that provide a similar service to you in your geographic area, or they cater to your buyer persona as well. So if you’re a real estate agent in a certain geographic area, you’re going to want to look at other real estate agents that have a great presence. Yes, go to their followers list and follow those people. Or if you’re a real estate agent and you have somebody in town that does something similar, let’s just throw this out there, maybe it’s a business service or a marketing company let’s say, why not go to their list and look and see what who follows them as well, because they are local and most likely those people will be from that area.

Also, what you could do to really dive down into that is go to those pages, especially if the ones that are really popular and get a lot of engagement, go to their last three posts, look at who’s liked it and follow those people because then you know that is the gold. They are most likely looking to engage with content like yours, or a service provider like you, or a business professional, or your product, whatever it happens to be. But also that you know that they’ve engaged recently, so that it’s not somebody that maybe jumps on Instagram once a month. Most likely they regularly engage with profiles. So that’s number two, don’t be afraid to follow people.

Number three is engagement. You need to engage. So you’re going to want to like other people’s stuff or comment on it as much as possible, especially those in your feed. Just go through and like everything. You don’t have to like everything if you don’t agree with it, or if you don’t like it, then don’t like it, keep this authentic as possible. You’re not going for a gold medal here, we’re just trying to get some visibility and followers to your account, so engage as much as possible.

So those are the three things. Content, share consistently on Instagram, a certain amount of content. If you want to share two posts, if you want to share five posts, that’s fine. I wouldn’t go over that though. Also it’ll put a lot of weight on your schedule. So, the content, share consistently. Number two, don’t be afraid to follow people and number three, engage, engage, engage.

So how can you do that with a busy schedule? Two tips. In the mornings when I get up, I get up a little early, I set my coffee pot in the morning so that it comes on at 5:30. I get up in my pajamas and I get my coffee and I sit on the couch with my cell phone. I instantly go to Instagram and I, first of all, look through, who’s liked my stuff and who’s commented, who’s shared, or anything like that. Then I’ll engage with them, thank them, whatever it happens to be, like it, emojis, all of that wonderful stuff. Then I’ll go to my feed and I’ll start engaging with stuff in my feed.

Then number three, I’ve carved out certain accounts and people and personas that I know that their content and my content are similar on Instagram, so I could attract their potential audience and knowing that that is my potential audience for my coaching business as well. So I will go ahead and follow them. Just a tip on the follower note, just because you follow someone doesn’t mean you always have to follow them. I’m not suggesting that you go follow a hundred people and then you unfollow a hundred people that’s not necessarily authentic, but you do it however you want to. But again, this is all about visibility and getting people to recognize and see your account and your business ultimately.

So, I carve out my about a half an hour in the morning to do that while I’m drinking my coffee before my son wakes up, of course. Then it doesn’t get in the way of the content that I build during the day, and working with clients and such. So I do that.

Then number two, I think do carve out about two to three hours a week, and you could take an hour if you wanted, and I schedule it in my calendar as a meeting and anyone from my team knows that they can’t schedule time during that time. Also, I have to dedicate myself to actually sitting down and building my content out at that time. That’s what I’m working on more this year, because it’s not always easy. I have clients and I have a busy schedule as a single mom as well. So I feel your pain, but if you try to dedicate yourself and if you’re serious about increasing your marketing outreach and really growing your business, you’ll have the motivation to carve out and dedicate that time as well.

So, thank you for listening today. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at karen@karencoons … No, that’s not it, that’s my personal, you can reach out to me there too, karen@karencoons.com, or you can send me an email at karen@digitalhugsmarketing.com.

We have a ton of content on our site, well we’re getting there anyway. This video series hopefully will be a regular thing. I also have a podcast and a blog. You can find all of that at abigdigitalhug.com. Please check out my YouTube channel as well and subscribe to that, that would be great. Subscribe to my newsletters. There are a ton of ways that you can get my content. I would love, love, love, love for you to send me any questions that you want me to address on a video, that would be excellent. Awesome, have a great Tuesday and I will talk to you soon, bye.

Thanks for listening. Let me know if you have any questions at all. I love helping with marketing, and I can answer your question on a video or in one of my social posts, or if you want a one-on-one consultation with me, visit my scheduling page here.

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