17 Ways to Get More Instagram Followers (2026)
Instagram can be a highly targeted visual marketing channel for your brand and an opportunity to build a loyal audience that will grow alongside your business.
In fact, more than 500 million users browse the Instagram app every day, making it home to some of the most engaged audiences out there.
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In this guide, we’ll show you how to grow your Instagram follower profile and increase engagement, while building a massive following over time — one that is full of real fans, not bots or fake followers.
How to get more Instagram followers?
Here are some tactics to help you get more Instagram followers, from embracing new features like Reels, to cross-promoting content, optimizing your profile, and collaborating with brand ambassadors.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand your reach, these 17 tips will help you increase your Instagram follower count and boost engagement on the platform.
- Incorporate Reels into your content mix
- Cross-promote your content
- Curate your profile grid
- Collaborate with brand ambassadors
- Get followers from your loyalty program
- Sell through your personal Instagram account
- Get featured on featured accounts
- Use the right hashtags
- Post at the right time
- Steal followers from your competitors
- Pay for sponsored posts and product reviews
- Use geotags to boost local discovery
- Organize your Stories into Highlights
- Ask for more followers
- Host giveaways
- Share user-generated content
- Use Instagram Live
Let’s dive deeper into how to implement each tactic to get more Instagram followers.
1. Incorporate Reels into your content mix
Reels are fun videos you can share with your followers on your Instagram account. They feature audio, effects, and creative tools. You can share them on your feed and publicly in the Instagram Explore tab to reach new audiences.
Reels are new territory for brands. Kristie Dash, Instagram’s beauty partnerships manager, said at the Glossy forum that there is no single recipe for success with Reels. However, she recommends the following tips to gain traction:
- Keep content unique and trend-oriented. Identify trends on Instagram and TikTok and add your own style to them. This will increase the chance that your reels will go viral and reach new people.
- Make content relatable and simple. Not every Reel needs to be a production. Lower-quality videos can perform just as well, if not better, than highly produced Reels.
- Educate your audience. Find a balance between education and entertainment in your Reels.
Reels should now be a big priority for you. It’s prime real estate for getting your brand discovered by new followers. -Kristen Dash, Beauty Partnerships Manager, Instagram
Trilce Jirón Garro, owner of social media marketing agency TBS Marketing, agrees. “Don’t sell your products through Reels content,” she says. “Share facts. Provide tips related to the industry you operate in. Entertain viewers.”
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Trilce suggests that both new and existing brands incorporate entertaining Reels into their Instagram strategy. “Reels give everyone the opportunity to reach new audiences,” she says. “There’s no learning curve because Reels content is lo-fi. And creators can produce community content that builds trust, gains followers, and enables sales over time.”
Trilce also appreciates the Instagram Insights Tool introduced for Reels. “Reels have become an integrated part of every Instagram marketing strategy,” she says. “The analytics tools for Reels have made it easy to track metrics and analyze data to find out whether your Reels are working. You can now understand exactly what your audience likes and dislikes, when to post Reels, and which calls to action resonate with viewers.”
Using the Reels Insights tool, you can see patterns and understand various fluctuations in engagement that affect your visibility on the platform. This allows you to create higher-quality content that gains even greater engagement and viewership.
2. Cross-promote your content
Cross-promotion involves posting similar content across different social media channels. It’s a tactic used to save time and resources. It is also effective at increasing brand awareness and growing your Instagram audience.
Mobile users are spending more and more time with video and entertainment apps, with the biggest growth coming from video content on social media platforms. Whether it’s a short video or a long tutorial, you want to improve the reach of your content on Instagram.
A great example of successful cross-posting is Justin Bieber’s holiday dance challenge. During the 2020 holidays, the Canadian singer posted the same dance challenge on both TikTok and Instagram. On TikTok, his short video received 9.8 million likes. The same content on Instagram received 4.8 million likes. While some users may overlap, others likely use only one of these services. Bieber therefore managed to reach more people simply by posting the same video on two different platforms.
Nadya Okamoto, founder of lifestyle brand August, found that TikTok naturally carries over to Instagram and YouTube. In an interview with Modern Retail, she said: “As we grew on TikTok from August, we also grew to 175,000 followers on Instagram.” Active posting on multiple platforms “has impacted our overall acquisition costs in a way that makes them super efficient,” allowing the brand to move away from paid media as its primary acquisition channel.
TikTok isn’t the only channel you can cross-post to. The Instagram Reels format translates well to YouTube Shorts and Pinterest Stories. It’s important to note that the Instagram algorithm won’t support Reels that have a TikTok watermark. So if you’re planning to cross-post content from Instagram to other channels, make sure the content is high quality and doesn’t promote a competing platform through watermarks.
3. Create a profile grid
Most of your Instagram followers won’t follow you because of what you’ve posted in the past, but because of the promise of what you’ll post in the future. Your audience wants to know what they’ll get if they hit the Follow button.
Having a channel with a consistent posting schedule and theme can have just as much impact on follower growth as many of the other growth strategies we’ve described above. Even a simple pattern can attract new followers if it’s communicated at a glance to anyone who lands on your profile.
Think of your Instagram bio and your last nine posts as your first impression on Instagram. Do they effectively communicate a certain level of consistency through personality, filters, colors, or layout? Does the clickable link send people to the same homepage every week, or do you also link to fun and exciting content?
Grid layout is an often-underestimated way to creatively work with the aesthetics of your feed while also giving your publishing strategy a rhythm and consistency that’s worth maintaining.
Indeed, many accounts that adopt this approach are often able to put less effort into content creation by focusing on converting visitors into followers, creating text graphics or other faster-turnaround content, and streamlining their overall Instagram content production.
Using a tool like Later, you can easily plan and schedule Instagram posts to create the look and layout of your feed. Letterfolk is just one example of how far some brands take the aesthetics of their Instagram layout.
Your feed serves as your brand’s billboard. It’s the customer’s first point of contact with you and captures the essence of your brand. -Trilce Jiron, TBS Marketing
4. Work with brand ambassadors
Don’t want to pay well-known influencers big money to promote your brand? Partner with brand ambassadors who have anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand followers. Ambassadors are people who genuinely support your brand, believe in it, and will tell their friends about it.
Luxury footwear retailer Sarah Flint reports finding success with its brand ambassador program, which has more than 500 women as members. Each ambassador has her own unique discount code, which earns her a free pair of Sarah Flint shoes after five new customers use it.
Ambassadors like Holly Hollon vouch for the quality and comfort of the brand’s shoes. Her Instagram posts are authentic and relatable to Sarah Flint’s regular customers. This helps the brand grow its Instagram following and generate sales.
5. Gain followers from a loyalty program
Retailers are increasingly implementing loyalty programs that repeatedly motivate consumers to shop with their brand instead of another. It works for brands like Sephora and Blume. One way brands use loyalty programs is by rewarding those who follow them on Instagram.
When luxury retailer Rebecca Minkoff launched its RM Rewards program, it gave shoppers the opportunity to earn points for following the brand’s account on Instagram. Brands like Blume also find value in rewarding Instagram followers. Program members can earn Blume Bucks for becoming an Instagram friend as opposed to Facebook or Twitter.
6. Sell through a personal Instagram account
Another popular way to increase your Instagram following is to expand a personal account—essentially, make yourself an influencer. Using both a business and personal account can increase brand recognition, followers, and sales. Pro tip: You can also launch this approach on TikTok to improve your numbers there too.
It’s a tactic that has worked well for fashion brand ANINE BING. In addition to the brand’s Instagram profile, the company’s founder also drives engagement and awareness through her personal Instagram page, which has more than a million followers.
Anine invites her fans into her design studio, walks them through the design process, and even gathers feedback from them throughout the creative process. Anine also shares a little about her personal life and milestones, giving followers a peek behind the curtain into the life of their favorite designer.
7. Get featured on themed profiles that repost other profiles
Instagram feature accounts are pages that curate the best content within a particular niche. They’re like “best of” photo magazines for a given industry. Some feature accounts have a massive number of followers. Getting featured on one of these accounts can send new Instagram followers to your profile.
There are feature accounts for every topic: travel, fashion, photography, and more. For example, @discoverearth curates adventurous travel content from around the world for more than 6.6 million followers.
8. Use the right hashtags
Your goal on Instagram is to regularly engage your existing audience while also growing your number of real followers. Posting new, interesting, and engaging photos will satisfy the first requirement, but to start growing, it’s essential that you tag your photos with hashtags. Hashtagging makes it easy for people searching for specific terms to find your photos.
So which hashtags should you use? Just like on Twitter and other social networks, Instagram users tend to gravitate toward certain hashtags over others. If you use popular Instagram hashtags in your photos, you’re much more likely to reach new users and be discovered.
At the time of writing, these were the top 20 most-used hashtags on Instagram:
- love
- instagood
- fashion
- photooftheday
- beautiful
- art
- photography
- happy
- picoftheday
- cute
- follow
- tbt
- followme
- nature
- like4like
- travel
- style
- repost
- summer
If you looked at that list and thought, “But none of that relates to my products or brand,” you’re probably right.
Using hashtags is one thing; using the right tags is another.
Popular tags like the ones listed above will likely net you additional engagement and likes. However, they won’t lead to increased long-term engagement from relevant users, new followers, or, most importantly, sales.
If you want to properly tag your photos, you need to find and use the most relevant hashtags. This means doing the appropriate research and making sure you’re using hashtags that not only capture your brand but are also being searched on Instagram.
You can use a free online tool like IconoSquare or Webstagram to find relevant, related, and popular hashtags by searching for key hashtags closely related to your brand.
For example, if you’re in the men’s accessories business, you can use the hashtag #MensFashion in Webstagram and pull up the following list of additional key hashtags along with the number of times they’ve been used (i.e., their popularity).
You can also discover additional related hashtags and their popularity by searching for some of your target keywords directly within the Instagram app.
In this exercise, you’ll want to try out various keywords that describe your brand and products, gradually building a list of hashtag keywords.
Keep in mind that Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags per post. Additionally, popular words change over time — make sure to revisit your hashtag keywords every few months to ensure you’re using the best possible terms.
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You can also steal hashtag ideas from competitors or similar accounts that have the kind of following you’re aiming for, but ultimately you want to create your own groups of hashtags that relate to your specific account.
Pro Tip # 1: For every product and product category in your store, research the most popular related hashtags on Instagram. Based on this research, compile a list of 15 to 20 popular hashtags for each product category, as well as a base of five to ten popular tags that describe your brand and product offering. Finally, create a list of location-specific hashtags that relate to your brand.
For example:
Brand Keywords: Hashtags
mybrandname #mensfashion #mensaccessories #mensgoods #fashion #mensstyle #instafashion #menswear
Product Category Hashtag Keywords
bugatchisocks #happysocks #corgisocks #socks #sockswag #socksoftheday #sockgame #sockswagg #socksofinstagram #happysockday #sockwars #funsocks #happysockday
Location-Specific Keyword Hashtags
Toronto #TorontoFashion #TorontoFashionBloggers
Save these hashtag keyword groups in a convenient place, such as Evernote or Google Drive. This way you can easily post a new image on Instagram on the go, optimized for the most relevant keywords. Some Instagram scheduling tools also allow you to save caption templates for storing hashtag groups.
If you put in the work upfront to research, organize, and save the most usable and popular hashtags, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, increase your engagement, and gain new followers.
Pro Tip #2: If you’ve been posting on Instagram for a while and feel like you’ve missed all these opportunities to build your audience using keyword hashtags, don’t worry. You can still go back and post a comment with new hashtag keyword lists and watch the likes and followers come pouring in.
Using Hashtags in Instagram Stories
Tagging posts on Instagram with hashtags is a given, but you should also use hashtags in your Stories to have a chance of being seen by users who follow that hashtag.
You can use hashtag stickers (which you can find in Instagram’s Stickers menu when creating a story) or simply add hashtags directly in post captions to have a chance of appearing in the hashtag story.
Now that users can follow hashtags, your Instagram Stories have a chance of being seen by both people who follow that hashtag and anyone who is currently browsing it.
9. Post at the right time
In addition to adding relevant hashtags and using the best filters to gain more followers on Instagram, you should also consider the timing of your posts.
A targeted approach involves analyzing what has worked for you in the past and what hasn’t. By visiting the optimization section on the IconoSquare website, you can get a detailed analysis of your posting history compared to engagement. This report will also highlight the best times of day and days of the week to post.
Dark circles indicate when you typically post media. Light gray circles show when your community engages. The largest light gray circles represent the best times for you to post.
You can also get a lot of great information for free from Instagram analytics for business accounts, which you can find in the Followers section.
You may want to consider using a social media scheduling tool so you can automatically publish posts when your audience is most engaged.
10. Steal your competitors’ followers
One of the best ways to find and attract new followers is to search for your closest competitors’ Instagram accounts and engage with their audience. These people have already shown some interest in the products you offer simply by following your competitors.
So how do you effectively steal a competitor’s followers? By engaging with them. There are several ways to interact with Instagram users, and the more effort you put in, the more followers and repeat engagement you’ll get out of it.
There are three types of engagement on Instagram:
- Following a user
- Liking a photo
- Commenting on a photo
Don’t be afraid to use an emoji or two to add some personality to your text.
11. Paying for sponsored posts and product reviews
All those optimized posts on your account are great, but if you really want to grow your Instagram following, you need to leverage influencer marketing and expose your brand to a wider audience.
So how do you do it? First of all, unlike the Instagram follower growth tactics mentioned above, this one usually isn’t free. However, if done correctly, it offers good value.
To get started, you’ll need to build a list of large accounts in your industry. For example, if you sell beauty products, you’ll want to find large beauty blogger accounts.
You may already be following these accounts, but if not, you’ll need to find them. One of the best ways is to use Webstagram and search for some of the top hashtag keywords you’ve identified. When you search for keywords, you’ll see all related keywords along with the top Instagram accounts featuring those keywords.
There are a few things to look for in the profile results:
- A large number of followers (typically 20,000 to 200,000).
- An email address in the profile
If an email address is listed in the profile, it usually means the account is open to sponsored posts or shoutouts in a sponsored story.
You will want to send an email and ask about their prices for sponsored posts. This varies from influencer to influencer, but you will likely find that the average rate ranges from $20 to $50 per post depending on the size of their following.
If you sell a unique and original product, you can also consider sending your product for the influencer to review and publish. Generally, the more natural and less promotional the image, the greater the engagement and response.
To gain more Instagram followers, you don’t necessarily need influencers with a huge number of followers, but rather those who have a high engagement rate (likes and comments relative to follower count), which many influencer marketplaces can provide you with.
12. Use Geotags for Increased Local Discovery
In addition to hashtags, you can also make your Instagram posts and Stories more discoverable by tagging your location — either the city you’re in or the place where the photo or video was taken.
Locations not only have their own Instagram feed, but also their own Story and hashtags, which you can contribute to when you use the location sticker in your own Stories.
Local businesses can make the most of location tags by regularly contributing to these feeds and also engaging with posts from potential customers who are physically located nearby.
13. Organize Your Stories into Highlights
Whenever a potential follower lands on your business profile, you have a short amount of time to convince them to follow you.
One way to do this is to use the Highlights feature on your profile and organize your Instagram Stories to communicate what your account is about.
Since Stories have a 24-hour lifespan, you can use the Highlights feature to give them a second life and entice others to follow you so they don’t miss out on future Stories.
Use Story Highlights to grow your Instagram followers:
- Creating teasers that hint at what your account is about.
- Organizing stories into themes (for example, countries you’ve visited for travel accounts).
- Explaining your products using images and videos
14. Ask for More Followers
It sounds obvious, but it deserves to be said: Don’t be afraid to occasionally ask your target audience to follow you.
Just like YouTubers ask their viewers to subscribe at the end of their videos, you too can ask viewers to follow you for more content.
Sometimes people might really like what you post on Instagram but need a nudge before they actually start following you.
You can also do this in Instagram captions: work it into your content by teasing viewers with what they’ll get when they follow you, or hinting at upcoming content they won’t want to miss.
15. Run a Contest
One of the best comments you can get on any social media post, not just on Instagram, is when one user tags a friend. Not only do these comments contribute to your post’s engagement, which in turn makes it favorable to the Instagram algorithm, but each tag brings you a new audience member who came through a recommendation and whom you can potentially gain as a follower.
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One way to encourage this behavior is to post relatable content that calls for one-on-one sharing (e.g., a gym meme that challenges you to tag a friend who skips leg day). A more reliable method, however, is to run a giveaway that encourages your audience to tag a friend and follow your account.
Follow Instagram’s promotion guidelines and any legal requirements for running a contest on Instagram that apply in your country.
For inspiration, here is an example of a successful product giveaway from Philip Kingsley, which motivates people to follow their account and tag a friend for a chance to win a collection.
16. Sharing User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is any type of content — such as videos, photos, reviews, audio recordings, and more — created by your fans or followers. It is an essential tool in your marketing arsenal for gaining Instagram followers. UGC helps humanize your brand by featuring real people with real stories showing your product in real life, and it builds a more trustworthy relationship with potential customers.
Not only will your audience love their 15 minutes of fame on your Instagram channel, but featuring them also helps boost sales in your online store. According to research by Olapic, consumers today are 56% more likely to buy something after seeing a product photo shared by customers.
Take Fashion Nova as an example. This online retailer’s Instagram account relies heavily on user-generated content.
Thanks to user-generated content, Fashion Nova has access to thousands of photos from people around the world that it can share with its target audience — photos that both showcase the brand’s values and inspire its followers to engage with its posts and purchase clothing worn by real people.
When it comes to creating user-generated content for your online store, start by asking customers to share their favorite experiences and images with your products by:
- Creating a branded hashtag channel where customers can post images.
- Adding a call to action to your Instagram bio
- Running a contest
- Reaching out to influencers
- Adding a UGC “request” to your packaging
Remember that the goal of UGC is to show an authentic perspective on your products. If some customers send you lower-quality photos that nonetheless highlight the best features of your products, don’t be afraid to use them.
17. Using Instagram Live
Live video is key to a successful marketing strategy on any social media platform. On Instagram, you can use Instagram Live to broadcast videos to your followers and interact with them in real time.
When your brand starts a live video stream, a ring closes around your profile picture in the Instagram Stories app, notifying followers that they can tune in. Followers will also receive a notification when you start a live video. Once the live broadcast is complete, you can upload it to your Story for 24 hours.
Remember that Instagram Live is interactive. Your followers will likely comment during the live broadcast, so try to acknowledge their comments and find ways to get them involved.
Ways to gain more followers when using Instagram Live include:
- Influencer takeovers
- Hosting AMAs (Ask Me Anything) or Q&As
- Announcing a product launch or update
- Hosting a talk show
- Behind-the-scenes glimpses of your business
- Sharing a current event
- Running product tutorials
Creating an Instagram Growth Strategy to Gain Followers
Growing your Instagram followers isn’t always just a numbers game. As with other social networks, authenticity and a social approach are the most successful content strategies.
If you focus on engagement rather than just follower count, Instagram can be a great home for your products and brand, and can lead to a healthy revenue stream for your online store. For more tips on making this social media platform a profitable channel, check out our guide on how to make money on Instagram.
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Michal Záruba je specialista na digitální marketing a konzultant v oblasti sociálních médií a SEO. Více než 8 let pomáhá značkám růst online prostřednictvím strategického obsahu, optimalizace pro vyhledávače a efektivní komunikace na platformách jako LinkedIn, Instagram a YouTube.
Na svém blogu sdílí praktické tipy o tom, jak propojit SEO, sociální sítě a brand building do jedné funkční strategie. Zaměřuje se na to, jak firmy mohou využít moderní nástroje a algoritmy k tomu, aby jejich značka nezískala jen dosah, ale i důvěru.
Když zrovna netvoří obsah, přednáší o digitálním marketingu, školí týmy a sleduje nové trendy v AI a vyhledávání.