How to Get Followers on Instagram?
How to get followers on Instagram? When you’re just starting out with an online business, it can be exciting to imagine how you can successfully sell your product through Instagram … once you build a following.
But the truth is, the first 10,000 followers on Instagram are the hardest to get. Why? No one knows who you are yet.
You still have to prove yourself as a successful brand and influencer. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
If you follow this guide on how to get followers on Instagram, you can reach 10,000 Instagram followers in just six months. No jokes or tricks!
Read on to learn how to grow your Instagram followers in 2021. And if you want to create a killer Instagram strategy, be sure to check out our latest Instagram course.
How to Get More Followers on Instagram
1. Get Instagram Followers by Joining Engagement Groups
Ever wondered what people who quickly gain Instagram followers do differently?
They join engagement groups (aka Instagram pods).
While it can be tempting to join the largest Instagram engagement groups, the truth is that if you stick to your niche, you’ll get a more targeted list of Instagram followers.
This tactic is best for entrepreneurs who are just beginning to learn how to get followers on Instagram.
You’ll find engagement groups for travel, beauty, fashion, and more.
In these groups, you can gain followers and likes from people who share common interests.
If you’re serious about capturing their attention, you should return that favor by following fan pages for people who joined the group.
I gained 2,000 new followers in 2 weeks through this strategy with friends.
While it may not help with immediate sales, it will help you gain credibility over time, so your Instagram page doesn’t show that you only have a handful of followers.
Remember, this is a short-term strategy for the first couple of weeks on Instagram, not a long-term strategy for gaining loyal Instagram followers.
2. Repost Others’ Content to Get Free Instagram Followers
When I started with social media marketing and building Instagram for my business, my entire posting strategy revolved around reposting content from other people.
In doing so, I made sure to credit the original poster in my captions every time. It’s the only way to get free followers without being flagged.
When I first started, I took screenshots and added images to my Instagram. What really helped my page take off was the Repost app. It allowed me to start reposting video content on Instagram.
One of the biggest home runs I had was when I reposted a video that accumulated 52,862 views, got 1,264 comments, and 9,147 likes. At that time, I didn’t even have 10,000 followers, so it was a big deal. The best part? I didn’t run any ads or anything. I got Instagram followers for free.
Because I knew it was easier to repost content. Besides, my visual and video content would never be as good as someone else’s. Hey, at least I’m being honest about it!
How did I know what to repost? I looked at the numbers.
Hashtags are a great way to get new followers. On Instagram, I was quite active, so I went through the list of hashtags I came up with and every day I used them to find the best performing posts that weren’t being reposted by other fan pages (meaning not my competitors), but by individual people.
I watched videos and browsed images to figure out which ones I had the biggest reaction to. If I felt the urge to share someone else’s post, I knew I had to repost it on my page.
So if you’re just learning how to gain followers on Instagram, this highly effective strategy is quite simple for a beginner.
Important: Instagram has now updated its policies and you must request permission before reposting.
3. Get featured on BuzzFeed and grow your Instagram followers
To increase those who follow you on Instagram, you need to find a way to penetrate a huge audience. And no one features Instagram posts in their content quite like BuzzFeed.
A BuzzFeed employee wrote an article about how she built her personal brand as an Instagram influencer. She currently has nearly 10,400 followers, but the article she posted on the platform could have helped her.
So if you want to experiment with BuzzFeed, go to the Community section, where anyone can add their own content to the platform.
Of course, you’ll need to follow their guidelines to gain visibility and build trust.
Is BuzzFeed not suitable for your niche? That’s cool. You can also use a tool called HARO, where you’ll receive emails three times a day filled with requests from reporters looking for content and expert quotes for their stories.
Most HARO reporters allow website links and social links. So you can kill two birds with one stone by including a link to your store and Instagram account.
4. Ask customers to share their photos
When you’re just starting out, gaining followers on Instagram will be much easier thanks to customer photos on your channel. Why? It helps increase social proof.
If you’ve never had a customer before, reach out to influencers in your space with fewer than 5,000 followers. I know that number seems low, but influencers with a few followers on Instagram want to monetize their accounts and will be willing to shoot with your products at a much lower rate.
You can also offer them an affiliate agreement where they receive a commission for each sale they score with a customer referral link.
If you’ve already had a few sales, reach out to customers and offer them a free gift or cash incentive to take quality images with the product they purchased.
Offering incentives won’t be your long-term strategy, but in the short term it will help you grow.
As more customers begin to see customer photos on your Instagram, they will naturally start tagging you in posts once they receive their products.
In short, if you comment on customer posts, repost their content, and follow them, you’ll likely get them to follow you back.
However, some will follow you after they tag you in their post themselves. Let word of mouth do the work!
5. Gain Instagram followers by having a consistent style
I know that sounds like one of those “blah, blah, blah” ways to gain followers on Instagram. But it’s not.
Reason: People don’t follow you because of the content you’ve posted, but because of what they think the future content you post will look like.
Let’s say you have a corgi fan page, and you flawlessly post cute images and videos every day.
If Instagram users continue to see your posts, they’ll eventually realize that you always post the cutest corgi content.
So they follow you with the expectation that your account will always have more of the same type of content.
A consistent style or theme isn’t just a branding game, it’s about creating expectations for your Instagram account that your followers or potential followers can rely on. They want to see more of the same type of content every day.
If you can maintain this consistency with each post, you’ll quickly gain Instagram followers while also building trust in your brand.
6. Use Hashtags to Get Followers on Instagram
Many experts will tell you to use only 5 or 11 hashtags or some other arbitrary number. But when I was building my store’s Instagram account, I ignored their advice and went wild with them.
I’d copy and paste a list of hashtags from my phone into the app. Then I’d sometimes switch it up and try different hashtags. And eventually I figured out which ones were right for my brand.
Usually I’d go as close as possible or right up to the maximum possible number of hashtags – 30. That’s the magic number.
The truth is, you add all these hashtags in the first comment. And as your engagement on the page grows, nobody will ever see the first comment because it gets too cluttered with people tagging their friends in your post.
Sure, when you’re starting out, people might see it. But if the goal is to increase visibility, the easiest way to do that is to add more hashtags. As you gain followers, your posts will rank higher for those hashtag keywords, which will give you even more visibility.
If your hashtags are niche-specific, you’ll increase the chance that relevant audiences find you, which will help you grow your followers on Instagram as well.
For example, if you sell fashion, avoid generic hashtags like #love or #picoftheday.
7. Use Location Tags to Get Followers from Your Area
Did you know that you can make your Instagram stories and posts discoverable by tagging your location? A “location tag” reveals the city you’re in or the place where the video or image was captured. Plus, it allows your posts to be categorized with all other content tagged for that specific area.
So if you’re a local business, you can use these location tags to make it easier for people to find and follow your Instagram account. Places also have their own distinct feed, story, and hashtags – you can contribute to them by using a location tag in your own stories.
8. Embed Your IG Feed on Your Blog to Grow Instagram Followers
If you have your own personal or business blog, you can embed your Instagram photos on your website. Don’t forget to follow Oberlo on Instagram while you’re at it!
Let’s say you have a blog about fashion accessories. You could write a blog post about the best accessories men should include in their fashion list. You can select posts from Instagram that feature individual images of your products or curated visuals of items that pair well together.
Then you go to Instagram on the desktop, navigate to your page, click on the post, click the “…” icon, and click Embed. Then you copy this link into the code section of your blog post
Over time, more people will visit your blog and will likely check out your Instagram account as well.
I know this is more of a long-term game. Especially if you’re not getting traffic today. But adding your Instagram posts from the start gives you a better chance at visibility.
Start doing this and after six months you should really start seeing huge returns.
9. Follow People Who Like Competing Instagram Pages
To increase your Instagram followers, you need to find people who follow brands.
Who are your biggest competitors on Instagram? Make a note of them. Then go through their posts and see who is commenting on their posts. Follow them and engage with them.
Remember that when selecting competition on Instagram, it’s better to go after smaller brands.
Why? Because if you’re selling makeup brushes and trying to capture people who comment on Sephora, there’s a good chance they’re not the right audience, even though they’re in a similar niche. Larger brands tend to have greater customer loyalty.
However, if you have a competitor who has 100,000 followers on their account, this brand may not be as loyal.
When commenting on posts from those you follow, try not to sound salesy
And never use the same comment for every person you message.
If they ask a question on your post, reply to them.
You can also look at the types of comments that others are posting for ideas and inspiration.
By continuously following people and communicating with them, you’ll start to organically build Instagram followers.
10. Work with influencers to get more followers for your profile
Another way to increase your Instagram followers is to get an Instagram shoutout from an influencer taking over the account.
If an influencer has loyal fans, they can give you a shoutout that will lead to new followers on your account and possibly a few sales.
Be sure to write a contract that prohibits the influencer from sending fake traffic.
Once we worked with an influencer who gave us a shoutout and the result was 2,000 inactive Instagram followers on our account. It was clear she used a bot.
When a sudden influx of fake followers appears on Instagram, you risk having your account banned. No one wants that.
If you’re looking for a way to gain real Instagram followers, ask the influencer you’re working with to take over the account in your Instagram Stories. This way, people will have to follow your page to view the story. Be sure to ask them to inform their audience a few days in advance.
11. Host giveaways to build your Instagram followers
Another effective way to gain followers on Instagram is through giveaways.
If you host giveaways on your website and give visitors the opportunity to follow you on Instagram and other social networks, you’ll have much greater reach.
If your audience is small, you can post your giveaways in certain Facebook groups. Spreading the word about your promotion could also help expand to blogs.
When I first started working in marketing, I would reach out to giveaway blogs. For a review post, I would send them some free products.
Most of them agreed to the free product, though some also requested payment. They would write a product review full of images and their experience with the product.
Eventually their audience would come in to win the product on the condition that we send the product to the customer. The result? Hundreds of new followers across all our social accounts.
It’s a great way to get new IG followers if you don’t have an audience. But it may not be as targeted as if you hosted giveaways on a relevant specialized blog.
If you’re just starting out, giveaways can help you get more Instagram followers. However, if you do them too often, you may not reach the type of audience you want.
If your goal is to get sales, giveaways may not necessarily help you get more of them. However, if you’re just looking for a quick way to gain Instagram followers, this strategy can work quite well.
12. Organically grow your Instagram following through partnerships
If you’re just learning how to gain followers on Instagram, it may be best to form a partnership with another brand. It can be a quick way to organically expand your follower base.
A trick I learned while working on my case study was to take my own product photos. Instead of other people reposting content, other brands would repost one of my photos and credit me. One of them had nearly 300,000 followers, so I eventually gained several new Instagram followers from their audience.
I didn’t have to do any direct work other than taking my own photos. I didn’t even have to reach out to gain new Instagram followers. They reached out to me. And they weren’t the only brand that did so.
13. Create Instagram Guides That Attract New Followers to Your Account
Instagram Guides are a new way to share educational and entertaining content with your followers. The content format provides users with an easier way to leverage useful tips and recommendations. In an IG guide, you can add an introduction, title, text, headlines, and even videos and images (that you’ve posted in your feed).
To get started, click the plus symbol in the top right corner of your Instagram profile, choose Guides, and tap the appropriate option
Instagram allows users to share guides in DMs and across stories, so if you manage to publish several high-quality guides, those who see them will naturally be inclined to share them with their social circle.
And because Instagram’s algorithm favors posts with high engagement, if many people end up sharing your guide, it could even appear in more people’s feeds. As a result, you can potentially gain a lot of new followers by creating Instagram Guides.
14. Use Instagram Analytics Tools to Gain More Instagram Followers
Instagram analytics can provide you with insights about your followers, but there are many free tools on the market that can give you more interesting information.
Things like engagement rate, new followers, Instagram followers, and inactive accounts can give you insights that will influence how you gain more Instagram followers.
The best Instagram analytics tools on the market right now include:
All of these Instagram analytics tools provide valid and highly informative information that will help you better understand your audience.
And they can also highlight the right content you can use to increase your Instagram followers.
How to Get Followers on Instagram – Summary
Finding out how to get followers on Instagram is the hardest at the beginning.
Once you cross your first 10,000 followers, you’ll need to continue using some or all of the strategies listed in this article to keep your account growing to 100,000 or even more than one million.
Remember to regularly update your profile, especially your Instagram bio, to include new calls to action or interesting news.
At the end of the day, you’ll need to put in more effort than you ever have.
Maybe posting Instagram posts three times a day every day of the week is hard to fit into your schedule, but in the end, all this effort will pay off. And you’ll have an Instagram you can be proud of.
Find more Instagram tools here >>
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.