Achieving consistent, sustainable Instagram user growth is crucial to developing a valuable community for your business or brand. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, surpassing the 2 billion user mark as of December 2021.
Instagram is also one of the best places for organizations to build genuine connections with their audience, through engaging and meaningful visual content. With a huge selection of content options to choose from and various ways to promote your profile, Instagram has it all.
Unfortunately, achieving positive organic growth isn’t always easy. There are thousands of other brands all competing for your customer’s attention at any given time, making success incredibly difficult. Fortunately, we have some tips to get you on the right track.
Benefits Of Instagram User Growth For Your Ecommerce Business
For an ecommerce company, Instagram represents a powerful way to get eyes on your products and build interest among your target audience. As one of the top visual social media platforms, Instagram is great at forging authentic, emotional connections between you and your customer.
Some of the biggest benefits of Instagram for ecommerce brands include:
- Increased sales: Around 50% of users say they follow businesses on Instagram today, and most admit they use the platform for inspiration when figuring out what they want to buy. With Instagram, you can improve your chances of driving customers back to your website where they can buy your products. Instagram also gives you new avenues for sales, with Instagram shopping features.
- Cross-promotion for social channels: Because Instagram belongs to the larger Facebook (Meta) brand, it’s excellent for cross-channel promotion. You can run a combined Facebook and Instagram campaign to improve your chances of reaching the widest possible audience. Plus, you get to take advantage of the exceptional targeting options offered by Instagram.
- Build brand trust and authority: Instagram provides companies with a way to show their customers behind the scenes of their business. Through videos, stories, carousels, and photos, you can highlight the human side of your company, and build an affinity with your customers. Instagram is a fantastic tool for demonstrating brand personality. You can even improve your credibility, by connecting your company to well-known influencers and other brands through campaign partnerships.
What’s The Secret To Instagram User Growth?
The first thing you should know is Instagram user growth requires regular investment, time, and commitment. You won’t achieve incredible success overnight with some quick scheme. However, there are various strategies you can use to practically guarantee positive results.
The best ways to ensure Instagram user growth are:
1. Using An Instagram Growth Service
An Instagram growth service is a dedicated solution for Instagram growth, designed to help you make the most out of your social media efforts. Notably, these services aren’t just tools for buying Instagram followers, they’re solutions designed to improve your chances of capturing organic growth, by connecting your brand to the people most likely to be interested in it.
People are often reluctant to follow companies who appear “new” to the Instagram platform. The best Instagram growth service will make your business seem more credible by engaging with people interested in profiles and content similar to yours. Essentially, they go out and “like” the posts of people who follow competitors and other similar brands to draw their attention back to your page.
The key to generating the best outcomes from your Instagram growth service is investing in the right solution. Make sure you look at:
- Organic growth methods: Make sure the company you work with is using safe methods for organic growth. While “buying” followers might seem like a fast solution or growth, it can put you at risk of serious repercussions with Instagram. Plus, you need organic followers to ensure you get genuine engagement and ROI over time.
- Support teams: Check out the kind of support you’re going to get from your Instagram growth service in advance. The right provider will be ready to answer all of your questions and ensure you have everything you need to succeed on Instagram.
- Good testimonials: Positive testimonials from other companies who have used the growth service in the past will give you peace of mind you’re working with a brand you can trust. Look for reviews and star ratings on the website.
2. Building A Strong Hashtag Strategy
Hashtags are critical to the success of your Instagram user growth campaign. On Instagram, hashtags are responsible for organizing content and making it easier to find for your target audience. Hashtags allow you to improve your reach and build connections with new customers.
To improve your chances of success on Instagram, every piece of content you publish needs its own selection of carefully chosen hashtags. Usually, a strong hashtag strategy will include a variety of different hashtags, including:
- Niche tags: Specific hashtags focused on a certain segment of your target audience. For instance, instead of just using #marketing, you might use #socialmediamarketing.
- Trending tags: Trending tags are the most popular tags on Instagram and the ones that often gain the most attention on the “Explore” page. These tags can help to expand your reach. Try things like #TBT, or #Instagood.
- Location tags: Location or geotags are connected to a specific location (often where your customers are located), to help you reach nearby customers.
- Branded tags: Branded hashtags are related to your company name, product name, or something else specific to your brand, the #Lushcommunity hashtag is a great example:
You can place up to 30 hashtags in every post. Most experts believe about 9-11 tags in each post is the best way to achieve maximum engagement levels.
3. Posting Consistent, High-Quality Content
This might sound obvious, but if you want to achieve sustainable Instagram user growth, you need to give people a reason to follow your brand online. Producing high-quality content is the best way to do that. The great thing about Instagram is it gives you tons of ways to connect with your audience.
You can post everything from small video Reels to Instagram Stories. Reels are currently appearing larger than photos on the Explore page, so they could be a fantastic way to stand out. You can also improve your chances of reaching video fans with IGTV.
Start building your content strategy by checking out what competitors are posting in your industry, and what kind of posts your customers currently follow. Once you start building your Instagram posts, use editing and scheduling tools to make the most out of your campaigns, for instance:
- Photoshop: Photoshop is an excellent tool for making your content look as professional as possible on Instagram. You can use it to really make the most of your photos.
- VSCO: Ideal for editing photos and videos directly on your smartphone, VSCO can help you to create content that stands out from the crowd. There are more than 200 million posts on Instagram with the #VSCO tag today.
- Canva: Canva is great if you’re looking for a convenient way to add filters and update your Instagram content with free graphics. You don’t need any special skills for photo editing, and you can even automatically resize posts.
- Later: With later, you can automatically schedule video and photo posts to appear on Instagram just at the right time for your target audience. This improves your chances of grabbing audience engagement at the right moment to ensure conversions.
- Buffer: Buffer is another fantastic tool for Instagram scheduling, with access to in-depth analytics about your target audience, so you can figure out what kind of content they’re responding to most.
Remember, pay attention to the feedback you get from your target audience whenever you’re posting on Instagram, so you can get a sense of what kind of content they like best.
4. Prioritize Engaging Captions And Stories
Finally, one of the best things you can do to ensure user growth on Instagram is finding ways of building relationships with your target audience. While photos and videos are great on their own, they’re even more engaging when they tell a story.
Stories are one of the most popular tools on Instagram, with more than 500 accounts using the service every day. Because these pieces of content are temporary, they’re a much more exciting way to experiment with ways of reaching your target audience.
There’s also a host of fantastic tools built into Stories to help strengthen your relationship with your followers, such as:
- Q&As: Hosting a Q&A is a great way to chat to your customers and teach them everything they need to know about your products and services.
- Polls: Polls are fantastic for collecting information from your audience, such as which products they like best. They’re also great for building engagement.
- Countdowns: Stickers, countdowns, and other eye-catching pieces of content in your Stories can help you get customers excited about promotions and events.
You can even use tappable Stories on Instagram to drive customers straight from pictures on your account to your website (if you have enough followers). Don’t forget to add snippets of your Stories to your highlights to help complete your Instagram profile too.
Outside of Stories, remember captions are still a fantastic tool for generating engagement. Not only do they help you to tell your customers more information about your product, company, or promotion, but they’re great for driving action, too. A compelling CTA asking customers to visit the link in your bio will help to drive more traffic back to your website.
Achieving Instagram User Growth
Successfully building and growing your Instagram follower count is a process that takes time and focus. While there’s no quick fix to become a success on Instagram, there are various strategies you can use to improve your chances of sustainable growth over time.
Remember, when using the strategies above, keep an eye on your Instagram analytics to collect as much information as you can about the campaigns that make the most difference to your target audience. The more data you gather, the easier it’ll be to build impactful Instagram marketing campaigns in the years to come.
