Your followers are the ones boosting your profile, liking your pictures, and giving your profile credibility.
The more followers you get, the more you need to engage with them.
Doing this is an extremely simple way of organically building relationships with your audience and supporting them in remembering who you are. It also shows potential followers that you care and that if they support you that you will be genuinely interested in developing a relationship back with them.
One obvious way to engage with followers is to comment back whenever they comment on your content. You should also search your brand’s specific hashtag if you have one and like and comment on anyone who posts specifically about your brand. These particular people are going out of their way to share your brand, so rewarding them with attention and interaction is a great way to show your gratitude and thank them for their support.
You should also spend some time each day scrolling popular hashtags that are relevant to your business. Liking and, more importantly, commenting on other peoples’ posts is a great way to get seen and increase the number of people paying attention to your page. It is important that you use genuine comments in this situation. Many businesses have come under fire recently for using pre-canned, generic “We love your page! Check ours out, too!” type comments that are seen as inauthentic and ingenuine by their audience. This gives your brand a spammy feel and can actually take away from the relationships you are building with your audience.
Instagram stories, Instagram live, and IGTV are three other features that give you a great opportunity to interact with your audience in a more live-in-the-flesh manner. Stories are always a great way to offer interesting, behind-the-scenes snippets of your day to your audience so that they can feel as though they are seeing into your life and genuinely building a relationship with you.
If you run a brand that is identified on its own, you can focus the story on your employees and the goings on at your store or company. Instagram stories also offer a unique feature to those with 10,000+ followers that allow you to attach links directly to your story. This means that you can advertise for a new product, service, blog post, or otherwise directly in your story and then inform watchers to “swipe up” to access the link and visit your link to purchase or further engage with your brand. This can be accessed by tapping the chain link icon in the top right corner of the screen when making stories and putting the link into the space provided. Again, this feature is only available to those with more than ten thousand followers. And we can help you reaching the 10K Instagram Followers!
Instagram live is a great way to offer live Q&A sessions, introductions, information, and other valuable, interesting, or entertaining tidbits to your audience in a way that allows you to directly communicate back and forth. Because it features your face and voice live on a video, it creates a more personalized and intimate connection between you and your audience.
IGTV is another great feature that was recently included. This particular feature works much like live but stays in the IGTV feed for 24 hours following your upload. It allows you to stay live for much longer, do more, and have a more professional look to your page. This is great for sharing tutorials, updating people on important happenings in your business, educating them, and otherwise sharing video-based marketing information in a more professional and new age manner.
Building A Strong Instagram Audience
Building your following on Instagram is generally the objective, but you want to make sure that you are building a strong, engaged, and large following as you go. The best way to do this is to take all of the tips provided in this post and practice them alongside consistency.
With Instagram, consistency is key. If you are not consistent in volume or quality, you will rapidly lose followers. You need to remain consistent in posting, engaging, and professional high-quality imagery if you are going to continue building your audience.
You should also keep your hashtag list relevant and up-to-date and regularly check for trending hashtags in your community that you can jump on board with to benefit off of.
As long as you remain consistent, your audience will continue to grow and before you know it your page will be massive. Then, your Instagram sales channel will begin to grow and before you know it you will be earning a killing through your Instagram feed.