6 Tips To Take Your Instagram User Growth To The Next Level

Are you looking to take your Instagram user growth to the next level? Instagram is a great marketing platform for brands. It can help you increase both brand awareness and overall revenue. But to see results, your account needs to continue growing over time — and sometimes, Instagram growth can be trickier than you think.

Luckily, you can grow your account on Instagram with a few key strategies. Here are six tips that can take your Instagram user growth to the next level and keep it there, bringing you more and more followers over time. 

1. Optimize Your Profile

First things first: To increase your Instagram user growth, you need to make sure your profile is optimized to attract new followers. When somebody visits your profile, they’re more likely to follow if your profile explains who you are. It needs to be comprehensive and accurate in information and also be visually attractive, enticing people to tap the “Follow” button. Let’s break down Pottery Barn’s Instagram profile as an example of best practices.

Profile Picture

Your Instagram profile photo should represent your brand. Use your brand’s colors and/or logo to provide visual identification. If applicable, you could also set your profile picture as a picture of a person’s face. Pottery Barn chose a simple black-and-white logo that stands out and helps you recognize the brand.

Username

When you’re choosing a username on Instagram, go for the name that’s as close to your business name as possible. Pottery Barn kept it simple with @potterybarn. If that username wasn’t available, however, the company could have tried something like @pottery.barn or @pottery_barn instead. While different, these usernames are still easily readable, and that’s the key.

Bio

Use the space in your bio to explain who you are and what you do. Pottery Barn artfully described who they are and what they sell in just a couple of sentences. They even had space to solicit user-generated content: “share + tag @potterybarn.”

Link In Bio

Instagram only lets you have one link in your bio. That’s not a lot of space to promote your business. Get around this issue by using a link in a bio tool such as Url.bio. With a link in bio tool, you can share multiple links for your followers in just one URL. You can share a landing page with different links or, like Pottery Barn does, create a shoppable grid. This is a great way to grow your business through Instagram marketing. 

Highlights

Finally, don’t forget to save your Instagram Stories to your profile through highlights. Stories are only available for 24 hours unless you save them to your profile. Saving your Stories adds extra content for your followers to enjoy. Pottery Barn has several neatly organized Highlights for Instagram users to tap through.

2. Utilize Cross-Promotion

Cross-promoting your Instagram account on other channels is a smart method for growing your Instagram followers. Promote your Instagram on all of your other social media platforms; being vocal about your Instagram account is the best way to get more people to follow it. You can share your Instagram posts on any of your other social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.

It’s also essential to include easy access to your Instagram profile in your email newsletters and on your website. You can create an email footer for your marketing emails that shares your social media icons. Do the same thing on your website by adding an icon that links to your Instagram profile at the bottom of each page. And in addition to adding these icons, you can directly embed Instagram posts into your emails and website, too. This will give your readers a chance to get a glimpse of your feed.

3. Run Instagram Contests and Giveaways 

Instagram contests and giveaways help you expose your account to new potential followers and create more engagement with the ones you already have — it’s a win-win! One statistic shows that Instagram accounts that run giveaways grow 70 times faster than accounts that don’t. And it’s just an added bonus that holding a contest or giveaway is a lot of fun. 

There are a few different types of contests you can hold. Some of the most effective are:

• Photo caption contest
• Tag a friend
• User-generated content contest
• Instagram Stories contest
• Scavenger hunt 

These types of contests help grow your account. Many contests require that your followers tag a friend, telling them directly about your account. Others are more indirect — if your followers create a post to enter your contest, their followers will probably see it and might be encouraged to check you out. 

In this post, the lifestyle knitwear company Wooden Ships hosted a giveaway for a sweater. To enter the giveaway, the company’s Instagram followers needed to follow them, like the post, sign up for their email list, and tag up to five friends — with a bonus double entry for answering the question of the day. This giveaway was an excellent way for the brand to boost engagement and gain some new followers. 

4. Partner With Influencers 

Influencer marketing is an excellent way to get more followers on Instagram. 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional Hollywood celebrities, and 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice. With stats like these, it’s no wonder that so many businesses are finding enormous success with Instagram influencer marketing. 

There are several types of influencer campaigns you can create. The simplest method of working with an influencer is to simply send them your product and have them post a photo with their review. You could also choose to give an influencer a unique promo code to share; have them run a contest on your behalf; or even let them take over your Instagram Stories for a day. The opportunities for content creation are endless. 

Here’s one good example. YouTuber Kiara Madisen regularly works with an athletic wear company, Fabletics. Kiara, who makes lifestyle and college videos, shares the latest Fabletics pieces with her 37,000 followers, giving them a special discount code. This is a great way for Fabletics to advertise its products to the exact demographic that’s likely to be interested. 

Athlete, Mallory Pugh, is another influencer who often works with different brands. Here, Mallory posted a video in partnership with Nerf, denoting that the post was an ad and using the unique hashtag #NERFSummerCamp. The video is a fun piece of content that stands out in your feed.

Influencer marketing can help you see massive Instagram user growth.

5. Reach Out To Followers 

One of the best ways to see long-term, sustained Instagram growth is to reach out to followers yourself. Expose your account to new followers by engaging with other accounts in your industry or niche. Follow these accounts and then like and comment on their posts; you can also build connections more privately through DM’s. 

A quick glance at the Sprouts Farmers Market Instagram page shows that several brands with similar goals and values, including Partake Foods and GoMacro, follow the Sprouts account and interact with its posts.

Reaching out to potential followers yourself can be beneficial. However, there’s one big drawback with this process: It sucks up a huge amount of time. That’s why you may want to use an Instagram growth service instead.

A growth service like Kicksta automates your follower growth so you can spend your time on other tasks. Kicksta does not get you fake followers or bots — Kicksta focuses on organic growth and real followers so you’ll see steady growth in both your follower count and engagement over time. Kicksta does this by using your account to interact with accounts in your target niche, reaching out to approximately 10,000 accounts per month. It’s a hugely effective way to boost your Instagram user growth. 

6. Run An Instagram Audit

One final way to improve Instagram user growth is to run an Instagram audit. Audits are a way to see where you stand currently from your marketing efforts. They can help you create benchmarks that will let you measure your progress more accurately in the future. 

Running an Instagram audit isn’t as difficult as you might think. You can do it yourself in a few simple steps. Start by setting some goals — what do you want to accomplish through Instagram marketing? Be specific with your answer. When you’ve determined the goals you want to measure, evaluate your Instagram account, making sure your overall Instagram branding is consistent with your brand personality on other social media platforms.

The next step is to take a more in-depth look at the elements of your Instagram profile, including your bio and individual posts. Analyze your hashtag strategy, too. Finally, look through your page to make sure you’re interacting with your followers as much as possible. Evaluating your Instagram profile every few months based on this criteria can help you ensure you’re getting the most out of your Instagram marketing.

Boost Your Instagram User Growth

With these growth hacks, Instagram marketing doesn’t have to be a puzzle. You can see steady growth by using strategies like influencer marketing, working with an Instagram growth service, and running regular audits of your account. Use these methods and sit back, relax, and watch your Instagram followers grow.