What can you do — except become jealous — when you log onto Instagram and see accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers while you’ve been unable to accumulate more than 50 of your own?
You can check out our top tips and hacks for becoming more popular, important, and influential on the social media platform — and get to work. Before you start your Instagram journey, though, you should know a few things about Instagram followers and how they’re acquired.
- Even though there are several billion Instagram users, increasing your follower count isn’t as simple as it might seem. More than 100 million videos and photos are uploaded every day, and exposure is at a premium. You might be creating terrific, high-quality content, but hardly anyone will ever see it and have the opportunity to follow you.
- Audiences are awarded by the Instagram algorithms based on an account’s popularity. The more followers you have the more exposure your content will receive, and the greater chance you have at building an impressive following.
- It’s extremely difficult to find new followers manually. You can find like-minded individuals on the app and see if they’ll follow you, attract viewers by using relevant hashtags on your Instagram posts, or cross-promote your content on other social platforms. It can take forever to do that, and you’ll only pick up a few followers one by one.
- The alternative is purchasing real Instagram followers from a reputable social media marketing service. When they arrive in your account, they send a signal to the algorithms that you’re quickly building popularity and your content deserves greater visibility. The larger audiences you receive give you the best odds of quickly adding tons of new organic followers who enjoy your videos and want to see more of them.
It’s a personal decision about which approach you want to take, manual building or buying followers. To help with that decision, here’s a comprehensive tutorial to help you boost your Instagram follower count.
The Fastest and Most Effective Choice: Purchasing Followers
Powerful IG users often have millions of followers. You can probably imagine how long it would take to build that sort of fan base if you relied solely on manual methods to pick up a few followers at a time.
That’s why many people who dream of popularity and importance as they use Instagram decide to buy followers.
We’re not talking about purchasing millions of followers, of course. The drastically smaller packages of followers you can buy simply jumpstart your Instagram growth by boosting a system metric called “follower growth.” The algorithms use that metric to identify accounts that are quickly increasing in popularity and give those accounts much larger audiences.
And widespread visibility is what you need to quickly bring in large numbers of new followers. As new users see your Instagram content, they have their first opportunity to watch it, enjoy it, and decide that your account is worth a follow. Assuming you’ve created enticing, terrific videos and photos, this approach is the fastest way to build a follower count and organic engagement.
Be careful, though. If you find a vendor by searching online or clicking on an ad, you’re likely to find a disreputable scammer instead of a trustworthy Instagram marketing service.
The scammers sell what are known in the industry as “fake followers” generated with bots, and they don’t fool IG’s algorithms. Fake interactions are removed almost immediately, they don’t generate any extra exposure or growth, and accounts using fake followers are often quickly deleted.
What’s the alternative? Purchasing genuine followers, who are real people with real Instagram accounts sourced and delivered by trustworthy social media management services. It can be hard to know whether a website sells legitimate IG followers since scammers are likely to lie about their interactions, so here’s a list of the three best Instagram providers to get you started.
1. Buzzoid: This company has built an enormous client base since it began providing high-quality, real followers and other engagements back in 2012. Buzzoid is regularly ranked as the best choice for Instagram followers not only because of their quality, but also because of the service, support, and growth they deliver.
2. Twicsy: Experts who don’t consider Buzzoid the #1 Instagram provider always put Twicsy in the top spot. With the same level of expertise, quality, and service, this company is reputable and relied upon by countless power users for impressive organic follower growth.
3. Rushmax: Rushmax has only half the experience of Buzzoid and Twicsy, but you wouldn’t know it from the outstanding followers, service, and results they supply to their growing customer base. They’re a terrific alternative to the two top-rated choices.
We have one more caution. Simply purchasing followers isn’t enough to send your popularity climbing; you also have to be sure your account and video content are as “welcoming” as possible. After all, just putting your posts in front of new viewers is no guarantee that the users will want to watch, will like what they see, or will hit “follow” to see the new content you create.
We’ll be detailing the specifics throughout this list of tips. Most of them, like optimizing your account and focusing on just one type of content, are the same social media strategies required to manually build followers for any social account whether it’s on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
So whether you want to buy followers or prefer to take the manual approach, keep reading.
Do Your Housekeeping
We just mentioned that it’s crucial to “welcome your visitors” if you want to convince them to follow you, and one way to do it is to optimize your IG profile.
Create a Great Instagram Bio
Before deciding whether an account is worth following, many users check out the account’s profile page to learn more about the person or company. This is where you can put your best foot forward.
In 150 characters or less, write a description of who you are and the type of content you post. (We’ll discuss your content strategy shortly.) The primary goal is to present yourself and your account straightforwardly, while still showing a little of your personality or sense of humor to make your account even more enticing to potential followers.
It’s also smart, if possible, to include one or two SEO keywords that relate to the topic of your content. That can make it easier for like-minded Instagram searchers to find your account.
Don’t forget to include links to other websites or link trees, if you have them, along with a call to action (CTA). If you have more than one site, plenty of templates are available that let you list them all.
Use a High-Quality Profile Picture
You want your Instagram profile and account to look as trustworthy and authoritative as possible. Using the best professional photo or high-quality graphics as your profile picture gives visitors the sense that they’re dealing with someone serious about their IG presence.
Pro tip: If you qualify for Instagram verification, go for it. The “verified” badge can provide the extra nudge potential followers need.
Consider a New Username
Many people are attached to their username and may also use it on other platforms or websites. Modifying it to align with the type of content you post, however, can give you another advantage when you’re trying to put your account in front of Instagram searchers who would be interested in your videos and photos.
For instance, JoeMc973 may never pop up in an IG search for “classic cars” — but an account owned by ClassicCarJoe might see a surge of new visitors interested in his content.
Develop an Instagram Strategy
The first decision you make will be the most important, of course: whether to purchase real followers from a trustworthy provider or seek out new followers manually.
Almost as important, though, is choosing a content niche. Here’s why that’s necessary.
Picking a Subject For Your Content
Most Instagram users aren’t interested in seeing random assortments of photos and videos posted by people they don’t know. They’re looking for accounts that cater to their particular interests. Focus on a single topic and create all (or almost all) of your content about that subject, and you’ll stand a much greater chance of attracting a large and receptive target audience.
(If you want to appeal to a specific demographic group, you can tailor your content any way you’d like, with the help of metrics available in the Instagram analytics section of your account.)
Creating Your Content
After choosing your niche, create and upload a good-sized library of videos and/or photos before you go searching for followers. Otherwise, potential followers looking at your account may be disappointed when they only see a couple of vids, and they’re likely to decide that following you isn’t worth their time.
Be sure to spend plenty of time and effort planning, writing, and producing the highest-quality and most compelling photos and videos possible. You’re facing enormous competition for followers, and if visitors see a video that’s out-of-focus, disjointed, or uninteresting, they won’t stick around to watch anything else you create.
Labelling Your Content
People scrolling through feeds won’t know how great your video is unless you tell them. It’s essential to spend time crafting an Instagram caption that entices them to stop and watch; intriguing, mysterious, or funny captions have been found to work best.
Don’t forget to use hashtags, either — but choose them carefully. Specific hashtags that describe your video will help convert surfers into viewers, trending hashtags found on the Explore page (if they’re related to your content) may bring in new viewers interested in what’s hot, and relevant hashtags can attract IG searchers looking for vids that focus on their interests.
Scheduling Your Content
Insta users often neglect an important element of an ideal IG content marketing strategy: creating and sticking to a posting schedule. If you don’t regularly upload new material, your existing followers may get bored and unfollow you — and you’ll be back where you started.
A schedule based on the times when most of your fans are online (you can find that information in Analytics, too) will let them quickly see the new content you’ve posted, and keep them happy.
How To Go Out and Find New Followers
Readers who aren’t interested in purchasing real followers for their account may be unsure where to go from here. Here are the strategies often used by influencer marketing firms to get small accounts seen by lots of potential followers, and to then get them on the road to Instagram popularity.
- Repurpose content to be posted in all of the Gram’s formats. The Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels sections attract enormous numbers of viewers, and creating smaller versions of your best videos for those sections of the app can expand your audience dramatically.
- Upload your videos and photos in carousels instead of individual posts. The posts in your feed that let you scroll through multiple pieces of content are called a carousel. You can create them easily when you upload, and they’re the most-viewed type of IG post.
- Create highlights: These clip montages stay on your profile page. They can give visitors a great look at the type of content you create and a good reason to follow you.
- Cross-promote your Instagram content on other social media apps: Feature clips of your best content on your other social accounts with a link to your IG profile. You might “drag” new followers right to the Gram.
- Interact with visitors and followers: Spend time responding to comments on your posts (and DMs you receive). A response may entice casual viewers to follow you and existing followers to become more involved with your account. You can also accomplish the latter goal by hosting real-time IG Live chats. Run giveaways or contests to get people to create and submit user-generated content (UGC) that you can repost. Pursue collaborations with influencers or with your own followers to expand your visibility on the platform. Those techniques will also boost your content’s engagement rates, convincing the algorithms to expand the size of your posts’ audiences.
- Look for other ways to attract followers: The only limit is your imagination. You can even go as far as running Instagram ads featuring your content niche to bring in new viewers; every little bit helps!
Don’t be shocked if these approaches don’t send your follower count skyrocketing. Experienced users and Instagram growth professionals will tell you that manually seeking new followers is a long haul and isn’t as effective as buying packages of real followers.
However you boost your fan base on the app, though, your efforts will lead to increased Instagram popularity, influence, and importance. And that’s worth the investment of work, time, and/or money it requires.
By Chris Bates
