The key to consistent growth on Instagram
There are multiple factors making it increasingly difficult to consistently grow on Instagram. Here’s our take on how to still deliver consistent growth without breaking the bank.
Instagram’s algorithm is making it harder and harder to grow your page without spending a lot of money on ads.
Many brands have wider PR, or a strong brand name which contributes to a lot of their growth on Instagram. Many others can spend thousands or millions on Instagram ads, meaning they will grow (to an extent) no matter how good or bad the rest of their strategy is.
Most brands, however, have hundreds (or less) in their Instagram budgets.
This, coupled with the ever-difficult algorithm, means it’s hard for many brands to see consistent growth on Instagram. If you observe some accounts, over a period of months or even years, their followers hardly grow.
With decades of social media marketing experience across our team, we have learned the methods which enable consistent growth on Instagram. To be clear, we never promise x results. We never promise a crazy follower growth. We do, however, consistently deliver consistent growth for our clients without massive budgets. Here are a few examples of that:
So, which techniques help to deliver consistent growth for those brands?
Engagement work
A laborious but often overlooked technique is what we call ‘engagement work’. This refers to engaging, such as liking, commenting, following, and sharing, content amongst your target markets. Find relevant hashtags, locations, posts, and engage with them, authentically.
Do this often, and your page views, reach, awareness, and (if your page is nice) followers will grow.
What not to do here, is go crazy. Don’t mass-follow accounts. Don’t copy-and-paste comments, don’t spam-like or comment. Instagram will notice this and punish you for it, plus you might get a restriction.
The obvious one - ads
Yes, it’s an obvious one, but it can work.
If you set up ads optimally either on Meta Ads Manager and/or the Instagram app directly, you can increase your follower growth rate for a relatively small cost. Try to ensure you always have at least one ad running, and test to see which ad types perform the best for your brand.
What not to do here is whack out ads to a huge audience. Even if, theoretically, anyone in the world could be your customer, running ads to everyone makes no sense and will waste your money. Make sure your ads are targeted, and test which type of ads work best for you.
PR and partnerships
By this point, we are not saying ‘hire a glitzy PR firm and people will follow you’. But we are saying two things:
Firstly; any form of PR should put eyes on your brand, often in a digital space, which frequently translates to a faster follower growth rate (we have seen this often, especially with hotels).
Secondly; partnering with a brand, influencer, or prominent page in your space can help your growth. For example: let’s say you’re a small architecture company. You pay for a feature on ArchDaily’s Instagram page, or a lesser-known page. This will expose your company to thousands or millions of viewers who are interested in, or involved in, your space. With the correct execution, this can lead to hundreds, thousands, or more, people visiting your Instagram page - the results of which are obvious. A different form of partnership - influencers - can have similar benefits.
There are other, one-off techniques you can apply to see a short-term rise in followers, too. For example, giveaway competitions, applied correctly, always see a sharp rise in followers. These can certainly be in your strategy, although our aim here is to discuss consistent, long-term growth.
Your overall strategy
To be frank, all of the above techniques will not work anywhere near as well if your own page and strategy is not good. The above techniques get people onto your profile, but if your content is bad, inconsistent, or poorly executed, they are unlikely to click ‘follow’.
Without going into every detail of a social media strategy, it’s firstly important to make sure your content is good quality, on-trend, and relevant to your target market(s).
Then you need to ensure you are posting consistently, to suit the algorithm, your content creation capabilities, and the nature of the business you are in.
Now you’re posting good quality content consistently, the details need to be there: which hashtags are you using? Which days and at what time are you posting? Are your posts optimised for each channel you are posting on? Do you have a location in your post, are you engaging with your followers via stories and/or the post?
Much of these are details, but the details all add together to create a good social media posting strategy.
Community management, which, in short, is replying to comments, messages, notifications, etc., in a timely manner, not only helps please the algorithm, but helps keep your community happy and, well, managed. It’s a small detail, but one which helps to complete a successful growth strategy.
The above techniques, either altogether, or a few of them combined, consistently help deliver steady growth.