I can tell you what I have been actively doing to grow my instagram page and the secret to getting 32,000 + followers! You see, I started taking my instagram career seriously in April 2016-I had 19,000k followers then and I have almost doubled that in 4 months. I am looking to hit 50k this year by God’s grace …so I’ll show you how I am going to make that happen! Update November 2016-Now at 42k followers!
ENGAGE- COMMUNICATE!
Instagram is not just this place your post pretty photos and then walk away. It is a community. You need to interact with your followers, post your photos with interesting captions. LOL. That’s why you will find photos of a cute dog and the caption will be something like “follow your heart wherever it leads”…wetin consine dog and heart? we may never know but at least you stopped, read it, and it got you thinking.
I think my post on tiger nuts and the naughtiness I was going to get up to after eating them was my recent most engaging post. Over 1300 likes and 200 comments. Update November 2016 -I played a prank on instagram and it got over 500 comments and over 2000 likes!LOL
POST QUALITY PHOTOS
Instagram is for photos. Pretty photos. Unbelievable photos. Eye popping photos. Larger-than-life photos! You can make it happen with a good camera-most phones these days come with a decent camera. I use my samsung S6 for a lot of my photos and they turn out really well. You need to be very intentional when taking a photos, make sure there is good lighting, make sure you try a lot of angles and don’t forget to edit! Instagram is also for videos!!! I share quick recipes on my instagram page and short clips from my weekly vlogs-like a teaser!
FILTERS ARE YOUR FRIENDS
I love filters. My favourite filters on instagram are Clarendon, Gingham- for it’s dreaminess, Crema for that Afropolitan feel, Valencia and X-Pro II. These are the ones I use often. I also increase saturation, sharpen to give it a bit of HDR effect, increase the brightness/reduce, contrast/highlight//shadow and sometimes I add a blue tint…makes some of the photos look crispy!
I never liked hashtags oh…but I quickly realised that you may need to use them if you want to grow your following! Use hashtags that are relevant to what you have posted i.e when I post about food/recipes I use hashtags like #Foodie #FoodPorn #NigerianFoodie #FoodBlogger #Instafood , what this does is anyone looking through those hashtags will come across your photos! I have discovered amazing instagram accounts just by looking through hashtags. You see how my bio is hashtagged? #ILoveHashTags #MarketMustSell #AllNaStrategy!
INTERLINK
If you have multiple social media accounts (most bloggers do) then find a way to interlink them. I share my instagram link on my YouTube videos especially the vlogs and recipes because they are my most watched videos. I also share direct links to my instagram account like I’ve done in this post. I syndicate my instagram to my twitter account and Facebook, that way anything I post on instagram gets posted to those accounts too and people will click!
*TRICK*
I read somewhere, I can’t remember where now, but what some people do is comment LB on popular instagram accounts for example on Kylie Jenner’s account. LB means Like Back. I know it’s annoying but I wanted to test the trick….I went on three of her photos and posted LB *Hides face* …did it work? To an extent. I got some likes and followers. Ha ha ha. No shame in my game!
Are you on Instagram? How have you been growing your follower-ship? Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and snapchat!
