16 Ways to Get More Followers on Instagram

The visual appeal of Instagram has captivated brands, everyone from Marley Lilly through to Black Milk Clothing are leveraging the platform to drive sales & awareness for their businesses.

If you look closely at the top 50 brands on Instagram you’ll notice that most are E-commerce. Instagram is the perfect marketing platform for any E-commerce business. It allows easy access to show off high quality images of your products & create a visual footprint.

One of the common questions we get asked is how can businesses drive more followers to their Instagram accounts? Well look no further, we’ve put together an indepth guide to boost your engagement rate, increase brand awareness, reach your target audience, collect user generated content, and help you grow your community like never before.

This one is a bit of a no-brainer, ensure when you post images that they are beautiful. Represent your brand in a way that would make you want to purchase the product.

This doesn’t mean that the photos have to be perfect, but they should be quality content that allows your users to connect with you and your Instagram posts in a way that is human.

No-one likes to see the same types of images posted every day. Forever 21 keeps their followers engaged by really mixing up the types of shots they post. Product shots one day, shots of customers wearing their clothes or even just artistic shots. This is the same across all social media platforms, not just when you’re trying to grow your Instagram.

Oreo really keep Instagram users engaged by turning every day objects into funny faces using Oreo’s.

Hashtags can be used in a number of ways, you can tag photos with popular hashtags to get them in front of more users, the most popular hashtag on Instagram is #nofilter but consider things that relate to your photo (including your brand name, like ASOS below). Hashtags are also a great way to get on the explore page and to drive people over to your Instagram profile.

You can get a list of the most popular hashtags here.

Another great use of hashtags is to create your own then get users to use it. The beauty of this is that is can allow flexibility in creating lots of different types of awareness campaigns.

Forever 21 have been running a #21DaysofLayers campaign in which they create content and post themed images every day featuring lots of layers in the run up to Winter:

Nike encourages followers to use the #justdoit hashtag.

Connecting social accounts to your Twitter profile allows you to easily syndicate your images. For example you can post straight to Facebook/Twitter & Tumblr when uploading any image to Instagram.

Want to grow Twitter even more? We’ve created over 40 tips to help you build your Twitter following.

A good contest can hands down be one of the best ways to drive new followers & activity on your Instagram account. Instagram has the flexibility to allow you to just run your contest on your feed, the advantage of this is that it’s easy to setup & encourages participation via Instagram.

The disavantages however are they you can’t capture contact information of entrants, it makes it very hard to promote if you already have a limited number of followers & it can be difficult to administer or pick winners (since you have no way to contact them).

Low-effort contests can also attract the occasional fake account, which offers little value to your long-term growth. Gleam has built in fraud protection so you know the winner is legit.

Here at Gleam our platform allows you to run Instagram contests wherever you like, the main advantages are that you get to capture all your user information (or even send them to Mailchimp), get exposure across other social networks & manage all your entries in the one place — all while tracking entries in real time.

Here’s a contest template you can try:

This may sound like a no brainer but, existing followers on other networks is by far the easiest audience you can leverage. Simply ask them! Callaway Golf has a call to action to ask all Twitter followers to add them in Instagram too. This is one of the most direct methods for promoting your Instagram to an audience that already knows your brand. You can add your other social media usernames in your Instagram bio and vice versa.

Here’s a list of places you can ask existing users:

• Use Gleam, we are the most effective platform to help activate existing users on other networks to Instagram
• Cross post Instagram photos on other networks
• Post on your Facebook timeline
• Send out a Tweet
• Include in company email signatures
• Ask users in your next email newsletter
• Promote in your blog posts

Instagram content can also be cross promoted on other channels to increase visibility without extra effort.

If you follow successful brands on Instagram you’ll notice that many will post offers that are only available to Instagram followers. This enables you to customise (and also track) what types of offers resonate best with your community. It also allows you to attract new followers that are interested in special offers that they wouldn’t see anywhere else.

This technique is often overlooked but something you’ll see prevalent on Facebook. Ask your users in the Instagram description to engage with the post:

• Like if you agree
• Like if you can relate to this
• Tag your friends

Brand advocates & fans love getting access to sneak product peeks. Instagram is the perfect way to share these with followers. I often see brands teasing people over a few weeks with clues about what might be happening.

Engage with your users, follow them & comment on their posts. A common technique brands use is to monitor hashtags & use them to find the users to follow.

With Gleams Galleries app you can create customized galleries which automatically import Instagram images from specific profiles or hashtags.

You can use these galleries to display your own instagram images on your website.

Or you can use a gallery to collect, curate and display images that users submit with a designated hashtag. This creates awesome social proof which will help increase conversion rates,as well as increasing product exposure on Instagram.

Start Showing Off Your Instagram Photos

Check out our documentation on setting up your own instagram gallery or get started now!

Instagram allows you to find friends that already exist across social networks you have connected.

It also allows you to find phone contacts, one advanced technique is to turn your customer database into a phone contact file, then follow all of your customers on Instagram using the Follow All button.

Instagram has some native integrations with Foursquare that allow you to tag yourself at a particular location. If you’re a business it make sense to ensure all your relevant locations are in the Foursquare database.

Tagged photos will also show the location if they are shared/posted to Facebook:

A great way to reach new users is to partner with influencers, these are generally users that have a large Instagram following.

This movie created a crowdsourced movie poster campaign via Instagram: