How to Get More Followers on Instagram in 2023

Do you think breakups hurt the most?

Well, try spending hours crafting the perfect Instagram post. Gather all the courage to share it with the world. 

Then, end up getting a few likes and a handful of followers from that post.

Yep, that hurts more than breakups! 

All the brands and social media managers out there will definitely relate to this.

The numbers of likes and follows matter a lot for brands. But, gathering those followers can be tricky. 

In this post, we will share with you the 9 powerful tactics on how you can get more followers on Instagram and increase your reach.

So ready to dive in? Let’s go.

9 Powerful Tactics to Get More Followers on Your Instagram Profile

1. Optimize your profile

The days of using business cards are long gone! Your Instagram profile is your new business portfolio.  

A good Instagram profile is all you need to make a first impression. It has the power to turn your visitors into followers. 

Now, optimizing your profile might seem like a walk in the park, but in reality, it requires a lot of strategies. So, if you want to create a killer Instagram profile, follow these simple and easy steps below:

Step #1: Choose a Memorable Username

First thing first, you need a name so that people can easily find your profile. 

So, choose a unique yet simple @username aka, “Insta handle.” If you have an Instagram business profile, you’ll want to use your brand name as the username- such as “@Netflix.”

Step #2: Choose a Recognizable Profile Photo

Your Instagram profile image is your brand’s identity. It’s the first thing visitors will notice about your profile. That’s why it’s important to use a great, recognizable profile photo that represents your brand. 

If you’re an entrepreneur or have a personal Instagram profile- use a headshot as your profile picture. On the other hand, if you’re running a business page, use your brand logo as the profile picture. 

Step #3: Write a Killer Bio

After the profile photo, your visitors will notice your Instagram bio. This is the place where you get the chance to express what you do. 

You only have 150 characters to write a killer bio. So, use it wisely. 

In the bio, you can write how your brand can help customers. Also, you can write something catchy that represents your brand’s identity. 

Step #4: Optimize Stories Highlights

You can optimize your Instagram profile by using the stories highlights feature. The highlights section appears right under your bio. 

Instagram stories highlights are ideal for sharing information, valuable insights, and important announcements about your brand. 

Let’s talk about Canva’s Instagram profile here. Canva managed to do a great job with their profile. From the username to profile photo, they’ve kept their brand identity on point. 

And let’s look at their bio; it expresses how Canva can benefit their audience.

2. Figure Out Your Ideal Audience Persona

Unless you know what your audience prefers, you can’t create great content. 

And unless you create great content, your audience won’t connect with your brand. 

So, if you want to grow your Instagram followers, focus on the audience first. You have to figure out their needs, expectations, and overall personality to craft valuable content. 

Having a good understanding of your ideal audience and what they like or dislike will help you boost engagement and increase followers. 

You can determine your ideal audience persona by asking yourself these questions: 

• What are your ideal audience demographics? 
• What are their hobbies?
• In what industry do they work?
• What problems is your audience facing? 
• What inspires them?
• How can your product or service help them?

Once you have a clear idea of what your ideal audience looks like, you can craft content around that. 

Another great way you can figure out your ideal audience is- Instagram Insights. 

Instagram lets you collect data on follower’s demographics and actions. 

This data helps you understand who your ideal audience is, where they’re from, and what their interests are so you can create a larger persona. 

For example, if you look at Evernote’s Instagram bio, you’ll notice how well they know about their ideal audience persona. 

From the bio, you can easily tell their ideal audience are busy professionals who are looking for ways to organize their work and achieve success.

3. Consistency Always Wins

According to a study by Lucidpress,2019, consistent presentation of a brand can increase revenue by 33%. Do you know why?

Well, because the audience loves consistent brand presence. It helps them remember your brand and build trust for the long term. 

According to a study by Tailwind, Instagram accounts that post frequently get a higher engagement rate than those that post once in a while. 

Most of your audience on Instagram won’t care what you’ve posted in the past; they’ll wait for your future content. They’ll want to know what they can expect from your profile after hitting the follow button.

And, not just the content, keeping a consistent theme, layout, filter, and color can also work as an excellent growth strategy for Instagram. 

However, consistency is always easier said than done! 

It’s not a cakewalk to Keep a posting schedule, a consistent theme, and layout. 

That’s why to maintain consistency; you can follow these strategies:

Keep a content calendar 

Once you get an idea about what to post, organize your post ideas using a content calendar. You can jot down all your content ideas to stay organized and determine when to post. 

Schedule in advance

Scheduling posts in advance always helps to win at the consistency game. Before scheduling your Instagram posts, ask yourself:

• How often do you want to post?
• When you want to post

Based on your answer, you can schedule your Instagram post. You can always use post scheduler tools like Facebook creator studio, buffer, or Hootsuite to automate the posting process and stay consistent forever!

Keep the Theme Consistent

Another way to gain followers on Instagram is to keep a consistent tone, voice, and theme. Make sure to follow a consistent pattern in your brand’s logo, photos, videos, and color palette. 

You can take Nike’s Instagram profile as an example here. The brand does a perfect job of maintaining a consistent theme on Instagram. 

If you look at their Insta posts, they highlight athletes and famous sportspersons. Also, all of their post captions contain motivational, clear, and concise copy to engage followers. 

4. Create Top-notch Content Pieces

With over 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million daily active users, Instagram has become one of the most popular social networks. 

This platform’s rising popularity can impact your follower growth negatively. 

In the ocean of similar content, if you want the audience to follow your account, focus on producing a top-notch quality of content. Content that makes them stop scrolling the feed check your profile and hit the follow button. 

And, here’s how how you can do that:

Post Great Photos & Videos

Instagram is a visual platform. So, if you want to grab audience attention, post great visual content. 

You can post high-quality product images, workforce images, behind-the-scenes videos, product tutorials, quotes, and much more. 

Write Great Captions

Instagram captions offer excellent opportunities to share your brand message, thoughts, ask a question, or encourage followers to take action. But, to write a stellar caption, you have to keep a clear, concise, and conversational tone. 

Tell Engaging Stories

Storytelling is one of the best tricks you can use to boost your Instagram engagement. 

Everyone loves stories. Stories are memorable. So, if you use the storytelling approach to create content, you’ll set your Instagram account apart from the rest. 

You can frame a story around your Instagram caption, video content, and even image.

Take Humans of New York’s Insta page as an example. By sharing real and inspiring stories on Humans of New York, they’ve gained over 11m followers on Instagram. 

And people around the globe love their authentic and engaging storytelling approach. 

5. Post On The Right Time

This may sound obvious, but if you want to gain more followers on the Instagram, post when everyone is online. 

Timing is a crucial element in your Instagram growth strategy. It can increase your overall engagement rate. 

Posting at the right time can also help you get more followers, likes, shares, and comments.

Moreover, your audience activity on Instagram can vary based on their timezone. Before posting, you have to analyze the timezone so you can invest your energy and time in the ideal audience. 

And if you don’t post at the right time, most of your audience won’t even see your content. So, it’s best to figure out what time and day are perfect for high engagement. 

According to research done by Sprout Social, on average, the best time to post on Insta is Tuesday between 11 AM and 2 PM CDT. 

However, you can always use Instagram Insights or analytics tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer to understand when your audience engages with the posts. 

And based on the insights, you can craft and organize the posting schedule efficiently. 

6. Collaborate With Other Influencers And Businesses

Collaboration is the new buzzword on Instagram. It’s quickly becoming a popular marketing strategy that can help you grow your followers. 

In today’s digital world, people trust influencers more than brands. 

The reason is – influencers create content that is niche-specific, authentic, and engaging. 

People look up to their recommendations and reviews before purchasing something. 

That’s why influencer collaboration is the best way to get engagement, followers, leads, and conversions. 

As per a survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub, 90% of respondents believe influencer marketing is effective. 

Brand collaborations on Instagram are another great strategy to increase your Instagram followers. 

On the other hand, brand collabs can help two brands grow by teaming up and helping each other earn followers in the process.  

When a famous brand or influencer in your niche endorses your product, they influence their audience to trust your business. 

This means collaborations can help you gain brand visibility, loyal audiences, and conversions. 

However, while collaborating with influencers in your niche, make sure to be open to judgments. If they don’t like your products, they’ll not recommend them to their loyal audience. So, keep an open mind and find the right influencers to endorse your brand. 

One of the best examples of brand collaborations in recent times is Allbirds and Adidas. In 2020, both brands teamed up on Instagram to launch a new product. The idea behind this collaboration was to create a product by two separate brands that combined the audiences’ love. 

7. Run Instagram Contests & Giveaways

There’s a wise saying- “Give before you get.” 

And it applies perfectly to business and social media. 

Building a strong, loyal follower base on any social media platform requires effort. You have to give value before you can ask them to follow, comment, or share your posts. 

That’s why hosting giveaways or running contests can work wonders for you. When done properly, giveaways and contests on Instagram can help you build a strong community and grow your followers at a rapid pace.

No matter what you give, as long as it is free, your account will get attention. After all, we all love free stuff! 

Through free giveaways and fun contests, you can convince your audience to:

• Follow your account.
• Like your posts.
• Tag a friend.
• Repost and share.
• Post their own content using your branded hashtag.

Hosting a giveaway isn’t a difficult task. 

First, you need to choose what you want to give. From small to large, you can give away any product or rewards to gain active followers. 

Once you’ve decided what to give, you can determine the rules of the giveaways.

A great example of hosting giveaways is Elle Effect’s Instagram giveaway. The brand teamed up with Etoile to give $1000 worth of products for completely free.

8. Start Posting a lot of Instagram Reels

Instagram reels are worth discussing strategy in this post! This rival of TikTok provides many opportunities for brands to reach millions of audiences in no time.

It’s challenging to crack the Instagram algorithm, but Instagram is doing everything possible to push your content to more of your audience with the new reels feature. 

Unlike Instagram posts or stories, reels are recorded for only 15-30 seconds. 

But the best thing about this feature is you can add audio files, filters, effects, and much more.

Brands like Netflix, Sephora, Amazon, or Maybelline have already started using Reels. 

And, if you’re thinking about using it as your Instagram growth hack, here are some ideas you can try: 

• Create educational videos, short tutorials, tips, and hacks with your followers. 
• Share behind the scene videos, funny clips to understand your team. It will help you gain trust and authority.
• Showcase your products to let your audience know what you provide. You can even launch new products using reels.
• Reels are great for ads too. You can reach more and more audiences by creating targeted ads through engaging reels.   

Here is an example of Makeup brand Sephora using reels the proper way. The brand is getting more than 500k views by posting tutorials and how-tos via reels. 

9. Be Unique & Real

So many influencers and brands on Instagram are trying hard to get the audience’s attention. Sometimes the competition gets so tough that they can’t resist copying others. 

To stay in trend, brands often forget to maintain their unique brand personality.

Whether you’re posting on Instagram to increase followers or to drive leads, it’s important to be unique and real. 

Copying other’s content or forgetting your own personality can even ruin your brand image on Instagram. 

Also, the number one rule to be successful on Instagram is to network with people who follow you. 

When you communicate with your followers, they’ll feel valued and appreciated. And when people feel appreciated, they won’t think twice to follow your brand. 

Here are a few things you can try to keep your account unique and real on Instagram

• First impressions always matter. So, make sure to maintain a consistent and catchy look on your feed.

• It’s crucial to provide valuable content if you want to stand out in the market.

• People on Instagram want to see the real you behind a brand. That’s why never hesitate to share your passions, dreams, hobbies to let the world humanize with your brand.  

Lastly, never try to fit in. Always remember your brand personality matters. So, create your unique persona and craft content around that to make people feel positive about your brand. 

Wrapping Up

Growing your Instagram followers can be a hassle if you don’t know how to apply the proper techniques. 

That’s why, in this post, we’ve shared some of the most actionable strategies to get more followers on Instagram for completely free.

From giveaways, collaborations to post consistency, there are multiple ways to attract new audiences effectively. 

But remember, we’re not saying one size fits all. So, make sure to experiment with all these tips to see what works best for you. 

What are the strategies you’re going to apply on your Instagram page? Let us know in the comments below.