Everyone wants to be famous and get more followers on Instagram. And when everyone wants the same things it becomes difficult. Here are some of the legit and fast ways which will help you get real followers on Instagram that will interact with your photos.
When real and free Instagram followers will interact with your photos, Instagram will more likely feature them more often than other people.
Let’s start off with the don’ts of Instagram.
You don’t want to be using these like-for-like apps or following exchange apps or buying followers because while these may grow your following and you may get followers from it, they’re not going to be actively engaged followers.
They’re going to be what we call ghost followers or people who follow your account but don’t interact to engage with your content.
While it might be cool to have this huge number on your account, they’re not going to be real people and they’re not going to be engaging with your content.
So they’re pretty much useless, but if all you’re looking for is a huge number of followers and you don’t care about engagement, disregard this tip entirely.
Here are the tips that will help you boost your Instagram followers, get free Instagram likes, and get engagement with them
1. Hashtag secrets
You’ve probably heard this a thousand times, you should always hashtag your images.
Hashtag images always perform better than images without them and statistically it’s been found that images with 11 or more hashtags perform the best.
You’re allowed up to 30 hashtags on your image with Instagram. I suggest using every single one of those.
Someone once said to me that if you get 30 chances to enter a lucky draw are you going to say no thanks, I’ll just use 20 of those chances to try and win a million dollars?
No, you’re going to try and use all 30 chances to win as much as you can. So use the hashtags to your advantage and hashtag all 30 of them on every single one of your images.
And the hashtags you want to be using should have about half a million or fewer posts on them and the reason for this is that you don’t want your image to get drowned out by the thousands of new posts being posted every minute.
So you try and find a tag that is popular but not oversaturated so that your image still has a chance of getting noticed.
But now how do you find hashtags that really work?
You can either look for feature accounts, that will feature your image and tag those accounts.
A lot of them will have a specific hashtag that you should tag your images with or you can just search for the word hashtag on the App Store and you’ll find a hashtag app or website like GetInsta that’ll help produce or generate hashtags for your images.
One of my favorites is Focalmark. The great thing about this app is you can select the type of image that you have whether it’s a portrait, a landscape, maybe a picture of your cat, and it’ll generate hashtags around their specific topic.
You can even generate hashtags around the specific topic and a location. I suggest just keeping it general and choosing the type of image that you have.
For example, a portrait and then copy those hashtags and paste them into your image.
Post hashtags in comments rather than caption sections
Now, you don’t want to post the hashtags in the caption section of your image because it kind of looks are messy.
So what you want to do is post your photo and then in the first comment of the image, paste your hashtags.
A neat little trick to keep your hashtags organized and neat on your phone.
Open up the settings on your phone. Click on general, scroll down to the keyboard, and then text replacement.
Now all you have to do is set up a new text replacement, type or paste your hashtags in the phrase section, and then create a shortcut for it.
So for example, if you have portrait hashtags, type portrait and save it. Now every time you post a photo all you have to do is type the word portrait and your hashtags will show up.
Engagement is the key
Now once you’ve posted a photo, you need to try and get as much engagement as possible as quickly as possible.
I’d say within the first hour of posting and the reason for this is that the Instagram algorithm will determine whether this content is worth sharing or not depending on how much engagement it has.
The more engagement it has, the more chance it has of reaching the top nine in hashtags and what that means is that with every hashtag there are nine posts at the top of that hashtag when you search for it, that are the most popular within that tag during a specific time period.
And if you can get into one of those top positions your photo is going to be seen by a lot more people. Another great way to get more engagement is to geotag your photos with the correct location.
So if you’re taking a photo on a tropical island, make sure that you tag it correctly and it’ll get shown to people within that location and you’ve got a higher chance of those people liking, engaging, and even following you in the end.
2. Be active and engage with the community
When you’re engaging and interacting with other people’s photos, post comments that are more than just nice pic or cool photos because these sound like bots and they sound robotic and they don’t sound real or genuine.
And even as a creator, the person posting the photo, I wouldn’t want to respond to comments like that.
So there’s no reason to even leaving comments like that because you’re not calling to action or calling for engagement.
So instead I encourage you to post comments that are actually engaging. You can learn more about path social for this purpose.
Ask a question, maybe start a dialogue, talk to the people as if they’re real people because they are.
Open a discussion and talk within the comments section amongst yourself, your followers, and followers of other accounts on other people’s photos.
3. Feed aesthetic matters a lot
You don’t want to get boxed in at all, The truth is with Instagram, the more consistent your feed looks and the more consistently you post, the bigger you’ll get.
This is one thing that a lot of people struggle with.
I suggest posting photos that are only within a specific niche or theme.
So for example, if you have an account with portraits. So people will come back time and time again to see portrait images.
Whereas if I had a travel account, I would post images of traveling, landscapes, and things like that but I don’t have an account like that.
So I choose not to post those images, even though I like them and I do take photos like that, sharing them on my feed just doesn’t fit the aesthetic.
So instead if you do want to take photos like that and you enjoy sharing them,
I suggest setting up multiple accounts or set up a separate blog where you can share your photos or set up your own website where you can have multiple categories of images and you can post there to your heart’s desire.
If you’re not a photographer or you don’t have the eye for keeping a theme or certain aesthetic for your images, I’d suggest picking a specific filter that you’d like and try and stick to that filter across a range of images whether that be a filter from an app or a preset, it’s up to you.
Image shapes
You don’t want to be posting all kinds of weird shapes in your feed so that your feed looks messy when you visit it because people who come to your account and choose whether they want to follow you or not, don’t look at just one image and decide okay, I’m going to follow this guy.
They look at your feed as a whole. So if your feed is messy and all kinds of different shapes and sizes, they’re not going to hit that follow button.
These days, Instagram does crop your image so that fills the square and makes it look a lot neater than before, whether your photo is landscape or portrait when you post it.
Portrait images receive more engagement on Instagram. Clearly, because they take up more screen real estate.
If you were to post a landscape image you’re sharing screen real estate with other posts and other creators so you’re less likely to get your viewer’s full attention.
If you post a portrait image it takes up more of the screen and you’re more likely to get that person to like the image or engage with it.
3. Cross-Promotion or cross-pollination
This is one big mistake most people are making. They’re so investing so much time into Instagram that they forget about other social networks.
You probably have different audiences on each of them so merging them and getting the audiences to spread across platforms, it’ll help you grow as well.
4. Stick to a category niche
Next is following people in your niche or category. So once you’ve picked a category, whether it be portraits, travel, fitness, fashion, whatever it may be.
Try and only follow accounts within that niche.
I know it’s kind of difficult because you want to follow your family, you want to follow your friends, but what I suggest is that if you want to grow your Instagram account, only follow accounts within your niche and the reason for this is that you get lumped with those other creators.
So if you only liking and interacting with accounts that are similar to yours, Instagram is going to suggest you to those people’s followers.
Or when a new person visits their account and clicks follow you may pop up as a suggested user.
So if you still want to interact with your friends and your family, I suggest creating a separate account whether it be a private account or public account but an account that you interact with just those accounts on.
But your main photography account, use just for photography and I guarantee you, it will help you grow.
5. Nurture your community
Interact with the followers that you already have. They’re already following you, those are the people that you
should be most grateful for.
To interact with them, talk to them, ask them questions.
When someone comments on your photo, comment back or reply to them, talk to them and that helps with engagement as well.
So say you post a photo, within the first ten months you get 10 comments.
If you reply to each of those comments that means there’s a total of 20 comments on that image and Instagram will see that as a more popular post than if it only had 10.
And over time you’ll start developing relationships with your followers.
For example, I have a follower that used to comment on my images time and time again and we started chatting because we have a similar taste in music.
So if I find a new song or she finds a new song, we comment and talk to one another and share our new finds in music.
So there’s always an upside to engaging with your community.
Incentivize your community as well, maybe give away some free stuff or give them a reason to engage with you.
Maybe you want to give away a free preset or maybe you’ll DM every person that comments on your photo.
6. Use Instagram analytics
Find the best time to post your photo.
This can make or break your post as well depending on which time of day you post your photo.
As I said, the engagement that happens in your photo within the first couple of minutes the most important.
So try and get that engagement rolling as soon as you can, by doing that you can use the insights that come with Instagram to find the best time to post.
You can see which gender people are following you, from where they are following, and at what time they are active.
You can use this data to analyze at what time you want to post your pictures to get maximum engagement.
