How to Grow your Followers and Increase the Engagement at Instagram

What's up, Steemians? For those of you who are visiting my blog for the first time, I want to tell you that I am a social media publicist.

Currently I work freelance, but I was in many companies where I acquired a lot of experience.

The last one I was in is called Ecopublicidad, a company that was very important to me and where I learned a lot of things.

Photo with some of my colleagues in Ecopublicidad. (2017)

---

Today I want to share with you some tips to increase the engagement and growth your followers at Instagram.

For those who don't know what engagement is, it's all the interactions that followers have in publications (likes, comments, shared).

As you know, our dear Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and proprietor of Instagram and WhatsApp, has not made it easy for us with his algorithms.

These algorithms limit the reach of the posts, this means that, even if a person is following an Instagram's account or a Fanpage, they will rarely see the posts on their timeline. Another consequence is that the growth of followers becomes slow, because very few people find the accounts organically.

If you've noticed, previously, the posts that appeared on Instagram's timeline were in chronological order, but now the posts appear according to their popularity or importance, which means that priority will be given to posts that generally have a lot of interaction or with which you interact regularly.

But why did they do that? Well, algorithms are simply a way of putting pressure on you to invest in ads. If you invest in Facebook or Instagram Ads, you will have a great reach of people, all your publications will have many interactions and even gain new followers.

Unfortunately not everyone can afford to invest in ads, that's why I'm sharing these tips for Instagram:

How to attract followers:

A simple way to get followers without having to invest in ads is to start following people. But wait, you shouldn't follow just anyone, you should make sure that those potential followers are within the target of the account you are managing.

For example: If it is a wedding photography account, you should follow engaged women who are beginning to plan their wedding. Where can we get them? In the accounts of other wedding photographers, wedding planners, wedding bloggers, etc.

How to get the engagement:

Once you are on the Instagram account where you are going to attract people, don't go to the followers section. Many people who are in the followers section don't interact and they are not convenient for your account.

For this strategy to be successful, you have to follow people who really interact and the way to make sure of that is to follow only people who comment and give likes in the posts.

How to have allies:

Another way to get followers and engagement is to have allies on Instagram. Let's continue with the example of the wedding photography account: In this case the allies can be bloggers and wedding planners.

How do we make them our allies?

There are 2 ways:

1. Giving likes and making good comments in the posts of potential allies, so that they will thank you and consider you.

2. Talk directly with these potential allies to know if they can make some kind of deal or exchange. For example: That the allies recommend and mention the name of the account in one of their posts, so that their followers can see and follow the account, in exchange for you doing the same for them.

Source

Once you start applying these tips, you can use cleanup apps, which will help you to unfollow people who didn't follow your account. This can be done once a week.

The app I use to unfollow people is called: Unfollowers for Instagram.