How To Organically Grow Your Company’s Instagram
Each social platform deserves a dedicated post to fully understand its culture. Today, however, the focus is on how you can grow your company’s Instagram organically.
Without a doubt, social media has become a staple for any modern day business. With social media management tools readily available to help you push out content to multiple social platforms, it is easy to forget that each platform has a unique culture.
In this article, you will understand Instagram’s algorithm system and how it can help you effectively strategize an Instagram content plan that will boost your following and engagement.
We will cover very important topics such as:
Instagram Algorithm
Instagram Culture
What types of content that performs best
Strategies to help you gain followers
Instagram Algorithm
Like many other social platforms, Instagram’s algorithms are constantly changing. These changes have made it harder for businesses, creators, and influencers to grow and reach their audience organically.
This is how Instagram algorithms work.
Instagram ranks your content based on engagement. If your content gets significant engagement from your followers, Instagram shows it to more people within your target audience.
However, if your followers do not engage with your content, it will start ranking lower on your followers’ feed and will not be shown to a wider audience.
Even when using hashtags, your post will rank lower if your content gets poor engagement. This decreases your chances of discoverability and reaching a wider audience, resulting in very slow to no growth rate.
Why the Algorithm Change?
The change in algorithm gained a lot of negative feedback, especially for those who make a living from the platform. However, one of the reasons Instagram implemented this new algorithm is to improve customer experience using new technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
This new technology learns what individual users like to see and interact with and shows them more of those types of content or more content from an account they interact with the most. This improves user experience and makes the platform more enjoyable for the users.
Instagram had become infested with spams and automated robots, making the platform unenjoyable for users.
It might have been bad news for businesses, but better customer experience kept users on the platform. As a business you want users on the platform or there would be no one to advertise to.
You may not be able to successfully use robots and other automated tools to help grow your company’s Instagram account. However, you can still grow your following by strategizing better content and ways to increase engagement by learning what your followers and audience like and want to see through Instagram insights.
Instagram Culture
In order to strategize an effective social media plan, it is important to understand the platform’s culture.
What is a platform culture? A platform’s culture describes what is the norm, the structure, and the behavior of the community within the platform.
For example, Twitter’s culture is different from Instagram’s culture. Twitter is built to encourage written communication. Users log into twitter with the understanding that they will interact by reading and writing. Users are more likely to interact with content that presents written value.
Instagram’s culture is visual communication. Users log into the platform to see, therefore they will engage more with content that are visually appealing.
Ideally, each platform should have a different strategy. Instagram’s strategy should focus on visual content, as that is the culture of the platform.
Readers are less likely to read below the first line, therefore it is important to convey the important points or message through an image or within the first line of your caption.
The next point will aid with tips and points on how to create effective content.
What Type of Content Performs Best on Instagram?
As established, visual content is the way to go for a platform such as Instagram. Contents that perform the best on Instagram are those that are visually captivating.
Here are some good examples of good visuals:
These images have one thing in common, they are visually captivating, attractive, vibrant, and catches the attention of users. Regardless of the industry (Beauty, Fashion, Photography, Technology), a fun and colorful image is sure to have users stop and stare. Especially since Instagram is over saturated with whites and pastel colors, dare to stand out. Try something different.
What Can you Do to Gain Instagram Followers for Your Brand
Quality visual content is what gets users to stop scrolling and pay attention. But that’s only the first step.
Caption
After capturing the attention and interest of users through a visual, a compelling caption is the next step to prompt engagement from your followers and users. What is the recipe for an engaging caption? What can you write that will encourage users to like, comment, share, and save your content?
The first line of your caption has to get the message across verbally, and then you can elaborate. Depending on your audience and the business you run, try the following;
1. Ask questions. Make sure you are asking relatable questions that your audience can answer.
2. Add humor. Lighten up the mood by making your caption bring a smile or a chuckle. People engage and interact with humor more than anything else.
3. Provide value. Solve a problem, give them answers, provide knowledge. This will make users want to follow and look out for your content because they know you will provide them value visually and written.
Quick Response and Interaction
This next step is incredibly important, the most time consuming, as well as the most neglected task. Responding to comments or DMs and interacting with your audience.
When your customers engage with your content, it is crucial to reciprocate and respond to their engagement. Especially if your account is still small. Not only will this encourage them to engage with future content, it will create positive rapport and a relationship that can lead to a level of loyalty.
This loyalty and relationship is what prompts customers to promote and freely support your company by sharing, reposting, or even tagging friends or family.
Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are becoming a great tool for businesses for many reasons. As a business you should be posting quality content daily, or a minimum of three times a week. Why? Because you constantly have to put yourself in front of your audience so your business and services are not forgotten. Being forgotten is very common in today’s fast paced society with consumers being bombarded by competing products and services.
Now, you might not be able to produce top notch quality content seven days a week, and that’s okay. In some cases, that is better as you don’t want to irritate your followers and cause them to unfollow, or mute your posts (when a user mutes an account, they still follow the account but Instagram will not show them the muted account’s post on their feed).
On days when you do not have a post for the timeline, post on your Instagram story. This particular feature is incredibly useful in creating relationships and rapport with your followers. It enables great interactive content creation using music, polls, open-ended questions, and so much more.
For a business, Instagram allows you to post links that directly take consumers to your products. On Instagram stories, you can share gift card links and so much more. Read this guide to Instagram stories to learn more about Instagram stories.
Consistency
Once you have applied the steps listed above, to see significant organic growth, you must be consistent. Be consistent in;
Your posting schedule
The quality of content you post
The structure and tone of your captions
Interacting, engaging, and responding to your audience
Posting on your Instagram story schedule and plan
Consistency is the step that glues it all together to create a growth machine customized for your brand and business.
The topics covered in this article will help increase your engagement. Once Instagram detects the increase in audience engagement from your content, not only will your content appear at the top of your followers’ feed, it will also increase and speed up your growth. Your content will begin to appear at the top of hashtag searches and on the discovery page. Exposing your content and account to a wider audience resulting in increased account visits and new followers.
You will experience growth without having to use third party tools, fake followers, or fake likes because those will most likely not help you in the long run.
