Growing your Instagram followers has become quite the challenge if you’re trying to grow organically. By the time you’ve solved the Rubic’s cube that is the Instagram algorithm, surprise surprise, Instagram introduces something new.
Growing is the goal, and there are always ways to grow without investing a lot… since this is our bread and butter, we decided to assist all who want to do some growing on their own!
Keep on reading to learn what to do, what not to do, and what to do more of!
TO DO
Define your audience. Who is it that you want as your audience/clientele? Define the age, define what they do, what they like, and start researching where their digital hangout is. Instagram is a collection of little communities, and if you know who your audience is, you’ll easily target them once you know which community they belong to. You’ll see what kind of content they post, what they interact with, and tailor your content so that they want to engage with you.
Post regularly. Don’t get us wrong, if you miss posting once or twice a week, the world won’t implode and your followers won’t unfollow you immediately. But, for the purpose of staying on the good side of the Instagram algorithm, it’s best to post at least once a day.
Follow specific people. This means, don’t do those annoying, 2015 follow-for-follow hacks, and don’t follow everyone in hopes of raking up your numbers by getting follow backs. Follow the people in your community who inspire you, whose content you love and want to engage with.
Open up. Just like you unlock the door every day to your salon, you should unlock access to your authentic self on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, the ‘’be authentic’’ talk gets kind of corny, but if you don’t show your personality, what will make you stand out? Why would a potential clientele choose you over some other business that does the same thing as you do?
Set concrete goals. Do you want to focus on growing numbers for the first quarter? If so, engagement and content planning might take the back seat. Or maybe you want to focus more on engaging with your community, and not so much on your numbers. Or, maybe you want to create amazing content and get creative with reels. All of these are great, just make sure to set those goals and chase them!
NOT TO DO
Stop doing it all. Don’t try to be everything and do it all. Focus on establishing yourself and creating your own voice. Don’t try to be it all for all people.
Don’t mix up photo styles. If you want your Instagram to have an appealing and attention-grabbing look, don’t post photos that don’t align with the look you are going for.
Don’t forget to post. You sometimes get frustrated if they can’t post the perfect photo or video, but you’ll be surprised. Sometimes the content you least expect to be successful…actually IS successful. Stick to a schedule and make sure you post regularly.
DO MORE OF
Content that provides value. Pretty hair pics can only do so much. Try to give back to your audience, and give them more tips, tricks, hacks on how to maintain beautiful hairstyles they got at the salon. Educate them on products, brands, your values, on things that they will find useful.
Engaging with the community. Determine which businesses or people have accounts in your community. Show them support, talk to them, discuss potential collaborations with them. Join efforts so you can both grow.
Question asking. Ask questions in your captions. Ideally, start the captions with a question that your audience can answer. Instead of being the one doing all the talking, make sure you hear back from your audience. This is how you get them to comment, like, share or click on polls or questionnaires.
Analysis. Don’t forget to pop into your insights dashboard from time to time, to analyse the content you put out there. Check out which posts did great and why. Was it the copy? Was it something different to what you usually post? Was it a different content format? If you keep track of your analytics you can tailor your future output to get better results.