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Top 10 Instagram Tactics to Grow Your Followers

Instagram is a powerful platform you can use to build your brand, generate traffic and sell products. It takes time to get the hang of it. Learn how Instagram works over time. If you're ready…

From Social Rocket editorial team

Updated on

This text was created with AI assistance and reviewed editorially before publication. All sources are linked below.

Top 10 Instagram Tactics to Grow Your Followers
Instagram is a powerful platform you can use to build your brand, generate traffic and sell products. It takes time to get the hang of it. Learn how Instagram works over time. If you're ready to put in the work, I'll share my top 10 tips with you on how to grow your account. If you don't want to put in the work, you can still buy Instagram followers.

Instagram Tactics for More Followers

1) Make sure users spend a lot of time with your posts.

Whether it's videos, gallery posts or informative content. You should aim to get people to linger on your post for more than just a few seconds, look at different images, watch a great video or read your guide. Instagram wants users to spend as much time as possible on the platform, so you should try to get followers to spend a lot of time on your account and with your content.

2) Post Regularly

Create new posts regularly, ideally several times a day and at least every day or at the very least every 2. day. The more active you are on Instagram, the higher the chance that one of your posts goes viral and you reach hundreds of thousands of users who aren't subscribed to you.

3) Be consistent in your posts.

If you post once a day, for example, don't skip days or post two times on one day and then nothing for 3 days. That will confuse your followers and make them think they're missing out on something, which could stop them from following you at all.

4) Optimize engagement on your posts

Promote your company or brand by uploading content that can trigger a reaction. Avoid posting the same picture as someone else if there are already thousands of posts on that topic. The more interactions your post gets, the better. Even negative reactions can help your reach in the short term, although of course you should always consider the long-term consequences of polarizing posts.

5) Find a niche you're genuinely excited about.

If your profile has a theme that doesn't interest you yourself, it will be difficult to keep offering new, interesting content in the long run. Find a topic you're passionate about and know the interests of your target audience. If you're enthusiastic about gardening, for example, you'll certainly know which problems someone new to the topic has, and also which tips even very experienced users in your target audience would be drawn to follow you for. If you already have a specialized account, it will also be much easier to present products to your followers that interest them, and so 10K followers can be worth significantly more than 100K unspecific followers.

6) Use the tools available to you

You can learn a lot from your Instagram Insights alone. Which posts had the most reach, which got the most likes, and what didn't land at all. From that alone you can align new content and create more posts that resonate well with your followers.

7) Get the maximum organic reach that Instagram offers you.

Use hashtags on your posts and vary how you use them. Depending on the topic, the ideal number of hashtags to use can differ. So try posting some posts with anywhere between 5 and up to 30 hashtags, make several posts over a period of time, and at the end compare which posts performed best. Based on the results you can draw conclusions and further refine your strategy. Sometimes it's better to use smaller hashtags with fewer posts that fit your post more closely. Think about it this way: is someone looking at the hashtag "#Guide" really interested in your post about how to fertilize your plants? If not, the low engagement on that hashtag could negatively affect your reach overall and with other hashtags too. Here, though, trying beats studying!

8) Don't get discouraged right away

Instagram is a game of trial and error. It takes patience to find the best time to post, which images work better, which hashtags are good for you or not, and so on. The most important thing is to measure all these factors over time and be patient. If you manage to consistently create good content over a longer period, growth will set in sooner or later. However, consistent quality matters a lot here too. If you give up after just a few weeks, publish only boring or simple posts, and stop creating original content, your account won't grow much either.

9) Get users to notice you

With a brand-new account, though, it can be worth taking manual actions. Look for an account that covers the same topic as you, and on its latest post go through the list of people who liked the content. There you'll find active users who also interact with that account's content. Now you can follow some of these people and with a bit of luck they'll follow you back. If you pursue a tactic like this, it's important not to overdo it. Maybe follow 50-100 people per day and unfollow them no sooner than 2-3 days later. That way you avoid your account being flagged for suspicious behavior and can still get your first 100-1000 followers noticeably more easily.

10) Use blackhat tactics

with botting or buy your Instagram engagement. Classic botting is declared dead by many, but there are still proven tactics that work. One of these is the "mother-child" method. You have a main account, the "mother", which you don't use for botting; you do everything manually and create good content etc. It gets interesting with your "child" accounts. These you will sacrifice ruthlessly. Whatever tactic you use — comment spamming, tagging other users, follow-unfollow, and liking a user's posts. The goal is to get people to visit this account. On the "child" account you then link your main account, either with an image or right in your bio. You can also post one of your main account's posts as a gallery and at the end lead users to your main account. In this way, without endangering your business profile, you bring new interested users to your profile by unnatural means and gain more followers than ever before. Those were my 10 tips for better follower growth on Instagram. Another post going a bit deeper into the possibilities of Instagram botting is also coming for you. If you still have open questions or want to contribute one of your own tips, feel free to leave a comment.