How To Increase Your Instagram Following In 5 Easy Steps

​Instagram is a great way for bloggers and businesses to get more followers and sales. Instagram now reaches over 400 million monthly users. Since they are always changing the algorithm that they use, it is hard to keep up, but by using these simple steps you should be able to see some growth in your Instagram following.

Canadian Customers

U.S. Customers

1. Complete your profile
 
The biggest downfall of most bloggers and sellers on Instagram is not fully completing their profile. I was guilty of this at first myself, I only had 3 words describing what I did. Now I have changed over to a business account and have completed my profile with the address of my blog and have also included my email in there and have received a major increase in traffic to my blog because people can just click right to my website.

2. Niche specific Hashtags
 
Another downfall for most accounts, which included my own origionally is not using niche specific hashtags for your posts. By using the proper hashtags you have a greater chance of engaging with new followers. The best rule for hashtags is to use no less than 11 and now more than 30 hashtags. I have found that 11 seems to work best for myself.

3. Engagement
 
Now that you have followers and they are commenting on your posts you should ensure to engage with them, you will find that they will search out your posts when they are on to see what you are posting, it improves your chances of getting your posts seen more through Instagrams algorithms.

4. Blog groups
 
I myself belong to lots of blogging groups, they are a great source of information and several have great threads that you can join to increase your followers for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and so many more. The two main ones that I use are The Blogging Squad which usually puts up their threads on Friday, they only allow a certain amount before closing them though, and Social Media Network Group, which puts one up monthly which lasts for a couple of weeks. These threads are great to join and have been able to find some great people to follow through them but the downside is that some people will follow and then unfollow right after the thread closes. I ended up getting followers+ for my phone which is a free app and it lets me know when people have unfollowed me and I do the same to them in return.

Follow/unfollow method
 
This is the method that I have found works the best for me. Find similar accounts to your, specifically those that are leaders in your niche and follow their followers. I did this for about 10 days and followed 5300 accounts, of that 5300 about 1400 followed me back, so almost 27%. Then I waited a few days and unfollowed all of those that did not end up following me. Of the ones that followed me I have been able to connect with lots of people that have an interest in the same niche that I blog about. I now have a huge increase in likes and comments and get to see other points of views of people that are interested in my niche. The other upside is that my views to my blog page that come from Instagram have gone way up and people have followed me on other social media accounts as well. Doing this method does take a while since Instagram will only allow me to follow 100 people every hour and only let me unfollow 60 per hour. The other drawback is that Instagram only allows new accounts to follow 7500 people, so unless you have an older account that will let you follow unlimited amounts of people this method won’t last forever. 

If you would like you can follow us

FaceBook - https://www.facebook.com/minimalist101/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/realminimalism
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/real_minimalism/
​Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com/realminimalism/

​Join our mailing list if you would like to stay up to date on when our new posts come out
​
Sincerely,

​Mark
​