Despite the regular emergence of new social media platforms Instagram widely remains the most desirable one to make it big on. The money earning potential is huge whether you are selling your own products or you want to be paid to promote brands so it’s not surprising there is a hunger to get as many followers as possible as quickly as possible. So what is the key to being successful on Instagram?
The Key To Being Successful On Instagram
Being successful on Instagram ultimately comes from two things: good content and enjoying the time you spend on Instagram.
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| You can have organic and good growth on Instagram |
There are other ways to grow of course from the questionable* practices of: competitions, engagement pods, follow loops, follow/ unfollow, paying for followers to more authentic approaches like investing time engaging with others. Some accounts will be lucky enough to be shared by big names and grow quickly, some accounts grow quickly because they have a large audience elsewhere that they can tap into, but ultimately successful accounts on Instagram are filled with good content and run by people who enjoy it. If you love what you do you are being authentically you and you will be producing unique content that reflects you.
There are huge numbers of people on Instagram ranging from those who post lots to those who mostly prefer to consume the content of others. The huge numbers mean that there will be an audience for you whatever your interest and style is. You can try to please the crowds with cat memes, but does that really excite you? Do you want people to be following you because you share funny memes all the time or do you want people to be following you because you are passionate about baking or great at watercolour painting or you provide an honest insight into mum life? What do you want people to follow you for? If you post what you are interested in and help your audience find you, you will become successful.
If you are a business you should be using Instagram to promote the products or services you sell. You want to turn followers into customers and posting a cat meme is not going to do that unless what your business is selling is cat memes. Yes crowd pleaser posts might bring in followers, but if they aren’t related to the rest of your content the new followers won’t necessarily be interested in the rest of what you post. What you want is to bring in an audience of people interested in what you are selling. Remember you don’t need millions of followers to make a lot of money, you just need the right followers: an engaged audience that love what you do.
How To Grow Organically On Instagram
So you are creating content you love what next? Help people find you through hashtags, follow people who inspire you, comment on other people’s content and genuinely aim to enjoy the time you spend on Instagram. People will share your content because it resonates with them or they find it useful. People will give you shout outs because they enjoy your content. Some of those that you chat to or engage with will check out your content and follow you if they like what they see. You will find growth will happen organically.
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* I describe a number of growth tactics above (such as running competitions and follow/ unfollow) as questionable because they can make your numbers grow in the short term, but the followers often don’t stay engaged. Not only will they not become customers, but they can actually prevent your new content being seen by potential customers. This is because a key part of Instagram’s algorithm is that they decide how widely to show posts to others based on the reaction of those who have seen it. If they show it to a small number of people who all love it, comment, share it etc they will think it is amazing content and show it to others. If people just scroll past they will decide it’s not worth showing widely.
