Instagram quickly outgrew its first impression as a fun app for kids and has become a serious content marketing, networking and audience building tool for individuals and brands. It's one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet, with over 200 million active monthly members sharing 60 million images and 1.6 billion likes per day.
Just how awesome is it? Engagement rates for brands on most social networks are less than 0.1%, but Instagram blows them all away. The average Instagram engagement rate for brands in a 2014 Forrester study was an epic 58 times higher than on Facebook.
You can't argue with numbers like that. But that's just average. And as I advocate across all manners of online marketing, you don't want to be average! It's not a dream or a goal.
Sure, 58 times greater engagement than Facebook sounds great, but you can do so much better than that on Instagram. Whether you're a big brand or maybe just wondering how to become Instagram famous, I don't want you to strive for average; I want you to reach for the stars and become an Instagram unicorn. A digital unicorn is that magical, rare creature that outperforms all others by orders of magnitude.
And you're going to accomplish this by working these eleven amazing Instagram hacksinto your social strategy. Check out these attention-getting ideas for your Instagram captions, hashtags, profile, and more, and see what to post on Instagram to get more followers and way more visibility and engagement too.
To get more followers on Instagram do the following things:
- Promote your dedicated hashtag on your other social profiles, on your website, and your email blast.
- Get creative with your hashtags. Be funny, ironic, or outrageous – but never boring!
- Watch topically relevant and trending hashtags. Join these conversations to get in front of more people.
- Use your bio link to drive traffic to your newest or most popular content.
- Write descriptive captions. Storytelling will help generate engagement and sharing.
- Interact with top influencers in your space and try to become one of their favorite people or brands.
- Don't want a tagged photo of you or your brand on your profile? Edit Tags to hide images from your profile.
- Adjust your settings so any potentially embarrassing tagged photos won't show without your approval.
- Develop your own unique, recognizable visual style. Figure out how you want to stand out and make it so!
- Visit the Places tab to see what's happening locally - your neighborhood, a city you're targeting in ads, or an event in a certain location.
- Use a call to action to tell people what you want them to do with your posts. Find clever ways to get people to share your content.