We won’t lie, followers aren’t everything. But they sure are good for social proof, and you obviously want the largest audience for all your great content too.

Getting started
First thing’s first. We’ll start with the basics. Grab a good username and take a fantastic profile image. Try and keep it consistent and use the same username across all your social channels. And make sure your profile picture summarises you or your brand perfectly too, as it’s the first thing people will see.

Choose a theme. No no, not a Wordpress theme. Manage people’s expectations by letting them know the content they’ll see on their newsfeed before they follow you. Don’t expect to gain a large following if you haven’t got a clear theme. So, if you’re a food blogger, don’t start posting about your pug’s new outfit. The same as if you’re a brand or company, stick to what you’re trying to promote and what your target audience are interested in.

Gotta connect ‘em all. Well, Facebook anyway. Connect your Instagram page to your Facebook account. If you have a Facebook Page this will give you access to loads of nifty analytics called ‘Insights’. If you don’t have a Page however, it’s still worth connecting as it will make it easier for Facebook friends to find you on Instagram.

Raking them in
Buying followers. Don’t. Even. Think. About. It. Instagram follows the same algorithm as Facebook, meaning the reach your content gets is decided by how high quality Instagram ranks it. Now, fake followers won’t engage with your content. So if you’ve got 10,000 followers and you’re only getting a few likes, Instagram will assume this is poor quality content and won’t place it as high in other’s newsfeeds. So, by buying followers you’ll see a lower organic reach. Not good.

Engage with potential customers and followers. Find a hashtag relevant to your brand or niche and interact with the content by liking, commenting and even following users that use it. As the people using those hashtags are likely to be relevant, there’s a chance you might see a few follow backs.

Cross-promote your page. Use your other media channels to let people know you’re on Instagram. This could be on your emails, website, business cards, or even on the side of your business vans.

Down to business
No matter how good you are at the stuff above, if you haven’t got a great feed, people won’t be interested. Your content needs to be great in order for people to follow. Choose an image and filter theme and keep it consistent. Colour themes can be great to do too, although hard to execute. (Did you know that predominately blue images generate 24% more likes than predominately red images? Cool huh.)

That text box? Use it. Sounds obvious, but a lot of people don’t take advantage of this. One of the beauties of Instagram is that long captions can work just as well as short snappy ones. So experiment with different types. Captions can make or break your image, and be a deciding factor between whether a user double taps or not. So make it count. Use emojis to draw attention too.

Plan your posts - make sure you’re posting regularly, but not too regularly. If you’re bombarding people’s newsfeeds, it’s likely they’ll unfollow. Also if your account is inactive, they’ll probably unfollow too. Try and keep a flow with your content, this could be anything from 1-3 posts a day. Timing is important too. If you’ve got access to Instagram Insights, take a look at when your followers are most often online and try to post around then.

And now you’re well on your way to Instagram stardom. If you’re stuck for content, have a look at your best performing posts, pick out why you think it did well and try to mimic that.

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