9 Essential Steps To Draw Followers To Your Instagram Business Page

Research Your Market

First, it’s good to know the basics about Instagram as a platform.

Instagram is visited by 1.22 billion people every month, according to the most recent reports. It’s extremely popular with users between the ages of 18 and 34 and is used by slightly more men than women, though the difference there is minor. It’s most popular in India, with a fast-growing market there that increased 16% between quarters last year.

If you’re planning to use Instagram to promote your business, it helps to know who you’ll be advertising to. Spend time researching your specific industry market by exploring popular tags and accounts in the same niche. This will also give you a good idea of who your average viewer is going to be, and which formats – feed posts, stories, Reels, or Lives – they’re going to engage with most.

Develop a Strategy

Once you’ve looked into your market, you’ll want to develop a strategy for your advertising campaigns. According to advice from Instagram’s parent company Meta, your marketing strategy should involve three basic steps:

1. Establishing a clear SMART goal. 

• Specific. You’re trying to build a following.
• Measurable. How many followers you do want to garner?
• Achievable. What can you do realistically right now to garner that number of followers?
• Relevant. What research do you have that shows the potential to garner followers?
• Time-bound. How long will it take to build a stable following?

2. Establishing a brand aesthetic. 

• Establishing a brand aesthetic includes having a consistent color palette, post style, and brand voice across all of your content.

3. Creating a posting schedule.

• We’ll talk more about this below, but for now, it’s enough to say that research suggests consistent posting on a reliable schedule, even if it’s not daily, offers a marked improvement in overall profile growth on Instagram.

Optimize Your Profile

Your Instagram profile itself is the best place to start when it comes to curating a following for your brand. Without a solid, well-optimized, and complete profile, no amount of advertising is going to make viewers convert to followers.

Here are some ways you can optimize your profile for both viewers and algorithms:

• Have a clear, simple Instagram handle. This is the name that users can look up in the search bar and tag when they want to mention your products in their posts. It should be associated with your brand and easy to remember. Ideally, it’ll be your brand name written as simply as possible.
• Choose a high-quality profile picture. For multi-product brands, this should be a high-resolution image of your company logo. For individuals running a business account, it should be a professional or semi-professional headshot that clearly shows your face. As an aside, try to keep the same profile picture or style of profile picture for as long as you can; this will help users quickly recognize at a glance when a post is yours.
• Include important keywords and hashtags in your bio. Your Instagram bio is the 150-character space in which you need to summarize your business for newcomers and the Instagram algorithm alike. Including important keywords and tags – vegan, fitness, fashion, business, social, etc. – will help the Instagram algorithm recommend your profile to users most likely to enjoy it.
• Include a profile link. You may choose to link to your brand’s website, your latest product landing page, or use an aggregation link like Linktree. This gives viewers another way to verify the authenticity of your brand.
• Take full advantage of Instagram’s Business features. Fill out your brand’s category, add the appropriate contact information, and choose an Action Button to appear on your page. This way, users don’t have to go searching for your information on other sites and can instead access your brand with one click.

You should also aim to be verified by Instagram. Instagram requires that an account be Authentic (represented and run by a real person or business), Unique (the only profile of this person or business as a business entity), Complete (with a public bio, profile picture, and active feed), and Notable (representing a brand well-known on and offline).

Though the exact requirements for notability are vague, it’s worth attempting to be verified, as this will prevent scam accounts from phishing followers from your brand and makes it easier to interact with other brands and influencers.

Create a Variety of Content

Instagram offers four main types of content, with the two major options being feed posts and Instagram Stories.

Since different niche users appreciate different content, it can be worthwhile to create a variety of different formats to test which appeals the most to your audience, and which gains the most traction. You may find that you want to use only one or two formats, or you may choose to use all four.

Feed Posts

Feed posts are the square photographs that appear on your follower feed and your main profile page. These posts can either be single images or a group of up to ten (called a carousel post).

These posts include a caption that can be up to 2,200 characters and options to add a location tag, product tags, and tags for other users. Instagram has also introduced a collaboration feature that allows your posts to be seen on both your feed and the feed of your collaborator, but we’ll talk more about this below.

Instagram also includes a wide variety of editing options for their feed posts including filters, light and colour adjustment, and focus adjustment, among others. Take full advantage of these features to create high-quality images that suit your theme.

Curating an attractive feed using this kind of post is the best way to attract new followers, as Instagram is a primarily visual social media experience. Many content creators choose to have a set theme or aesthetic for their posts; this can be especially helpful for brands who wish to be instantly recognizable. This is where your brand aesthetic comes into play.

Stories

Instagram Stories are short images or video clips that stay on screen for a few seconds at a time before automatically moving to the next piece. Much like content on Snapchat, Stories disappear after 24 hours and make great vehicles for quick snippets like one-off jokes, new post announcements, behind-the-scenes content, and time-sensitive content.

Stories are some of the most versatile pieces of content you can create on Instagram, given the wide variety of features you can add in the editing phase. You may choose to:

• Create a Boomerang, a looping video that plays backward and forward, for a unique aesthetic approach
• Use Stickers such as hashtags, mentions, polls, questions, and meters to interact more directly with your audience
• Share user-created posts to your Stories and comment on them to engage your community
• Create an Instagram Filter that others can use in their own Stories

The possibilities are endless. One tip here is to have some level of consistency across your Stories. While creating a variety of content is fun and engaging, if you want to keep your brand recognizable, you’ll want to incorporate your aesthetic – a colour palette, set font, or logo set – into each Story.

Reels

Reels are longer-form videos on Instagram, about 15-30 seconds per post, that are reminiscent of the TikTok format and follow many of the same creation rules as that platform. This longer space allows you to share more information more effectively than you can in Stories or feed posts.

As with its other content types, Instagram offers a variety of editing tools for Reels including clipping and adding special effects in post-production. Though you can shoot Reels directly in the app, you can also import short videos from third-party apps with more editing options or through the Meta Business Suite for more control over when your video is posted.

Shopping

Instagram Shopping is the app’s latest addition, allowing creators to manage storefronts within the app itself. Shopping entries are fairly standard product options; you can include an image (or multiple images), a description, the price of the product, and a link to purchase.

Recently, Instagram has introduced the option to buy products directly in-app, though this feature is as of yet only available in the United States. For all other countries, you can include a link to your external store page to purchase.

5. Use Your Captions Effectively

Though images are the main draw for your content, having a compelling caption can make or break your user engagement. As mentioned, the caption limit on Instagram is 2,200 characters, so it’s a good idea to experiment with both longer and shorter captions to see which appeals to your audience more.

You must put the most important information in your caption in the first line if possible. This is because Instagram automatically cuts off captions after the first few lines, meaning that you need to grab your followers’ attention immediately to encourage them to click “more.”

Beyond that, you’ll want to make sure your content is tagged appropriately. The standard etiquette for Instagram is to put all of your relevant tags at the bottom of your caption unless they can be worked in naturally to the caption text. Tagging your post will cause it to appear on that tag’s Explore page, which leads to more exposure for you and your brand. Try to choose a few relevant keywords, and avoid spam tagging (filling the entire caption with every imaginable tag), as this can come across as insincere at best and bot-like at worst.

You may also choose to include a question or prompt in your caption that invites users to comment on the post and contribute their feedback. This drives up engagement naturally, which looks good for your page and can, again, increase your wider exposure on Instagram.

Create a Schedule

According to social media marketers, the best strategy for the fastest possible growth is to post at least once per day, every day, but even posting a few times per week is going to boost your follower count steadily over time. To keep up with this amount of content, it’s a good idea to create a consistent content calendar and a backlog of prescheduled posts. This will give you time to plan your content, produce batches of it at a time that will be more consistent, and focus on interaction rather than daily posting logistics.

There are many third-party apps you can use to create and schedule your Instagram content, though you can also do so directly from the Meta Business Suite, which features an in-built posting calendar complete with suggestions for important days to post on and data about the optimal time to post based on your followers’ previous engagement.

Engage with Your Audience

Posting alone will not get your page noticed on Instagram the vast majority of the time. The site is, at its core, a social site; it’s designed for two-way interaction and community building. This is why bot accounts don’t do as well as actively managed accounts – active accounts interact with people, which causes them to find more followers, more quickly.

Here are a few ways you can engage with your audience to create a sense of community.

• Follow accounts that are similar to your brand and your brand values. This will not only give you insight into your market and the type of content they can expect but also opportunities to collaborate with others in your niche.
• Like and comment on these other accounts’ posts. Actively engage with other accounts and your brand will be seen as more personal, with real interests, rather than a faceless corporate account. It will also help the followers of these accounts to be exposed to your name, allowing the opportunity for more brand exposure.
• Speaking of being personal, interact with your followers on your posts! Respond to comments and pin your favourites to the top of the post. Answer questions when they come up and direct people to your target landing page when you can. Interacting with your followers not only drives engagement on a post but encourages engagement on future posts and builds trust in your brand.
• Run polls and Q&As from your Instagram Stories. This allows you to not only boost engagement but also receive direct feedback from your audience and tailor your social media plan to their expectations and preferences, making it all the more effective. You might even gather insight on interest in future products.
• Run contests and giveaways in your feed posts. Common entry requirements for contests and giveaways on Instagram are comments, tagging friends, liking, and sharing a certain post to your own Stories. This increases the exposure exponentially and gives you a chance to make an impression with new followers using follow-up posts. Be warned that many followers gained from this tactic are likely to unfollow as soon as the contest ends unless impressed by your follow-up content.
• Work with influencers in your niche. Offer an affiliate or ambassador program and collaborate with other creators to be featured on both their feed and yours. This also helps build brand loyalty; people are more likely to trust a brand they’ve heard of through someone they already admire and trust.

Advertise Your Page

Of course, the most traditional way to gain followers on Instagram is to advertise on the platform. Luckily, Instagram advertising is relatively easy and inexpensive; the ads can be easily created from existing posts and monitored from their Ad Centre in the Business Suite (or Ad Tools on the mobile app) for the best possible results.

To build an effective Instagram ad, start with what you already know about your followers by examining your Insights tab. Use this information to choose a high-engagement post and target a specific audience (by age, gender, location, and/or interests). From there, set a specific goal (in this case, “More Profile Visits” is probably the most appropriate option), set a daily or overall budget (you can choose to run ads for as little as one dollar per day), and allow the ad to run.

You might choose to test an ad structure with a low budget and, if it produces the results you want, repeat the campaign with a higher budget to win better placement. You may also choose to run multiple ads simultaneously to examine which structure works best. As with any other kind of content on the site, remember to tag your ads appropriately for the best exposure.

Review Your Results

When you’ve tried everything you want to gain followers, examine the results of your efforts. You can do this by keeping track of how many followers you’ve gained over time through your Insights page, from which you can also glean more information about what kinds of followers you’ve been getting. Find out which strategies have been most effective and continue with them or tweak your approach to better cater to your findings.

You should be reviewing your results regularly, about once per month at least, to keep an eye on the patterns and trends that emerge. This will help you plan your next month of content and engagement and may help you decide which influencers and brands to partner with again in the future and which promotions are most effective not only in terms of followers but in terms of producing leads.

Conclusion

Instagram is a fantastic place to create and maintain an active brand image. The platform is most helpful for visually-based brands, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to maintain a profile there even if your brand is more abstract in its offerings.

By following these essential steps, you can draw high-quality converting followers to your Instagram business profile and grow your business in a cost-effective and modern manner, perfect for the digital marketing era.