How to Get More Followers on Instagram Fast and Free

Your content should consist of four key components:

1. How often and when to post?
2. What themes to use?
3. What are your style guidelines?
4. And lastly, what are your engagement guidelines?

1. POSTING

Do your research and start posting at different times and at different intervals. Then carefully examine all of your results and create a report of the engagement statistics. Now, we know that you can find lots of information on the internet about the best times to post on Instagram but we still suggest you do your own field studies, as there are lots of factors that affect these ratings, such as the geographical locations of your target audiences, time zones, different cultures, career paths of your target audience and the list goes on. After you have tracked the results and drawn up your conclusions it is time for you to create a content calendar.



In a content calendar, you will carefully plan your posts, what to post and when to post them to achieve the most desirable responses from your Instagram community. However, there is nothing wrong with a bit of spontaneity and will in fact be some of your best Instagram content, especially if you highlight company culture and events.

2. THEMES

You should be rotating different kinds of themes in your Instagram to keep things interesting for your customers. You could for instance have themes where you create brand awareness, attract new customers by having contests or sweepstakes, share discount codes or exclusive offers to your Instagram followers, tell stories, and share amazing visuals with your product or service to introduce them to life with your products or services.

ENGAGEMENT GUIDELINES

There are some things you should consider when engaging with your audience.

It won't matter how well you interact with people if you are not providing high-quality content on Instagram. Create edgy captions to match your image and reveal the personality behind your brand. Also, keep it simple and avoid anything that looks too busy.

Instagram is a "social network" for a reason, so the way you interact with your audience will help or hinder your engagement. Ask questions and start conversations. By being active and having fun with everything you do, people will respond to your personality and will want to engage with your brand.

TIP: Know your audience. You won't be able to interest someone in conversation if you don't know what they like, so try to understand who you are speaking to.

How will you optimise your strategy to create more engagement? Track your competitors, followers, fans and customers and adjust your strategy according to their movements. The elements of your strategy need to be as measurable and specific as you would for any other marketing platform to get sustainable results. Instagram is no different from any other marketing channel you are using when it comes to optimisation.

Hashtags help your content get discovered by more people, so you need to effectively use them to skyrocket your post engagement and increase your followers. Check out trends, create a unique hashtag for your brand, create contests and deliver offers that are unique to your Instagram audience.

There is not much point in having great content if not enough people are seeing it. Cross-promote on other social networks, look for influencers within your industry and run Instagram ads. With a community of over 400 million users, Instagram is one of the world's largest mobile ad platforms.

CAPTIONS

Compelling visuals may be what Instagram is all about, but an effective Instagram caption will push engagement with your audience even further.

When writing Instagram captions you have 2,200 characters to use with an ellipsis after three lines of text and while some users may omit captions, your brand never should. An image alone can be great, but one with a story is even better.

A few things to keep in mind are to try and include the important part of your message within the first three lines and use your captions to keep your audience's attention and inspire them to take action.

WHAT ARE GOOD CAPTIONS MADE OF?

Good captions add context, show personality, entertain the audience, and prompt your audience to take action.

Check out some great tips below to help you improve your captions:

1. Know your audience. Build audience personas by outlining the basic details about your target customers, and their goals and pain points. If you know your audience, writing captions to your specific target market and building engagement with them becomes much easier. This will eventually lead to more engaged followers and that will lead to more sales.
2. Identify your brand's voice. Make a list of your strongest qualities and values that you want to reflect through your brand and make sure you reflect these values and qualities in your posts.
3. Know when to use short captions. Give context only where needed. If your post is very clear, it will speak for itself.
4. Like with all your marketing messages the most important piece of information should come first. Instagram is no different, as you only have a few lines to grab their attention.
5. People love stories, so tell your brand story within your posts.
6. Use your captions to ask questions and opinions and get followers to tag friends on your posts.

THE POWER IN AUDIENCE PERSONAS

The value of knowing your audience results in a better engagement rate. Higher engagement rates equal stronger relationships, which in turn leads to more sales. Knowing your audience also enables you to provide better customer satisfaction and fulfilment of their wants and needs when you have a clear understanding of them.

Everyone has a persona, including your customers and these personas are generally made up of things we like and don't like, career goals, dreams, the struggles we have and any pain points we may have gone through. This information creates a very valuable snapshot of the people you are trying to reach.

To create these personas you will need to do some research and have a bit of intuition and creativity. Creating these personas may take some work but it will be worth it.

1. Research your customers thoroughly. If you can, find out their gender, age, income, employment, location, and education. Any data you can get your hands on.
2. Then look for similar trends among your customers For instance, you might notice that they have similar careers or occupations, live in the city or rural areas, have similar age groups and so on.
3. Most often, once you've done your research you will find 3 to 5 major groups. Let your imagination go wild and create imaginary characters out of these 3 to 5 groups. Give them names, jobs, marital status, careers, living areas, families etc.
4. Next, you want to learn about their goals and aspirations. Find out what motivates them and what their ultimate dreams and desires are. Once you have identified what drives them, look at what you can offer them and how you can provide value in their lives and how you can even help them reach their ultimate goals. Then you want to find out what their pain points are and what's holding them back from reaching their goals. Finish off by gaining an understanding of how your product or service can solve their problems or ease their struggles.