Because Instagram’s algorithm is designed to support content creators, show their pages to new people, and find them an audience, you can grow your Instagram followers too just by making the right kind of content.
Creating Content to Grow Your Followers
For your content to actually grow your page’s followers, it needs a few qualities: it has to go viral, the viewer has to follow your page after seeing it, and then they have to stick around, engage with you, and not unfollow you. Let’s look at each of these a bit more closely.
The Content Has to Go Viral
Going viral means your content gets a lot of views, gets passed around, and is seen by a lot of people; that’s step one. The more your content spreads, the more foot traffic your shop gets, so to speak. For example, if 1 out of every 100 people who see your post follow you, then obviously if one of your posts gets a million views you’ll gain 10,000 followers. So the higher you can push your content’s view count, the better your chances of attracting an audience.
The Content Has to Deliver Value
A lot of content gets seen but doesn’t actually attract followers. For instance, we see plenty of funny, motivational, or suggestive posts and maybe even like them or send them to a friend, but they’re just passing moments and we probably don’t even check out the page that posted them. For us to follow a page, there usually has to be something more in the content, and that something is value creation. I follow a page when it gives me some kind of value: maybe it has nicely priced, good-looking clothes I might want to buy later, or I’m weak at sales and it’s teaching me sales tricks, or it posts good English lessons, and so on. It might even be a really good comedian whose videos genuinely lift my mood; here the value is feeling good and cheerful, and that’s why I follow them. If your posts don’t deliver any value to your audience, your follower conversion will probably drop.
A Proper Call to Action
There’s a concept called a call to action, or invitation to act, that has a big impact on your conversion rate. If I tell my audience directly or indirectly what value I’m offering them and ask them to follow me and check out my page, very often that turns the viewer into a follower. For example, in a post or caption I might say: if you want to learn Instagram sales tricks, follow my page; or if you want to grow your followers, check out my Instagram follower-growth highlight; or if you want me to send you a video on how to use this app, comment the word “video,” and so on. These CTAs get the viewer to take one more step and do something instead of scrolling past the post, which raises the chance of them becoming a follower.
Having a Target Audience and Keeping Your Topic and Format Consistent
Someone might follow your page and then turn into a ghost follower or unfollow you. If you know your target audience and their concerns and create content only for that audience, this never happens because you’re constantly delivering value to them. But imagine you don’t have a target audience: as a business consultant, say, one time you talk about sales and marketing, another time about human resources, another about building systems, and so on. That makes you a bit of a generalist, and if one of your posts was about sales and someone followed you for it, your next post about human resources is useless to them, so they either unfollow you or scroll past your post and gradually lose engagement with you. But if you only talk about sales, every one of your posts is useful to that person. The next thing is keeping your content format consistent. If your content style is writing points on a whiteboard and explaining them with educational videos, it’s better to keep that style and not suddenly switch things up and make funny or motivational content in a completely different format. Very often this kind of style change makes the audience fail to connect with the new format and unfollow you.
Conclusion
Overall, growing your Instagram followers through content is the best way to attract your target audience and customers, and all you really need to do is find the winning content style for your Instagram page and the methods that get you viral. If this approach doesn’t work for you and your content isn’t getting the response you expect, you can use our Instagram coaching services.