How to Reach 10K Followers On Instagram?

If your business or brand isn’t using Instagram, its time to start! It’s a powerful marketing tool, a platform to engage with your community, and let’s not forget, it’s the most popular social media platform. More people are using Instagram than ever before – so this is definitely the time to capitalize on that!

If you have been struggling to grow your IG numbers, don’t worry! That is why we are here! To give you some tools of the trade to help. The following techniques are ones that we have used personally within our own company and with clients. So we know they work!

1. Your Handle

Make sure that you have a fairly easy to find Instagram handle. If your handle is something too obscure, has too many underscores and/or numbers it will be difficult for people to find you.

The best IG handle is your name (if you are a personal brand) or your business name.

2. Optimize Your Profile

Your profile will be one of the first things your potential clients and customers visit. Make sure you have the following 4 things in place:

• Who you are – your name and/or title

• What you do – what business are you in? Whom are you helping? Whom are you trying to attract?

• How you do it – do you have products? Services?

• URL – Where would you like people to go? (Linktree, Landing Page, etc)

• Optional: your email address and/or fun facts about you

3. Creating the RIGHT Content

Remember, Instagram is a visual platform. People go there to see pretty pictures. Whatever content you decide to curate for your audience, make sure the content is high quality AND content that your ideal audience will be attracted to.

Ask yourself this question before posting: is this content relevant? Is this content appealing? Is this content speaking to MY people?

4. Post Regularly

We recommend that our clients post once a day for several weeks to give them insights into their audience’s behavior. Try testing out the algorithm. After you have posted consistently for 2-3 weeks, take a look at your analytics. Make note of what time of day your people are the most engaged. Which posts received the most engagement? Then, adjust your content strategy accordingly.

5. Use Hashtags

Hashtags make your content searchable on Instagram. You are allowed up to 30 per post. We recommend using 11-27. You want your hashtags to be relevant to the post, nothing generic. Also, make sure you don’t ONLY choose the most popular hashtags in your industry. You will want to stagger. Have ½ of the hashtags be the most used in your field, and the other hashtags be ones with less than 150,000 posts.

6. Engage. Engage. Engage.

We are talking about Social Media. Emphasis on the word SOCIAL. Instagram pays attention to who is on the platform and what they are doing. If you engage with others, Instagram will be more likely to promote your content for others to engage with as well.

Make sure you reply to every single comment posted on your page (it counts towards your engagement). And be sure to comment on others as well – especially with people who are most likely to reply back to you.

7. Pods & Engagement Groups

Pods have been around for a few years now. It teeters back and forth from being super helpful to just ok with regards to how it helps your Instagram grow. But I still think it’s worth mentioning.

What is a pod or an engagement group?

Well, it's just as it sounds. You can create a group on IG (in the DM section) and the goal is to have everyone notify the group of a new post. Then everyone in the group goes to that person’s post and LIKES it and comments 4+ words.

How does this help grow your Instagram?

Well, its all about giving your algorithm a boost. Having more people engage on your content tells IG that your content is good and is garnering attention. In turn, IG will show it to more of your followers – increasing your organic reach.

8. Paid Growth Opportunities

Everything I mentioned above is the very basics of what you should be doing to grow your Instagram. These next few items are optional, but can certainly get you to 10K a lot faster.

9. Giveaways

Everyone loves free stuff! Hosting giveaways on your IG is a great way to grow your numbers.

Here is why:

• In order to be entered into the giveaway, people need to follow you (helps increase followers fast)

• In order to be entered people need to comment (helps boost your engagement)

• In order to enter people need to tag their friends (helps build more brand awareness)

10. Influencer Shoutouts

You can actually hire other popular Instagram Influencers to give you a shout out to their following. This gives your page exposure to an audience you may never be able to reach otherwise.

11. Brand Awareness Ads

We don’t recommend buying followers – that won’t help your algorithm, engagement or your bottom line. But we do support paying to play on the IG platform. With Instagram Ads you can create a brand awareness advertisement on Instagram that is shown only to your target market. This is brilliant because you can choose what age, country, city, state, gender, hobbies and habits to target. It’s a pretty intricate system.

We have seen great success with paid Instagram Ads. You can start with as little as $50 a month (and every business should have at least a $50/month ad budget!).

If you would like to explore all of these possibilities, get some training on how to make it work for you, or just desire for Flourish Media to come in and give you a Social Media hand, just give us a shout!

We would love to help!

Written by Dr. Tracy Timberlake - Follow Dr. TT on insta!