Be dynamic
A lot of people would say if I have a calendar, I can’t be dynamic or if I’m too dynamic, I’m not going to be able to really follow a calendar or a schedule. Find a middle ground for both. Find your consistent posts, that with your calendar. With this, you could be dynamic, this is Instagram Stories. This is IGTV, using emoticons in your content, using different hashtags, being a little silly sometimes, responding to comments and responding to them quickly, asking questions, engaging with other influencers or your followers, responding to direct messages, things like that. You really want to make sure that you are engaging with people because this is the social part of social media. This, being dynamic, or dynamic account is where the value really comes from. People don’t follow a brand or follow a company on Instagram because they think it’s cool, they follow it because they want to feel connected with you and they want that social aspect of your business and your company. So give that back to them. Be easy going, be friendly, be lighthearted, communicate, show them what the company or what you are like behind the corporate curtain, and give them that social experience that they’re really looking for. Not only will they stay engaged with you and following with you, but their friends and other people that they influence will also.
Follow other influencers
If you can identify other influencers in your area, maybe it’s other people in your niche industry, thought leaders, it could even just be news sources or media sources that are familiar with the industry that you’re in, things like that. Follow them (especially if you’re in the ecommerce/aliexpress best sellers niche). One, it helps you keep on top and abreast of what’s happening in your industry, it allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. But two, and this is something I really enjoy, is if you keep your follow, the list of people that you follow low, a lot of users can use this as a curated content list of people that they should also follow. So you may not want to always be following competitors or things like that, but follow people and give your followers an opportunity to follow people that can provide value and add more value to their social feeds. Now, it’s not just you out there, you’re not the only business, you’re not the only company, but there’s other people in your same niche industry that can provide value. And if all the value in a user, one of your follower’s feeds is all related to the service or the product or the industry that you’re in, that is still helping to keep your business and your industry top of mind. So keep your follow, or the list of people that you follow, keep that a little bit low, and use that as a curated content list of people that your followers should also follow. It’s a great way to connect with influencers, let them know that you’re out there, but also make sure that your followers are getting great value.
Dedicate a budget
Like all social platforms, and really all types of marketing, nothing is truly free. You can get organic reach if you are an influencer and you’ve got more followers and they’re continually gaining, that’s where you’re going to see more of that growth, but your growth is going to be limited by algorithms, right? By Instagram’s algorithm, by any other social media, things like that, plus everybody competing for the same followers that you’re competing for. Take a little bit of a budget and use that to promote your posts and your ads. You can send people to your website, you can send them, the link will be your phone number. I really like to send people directly back to my profile. A lot of the posts that we will boost, or that we post on there, we sponsor, we direct them back to the profile because there’s a lot of great content there. And this may be your first time interacting with our Instagram account, so we want to give you the opportunity to check out everything else that we’ve got over there, all the other tips and the tricks and the strategies that we post. You can do the same thing for a pretty limited budget. Identify your audience, identify the people you want to target and then just, a dollar a day per post, two bucks a day. Let it run for three or four days, and then continue to build.
You’ll find that you get more followers, you get more influence, you get more people that are communicating with you and potentially even proposing business partnerships and offering dropshipping products. And it’s just a little bit of an investment, but it helps push you through, or push past the algorithm and give you more reach than you would experience if you didn’t invest anything. And finally, I’ve got a bonus tip for you. This may go against what you may hear some other influencers or some other Instagram experts say, but believe me, don’t use automated bots or automated tools. This goes against everything, one, in Instagram’s Terms of Service, and two, it goes against everything that is really ingrained in social media. This takes away the social aspect of social media. If you’re auto following, auto unfollowing, auto liking, auto commenting, auto following hashtags, things like that. That is not the purpose of social media and there is zero, I’ll say that again, there is zero value for anybody using automated bots. You’ll find it all over the place. You’ll find these people that are paid influencers, saying I use this bot, and I love this, and it grew my Instagram. Sure, it filled it up with other bots. It filled it up with other bots that are commenting auto bot and auto reply comments on their pages. Now, these are the folks that you see have seven posts and 30,000 followers. They’re using automated bots, they’re not to be trusted.
Pro tip: If you’re going to grow your Instagram account, grow it organically. It takes more time, energy, and effort, but it actually pays off in the end, whereas using automated bots has zero pay of at any point in time.
