Are you looking to grow your Instagram account organically without spending money on ads or paying for bot followers? Perhaps, your main concern is figuring out how to go viral and reach more followers on Instagram 🤔.
Either way, this post is for you. Although challenging but not impossible, using organic methods to grow your Instagram account can be extremely rewarding. For starters, it saves you a lot of money on ad spend. Furthermore, it can be your ticket to building a loyal base of followers who love your content.
That being said, organic Instagram growth isn’t a walk in the park. It goes beyond sharing pictures/videos and adding hashtags in your captions. Long story short: it requires a strategic approach.
In this post, I will be sharing well-guarded secrets you can utilize to expand your reach and attract more followers on Instagram. Awesome, right? You bet 🤓
What Are The Benefits of Growing Instagram Organically
Granted, attempting to grow your Instagram followers organically can save you serious money on ads. But when you think about the amount of time you’d have to put in to make that happen, you might start to wonder if the effort is worth it. Actually, it’s worth it when you think about the following benefits.
1. Attracts Real Engagement and Connections
One of the major benefits of organic Instagram growth is that it connects you to followers who are genuinely interested in your content, services, or products. This means they will naturally engage with the posts you share on Instagram by liking and commenting.
This type of audience has a longer lifetime value compared to followers acquired through paid ads.
2. Stronger Brand Loyalty
The upside of having real, engaged followers is that they will likely show higher levels of brand loyalty. This means they will naturally buy your products without much persuasion. Plus, they will happily go out of their way to recommend your brand to their friends and family, leading to wider reach with minimal ad spend.
3. Attracts Quality Partnerships
If you are looking to use Instagram to forge partnerships with brands, then growing your Instagram followership organically is your best bet. The reason is simple: brands consider engagement as the key metric when looking for Instagram influencers to partner with.
As such, they will first check how well followers engage with your content when deciding if you are a good fit. If your followers are organically acquired, you are halfway through already. But if they are acquired through paid ads, or worse bought, brands will instantly back out.
4. Saves You Money
This one is a no-brainer: organic Instagram growth can save you a lot of money on paid ads and influencer partnerships💸. The only drawback is that it will take you longer and, ultimately, more effort, but the result will definitely be worth it.
5. Makes Your Page More Credible
Credibility can make a lot of difference when trying to grow your business or brand on Instagram. More often than not, IG accounts with organic followers appear more credible than those with paid followers. So if credibility matters to you, the best way to grow Instagram followers is organically.
Challenges of Growing Instagram Organically
Growing your IG account using purely organic methods is anything but easy. Here are some of the potential challenges you will encounter while at it.
- Slow Growth: When trying to connect with a loyal base of followers, you will lose speed because organic growth can be painfully slow.
- Changing Algorithms: Instagram algorithms will likely not be in your favor when trying to grow organically. The reason is that it uses a lot of signals to determine if your content is worth ranking: user shares and likes, post relevancy and frequency, content quality, etc. Hitting all these checkboxes isn’t always easy, hence why growing organically isn’t easy.
- Highly Competitive: The truth is that Instagram is a crowded space, making it fiercely competitive. The competition gets fiercer when you try to grow organically.
- Inconsistent Engagement: Even if you have a solid follower base, getting consistent engagement on your posts isn’t always possible. However, using your account’s analytics can help you understand your audience’s preferences and tailor your content accordingly. Doing so improves the odds of enjoying fairly consistent engagement.
- Difficult to Monetize Early On: Whether you are looking to monetize your content or attract customers for your products and services, it’s hard to make money early on when growing your account organically.
Strategies to Increase Instagram Followers Organically
Although riddled with numerous challenges, growing your Instagram account organically is still well worth it. If you have decided on it, here are tips to make it work.
1. Optimize Your Instagram Profile
When looking to grow your Instagram account organically, the very first thing you have to do is to optimize your profile. A well-optimized profile makes a good first impression on first-time visitors. Also, it can help establish credibility with people who are considering following your account.
Here are some helpful tips I believe will help you optimize your profile properly:
- Use the right username: The username you choose can instantly tell people what your Instagram account is all about. So put in some thoughts when picking one. However, if you are having a hard time coming up with the right username, consider using our Instagram username generator tool 💪.
- Use the right profile picture: An appropriate profile picture is equally as important as a good username. Make it a priority to use the right one. A logo or a modest picture of you will do the trick.
- Craft an enticing bio: Your bio is where you get to sell yourself or your brand to prospective followers by giving them good reasons to follow your account. Be concise and affirmative when crafting it.
Here are some bios from top Instagram creators you can take inspiration from:
What do these bios have in common? They are short and super concise!
2. Post Engaging Content Consistently
Before you proceed to creating and posting content, it’s important to have a fair idea of your end goal. In addition, you need to properly research your target audience to ensure your content aligns accordingly. Is your end goal to entertain or educate your audience? Knowing this will help you develop a content calendar - or at least a pool of content ideas.
After you’ve developed one, be sure to post consistently. Now, posting consistently doesn’t connote publishing a new post every single day. It means showing up as frequently as possible. This could mean posting 3 times, or even once, a week. Whatever posting frequency you choose, be sure to stick to it. Of course, consistency will always trump quantity.
3. Engage with Your Audience
More important than posting consistently is engaging with your audience. Engaging with your audience doesn’t only allow you to build a strong community but can also make your profile a lot more visible.
Here are some simple ways to engage with your audience:
- Reply to comments and DMs: Be there in the comment section with followers as they interact with your content.
- Engage with other accounts: Another proactive step you can take to expand your reach organically on Instagram is to engage with other accounts. Comment, like, share their content, but don’t be spammy about it. Be sure to engage with accounts within your niche.
- Utilize Instagram Live: Instagram Live is a feature that enables you to host live podcasts. Utilizing creatively can give you a means to engage with your audience.
4. Use Hashtags Creatively
When used creatively and strategically, hashtags can help you expand your reach on Instagram. Here are some strategic tips for using hashtags to expand your growth on Instagram organically:
- Keep it relevant: No matter how popular the hashtags you select are, they won’t do any good if they aren’t relevant to your channel or content. So be sure to keep them as relevant as possible
- Mix things up: You will want to use a mix of popular, moderately popular, and niche-specific hashtags.
- Use moderately: Excessive use of hashtags can have repercussive effects, including making your account look spammy or, worse, a ban 🙅.
If you find hashtag generation a time-consuming process, consider using our hashtag generator tool.
5. Leverage Instagram Reels and Stories
Posting Reels on Instagram can help you reach more followers organically. The reason is pretty simple: Instagram Algorithms have a thing for Reels. Posting Reels indicates to the algorithms that you are a potential valuable content creator, and so will likely make your Reels more visible.
To see meaningful results, do your best to make your Reels as engaging as possible. Adding dynamic captions can also help. Same with using trending music.
6. Partner with Other Creators
Partnering with other Instagram creators can also help you grow organically. This can be done in two ways: partnering with top influencers with a larger following or collaborating with other creators at your level. The former might require you to part ways with some of your cash, while the latter can be done totally for free.
7. Leverage AI
Leveraging AI can make your life a whole lot easier. From AI captions to AI Reels makers, these features will come in handy when looking to grow fast organically.
8. Be Patient
Patience, they say, is a virtue, and there are no truer words than those when it comes to building your Instagram account using organic methods. You might not see results as fast as you want, but by all means, keep at it 👍.
Try different tactics and methods. Experiment and keep doing so until you break through.
Conclusion
Growing your Instagram followership without using paid ads or paying for bot followers isn’t easy. If it were, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be doing it. Nonetheless, it has a lot of benefits, including saving you money and attracting authentic engagement.
In this post, I have tried my best to give you tried-and-true strategies you can utilize to grow organically. Be sure to try them out.
If you found this helpful, be sure to share your experience in the comments. Better yet, follow us on our various social media handles to enjoy quality content like this.
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