In todays’s world, it is no longer about many followers you have on Instagram, but rather how engaged your audience is. If you were to promote a brand or product on social media, how would your audience respond? Would they purchase the product? Book a trip to the hotel you recommend? How much do they trust you to be influenced by your recommendations?
Whether you have 50 followers or 1 million followers, what brands ultimately care about most is their ROI, or return on investment. If they decide to collaborate with you, they want to know that your audience is invested. Paying an influencer to put an ad on their page is similar to placing an ad in a magazine. They are paying influencers to help them market their services to a targeted audience. Ultimately brands want to work with people who can help them spread awareness and help them to grow as a company.
Related: How To Land Your First Brand Deal as a Microinfluencer
Now that you know why having an engaged audience is important, let’s go over my top tips for how to build one.
Come Up With a Captivating Instagram Handle
While there is a trend lately to use your full name (or a stage name) as your handle, I am a huge fan of coming up with a username that is captivating. This can be anything from “TravelLover” to “StyleQueen” to my own handle “SweetCarolinaJ“. If you find a name that calls to you, stick with it!
The types of handles I would avoid using are ones that have a lot of random numbers and symbols. If there is a number that is meaningful to you or your business, then by all means include it! For example “30DayFitness” does a great job of including numbers as do athletes who include their jersey numbers in the handle. However, accounts that use too many numbers and symbols such as “user321439587!_?+~” are typically seen as fake or spam accounts.
Use this to your advantage and come up with something meaningful so that people know what to expect from you and your page!
Post High Quality Images
Unless you are a celebrity or an outlier, in order to build any kind of audience on social media it is important to have high quality photos. Instagram is primarily a visual platform which means that the quality of you photos matter. This is particularly true if you are in the travel or photography space and want to work with brands in the future. People are drawn to beautiful photos! This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need a fancy camera, just that you want to make your photos visually appealing. Plus brands are much more likely to reach out to work with you if you can produce high quality images that they can use for their own marketing.
Pretend for a moment that you are a brand looking for an influencer to promote your product, which image would you be most interested in?
The one to the right, correct? Where you can actually see the product.
And if you were a hotel, which photo promoting your property would you be more interested in?
I am going to guess you chose the image to the right once again, where it is well lit and you can see more features of the property.
All of the above images are mine, however once I learned how to edit my photos and use proper lighting, I found that it was easier to grow an engaged audience.
Post to Instagram Regularly
The more you post, the more you are putting your content out there for people to discover. Posting 1-2 times each day not only shows people that you are serious about your account, but each photo is another opportunity to make it to someone’s explore page.
If you don’t believe that you can gain followers from a single post, check out my post on Instagram Hashtags here where I show off my stats on how I gained over 100 followers from a single post!
Offer Value to Your Audience
Nowadays there is a lot of competition in the online space. With so many talented creators out there, what makes you and your account stand out? Why should people follow you over someone else?
This is by no means meant to discourage you. In fact, I am saying this to hopefully inspire you! Every creator you admire started somewhere and those who have been able to create a successful career are the ones who offer value to their audience. Whether you can teach your followers how to edit their photos on Photoshop or create workout videos filled with exercise tips, everyone has something of value that they can provide to their audience.
One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given is that you don’t need to be an “expert” in what you are teaching. You just need to know more than those who want to learn from you.
Use Relevant Hashtags and Location Tags
Expand your reach by using 25-30 hashtags in each post and tagging your location. Using tags such as #travelblogger or #Miamiblogger help people interested in your niche find you. It also helps brands discover new influencers in a particular niche or area.
If you would like to learn more about how to use hashtags on Instagram, feel free to check out my blog post here.
Engage With Other Instagram Accounts
One of the best ways to get others to notice you is to engage with other accounts. Find people in your niche by searching relevant hashtags. This is often called “following a hashtag” where you search a popular hashtag in your niche then like and comment on accounts that use it. When you support others, they are more likely to return the favor and like, comment, and even follow your work.
Make sure to leave long and thoughtful comments. This helps for two reasons. First, short comments can often be thought of as spam. Second, the longer the comment the more likely it is to be one of the featured comments on the post. When Instagram shows your comment, it allows others who are commenting to check out your page.
Be Authentic
The great thing about social media is that it allows people to share the things that they are most passionate about! So choose a niche that represents you. Building an audience takes a lot of time and effort, so if you are going to put in the work, you may as well create something that you will enjoy.
If you have found this article helpful, be sure to check out our posts on blogging, branding, and social media tips here.
Also feel free to pin this on Pinterest so you can refer back to it at a later date.
