Tip 1: Optimise your Instagram bio
The first tip I have for you on how to get followers is to optimise your bio. Your bio includes everything above the feed; it’s really the first thing that people are going to see when they come to your profile.
If your bio isn’t optimised, then you’re going to lose a lot of the traffic that comes to your Instagram.
What is going to happen is that users are going to come to your account, and they’re going to decide within less than five seconds whether you are worth following or not.
If you’ve got a lot of traffic coming in, but your bio isn’t actually optimised, then you’re just going to lose those potential followers and even clients. This is why I would say that your bio is the number one thing that’s going to determine whether a browser to your profile is actually going to become a follower. If you have a business then, in your bio, you definitely want to include something called a niche statement. Your niche statement essentially tells people how you can help them. Your niche statement might tweak and evolve as you grow, and that’s okay! This is mine right now:
But if you don’t have a business, and you’re simply a content creator, then another option that you can do is to have your content pillars here. Your content pillars are 2 – 4 “themes” that your content centres around. For example, before I niched down my content, my pillars were property, investing, social media and content.
Then I actually grew that into a business, which is why I now have a new niche statement. Another thing you definitely want to include in your bio is a credibility factor. So this is something that’s going to build your credibility and authority with potential followers so that it entices them to actually follow you. You need to think about what makes you stand out here. For example, mine is that we have generated over £670k from Instagram inside the Content Accelerator. Here are examples from some of my students, who were in the property niche:
If you don’t yet have any numbers to put on there, then simply drawing people’s attention to the best part of your content is a really good idea. For example, you might say “Look out for my weekly Reels” or “My stories will make you laugh” or just something that is memorable! If you want a more in depth step by step tutorial on how to write the perfect Instagram bio, then make sure to read this blog post here, because that’s going to guide you through everything.
https://inabakalova.com/2022/03/22/2-how-create-the-perfect-instagram-bio-in-3-steps/
Tip 2: Jump on trends with Reels
The next tip on how to get followers organically and easily is to use Reels. I bet you knew this one, right? But there’s no doubt about it: Reels are absolutely the fastest way to grow organically on Instagram right now. I know that they can be an absolute pain to create when you haven’t really done them before. They seem really time consuming. I’m going to give you a really quick hack that’s actually going to make this a whole lot easier:
Don’t feel like you have to reinvent the wheel
A mistake I made when I first started creating Reels is that I was reinventing the wheel every single time. So my first Reels were literally like mini films in themselves, and they would all be the maximum length. They took me hours to create! What I’ve learned is that you don’t need to start trends; you need to simply find something that’s trending and then jump on that bandwagon.
Your first step is to actually spend some time looking at other people’s Reels. So either in the Instagram app, or you can go to TikTok and look at the content there. As you’re watching all of these random reels, you just want to start thinking about how you can actually adapt those ideas to your niche. The key here is that you are not copying other people’s content; that just doesn’t work. You want to be getting ideas from different niches, and then thinking: “Okay, how can I adapt and change this so that it works for my niche?”
When you get an idea for a Reel that you can do, just make sure you write that idea down somewhere on your phone or in your notes so that you can save the sound that was used for that Reel too. Typically, a lot of these trending sounds are actually way shorter between 5-10 seconds long. Once you have them saved and when you go to create Reels, you can just go through the sounds that you’ve saved, find the relevant ideas, and then recreate that reel, but for your niche. With this method you’ll be able to create way more content than if you were just starting from scratch every time.
The key here is to just do as many as you can. If you want more in depth training on how to really explode your reach with Reels, then make sure you read this blog post where I show you how one of my Reels went viral.
Tip 3: Choose a realistic posting schedule for you – and stick to it
The next tip is to be consistent. You want to have a posting schedule and that’s going to be different for everyone. You just need to make sure that it’s something that you can actually commit to. But once you have that posting schedule, you need to stick to it. I actually looked at the data of when I was posting really frequently consistently versus when I had a few days/a week off. When I went back to Instagram afterwards and started posting, my content was reaching far fewer people. So it definitely is true that Instagram just doesn’t like it if you are inconsistent and sporadic.
We want to be posting more than once a week, so around 3-5 times a week or more if you can. Whatever you decide, you just need to actually stick to it and be consistent with it. Not only is this going to help you with the algorithm, but it’s also going to help you with your followers, because then they know that they can expect content from you regularly. It’s really very simple:
The more content you put out, the more people you’re going to reach
Tip 4: Pool Audiences with Instagram Live
If you’re still wondering how to get followers, then the next tip is to pool audiences with someone else in your niche. The way you do that is by identifying someone who has a similar audience and ideal client to you, but who isn’t a direct competitor. So just to give you an example: If I was a gym owner, then I could pool audiences with a fitness coach or a fitness influencer. This is because we both have the same audience and the same ideal client, but we’re not exactly direct competitors. What you want to do next is you want to jump on Instagram Live with them, and this is going to combine both of your audiences.
Every time I’ve done an Instagram Live, I have had a ton of followers afterwards. The reason that collaborating over Instagram Live is so effective is because you don’t need to build up the trust with this new audience from scratch. You already have that because you’re collaborating with someone that they already followed, and that they already respect! Arranging these lives regularly can actually be quite time consuming, and I find that this is why most people don’t tend to do them consistently.
How to organise Instagram Lives seamlessly
You want to have a really efficient process and workflow for actually scheduling these lives. Now what I suggest is that you have your calendar link, and in the description of that calendar link, you also have a link to a Google Doc. In this Google Doc, you’re just going to have an Instagram Live brief. So in that brief, you want to have all of the information that someone might need to know when you’re doing an Instagram Live together. Some ideas:
- How do they join the live?
- What will you be talking about?
- How will the conversation flow (roughly)?
- How long will it last?
- What should they do, if they want to reschedule?
Putting all of this into a Google Doc is just going to ensure that all the information is there so they can read through it themselves, and they don’t have to ask you all these questions. And then if they’re happy, and they want to book and go ahead, then they can just book by your calendar link with this process. It’s so much easier and you’ll be able to do at least one (if not two!) lives a week. At the end of the Live, just make sure that you download that video and you save it because then you can post it as an IGTV. Clever, hey?
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