How to grow your Instagram audience in 2023

Table of contents:

• Prepare your account for promotion
• Use hashtags
• Hold contests
• Order advertising from bloggers
• Prerequisites before promotion

Prepare your account for promotion

Before you attract users to your account, you need to do some preliminary work:

• Analyze the target audience (age, gender, interests, etc.), understand which profiles its representatives are subscribed to and which bloggers they follow. The better the company knows its target audience, the more accurately targeting ads will be set up, the more correctly bloggers or partners will be chosen for cooperation. Correspondingly, there will be more return on promotion and less cost for it.
• Research your competitors. You should know which companies offer similar products or services. Analyze their website and social networks with the help of appropriate services. You will understand how competitors differ from your company, what they write about, what promotions and sales they hold, what contests and giveaways they have. Find out how your audience reacts to this or that information in order to highlight your advantages and set yourself apart from your competitors.
• Make a content plan for Instagram posts* and write the first 9-12 posts. If the account looks empty, with design errors, it won't be trustworthy and, from experience, few people will subscribe to it.
• Translate the profile into a business account. A new account created in Instagram* is assigned the "Personal" type, which has limitations. For example, you won't be able to see the number of visitors to the account, profile subscriber data (their weekly growth, geography, age, gender) and statistics (for example, the number of views and reach of each post, video, story). Also, you can't run targeted ads in your personal account. But in essence, these two account types are not much different. For example, the "Authors" type shows daily stats about subscriber growth, while the business account shows weekly stats.

Don't be shy about asking people you know to subscribe to your account.

So ask colleagues, friends, relatives to sign up for the account and make a post about it in your feed or storis. I've noticed that people I know are more willing to repost a post you've written than to come up with a text themselves.

Mention Instagram on all of your resources

Subscribe to competitors' subscribers or like their posts.

Go to the accounts where the target audience is concentrated and choose the appropriate users. Next, like or subscribe to their posts. Some of the users will want to see who has liked or friended them. And, if your account is interesting, they're likely to subscribe to it. However, if the subscriptions are equal to the followers, it may make users distrustful.

Therefore, I recommend unsubscribing from your subscribers periodically. Don't worry, they won't get a notification about it, you won't offend anyone :-)

Use hashtags

In each publication indicate the hashtags, connected with the subject of the company.

For example, if your company is engaged in car-care center in Yekaterinburg, specify the hashtag #autoservice_Yekaterinburg. Hashtags can be selected, for example, in TopTag and Instatag.

Hold contests

Agree on a joint contest with other accounts where your target audience is, and sponsor a gift. Then both you and your partners will benefit from the collaboration:

You'll attract new subscribers to your company's account.
They'll hold an activity on their profile and raffle off a gift at your expense: -)
I recommend looking for an affiliate account with at least 5 thousand subscribers. Otherwise, there might not be many participants in the contest.

Order advertising from bloggers

Choose bloggers or business accounts which write about similar subjects, or if their target audience is similar to yours in some way (e.g. age, gender, interests).

For example, your company is engaged in the production of youth clothes. Look for bloggers who write about fashion, clothing and social life. I recommend flower store owners to cooperate with blogs that talk about weddings or wedding preparations. This is where you can advertise wedding bouquets or floral arrangements for weddings.

Keep in mind, the bigger the blogger, the more expensive the advertising. Microbloggers (who have less than 10 thousand subscribers) are unlikely to bring your company's account a large number of subscribers, because their posts have small coverage.

Bonus: get 50 free likes right now!

Prerequisites before promotion

• Check your profile with a short checklist before you start promoting your Instagram account:
• Whether your description is complete. It's clear what your account is about, and the title is related to the theme. Even if you use your first or last name, write the field of activity.
• The profile is translated into a business page. Read how to do this in the detailed Business Profile Guide on Instagram. 
• Selling and tracking stats without this option will be difficult. You can keep a regular page if you're blogging. But remember, as soon as you want to take something for advertising, you still have to show the advertiser your stats. And it's only available for the business profile.
• There are 12 posts in the feed. No one will subscribe to an empty account, you have to fill the first visitor screen. This is exactly 12 posts, but you can write more. Pictures must reflect the essence of your topic, texts - to be useful and capacious. How to do it? Look at the posts you save on Instagram or other social networks, and do by analogy.
• No selling content. Until you get your first 1,000 subscribers, use useful and engaging content. Don't be repulsed by the "they're selling something again" impression from the first second - it won't help you promote your account.

Try the standard methods that everyone advises
Collected the basic tips that are most often repeated in articles on "How to promote Instagram* by yourself from scratch". There is no need to abandon them - check on yourself. The main thing - to get experience.