9+1 Evergreen Instagram Growth Hacks and tips to boost your Business

Instagram is a great platform for businesses to extend their branding efforts, and it's also a marketing and sales channel. We're gonna tell you about some Instagram growth hacks to boost your profile and business.

Most of you reading this post probably think Instagram is just for fashion brands and photographers—it's not.

The fashion and photography industries use it effectively for marketing, brand building, and often sales. Other industries can also use it as a social front for their business, share behind-the-scenes images and videos, connect with people, explore new trends, get hiring leads, create a non-formal army of followers and brand ambassadors, and experiment with marketing.

Growth hacking for Instagram is basically a process of rapid experimentation to figure out the quickest way to grow your business on the platform.

The main focus is to grow the business using both conventional and unconventional methods that are low-cost alternatives to traditional approaches like paid shoutouts, Instagram ads, and thunderclaps.

Did you know 80% of Instagram users are outside the US? And about 51% of Instagram users access the platform daily? It's also true that a small percentage of Instagrammers take action after getting inspired by a post. Plus, 90% of brands are on Instagram—and you should be too.

Most businesses are using growth hacks for their Instagram profiles to improve their brand presence, get more followers and likes quickly, and do it all on a low budget. The benefit of using growth hacks is that they organically grow your Instagram followers, making them natural and fitting perfectly into your marketing strategy.

While forums and blogs are flooded with articles on improving Instagram accounts and growth hacks to get tons of followers and likes, there are some evergreen Instagram tips for growth hacking your business.

Here are 10 such tips to follow.

Theme Your Images

Make this a part of your Instagram marketing strategy. Theming your images based on colors, saturation, and hue, and keeping it consistent throughout your profile can land you a lot of followers. Theming creates a sense of uniqueness that flows with your Instagram profile's vibe.

Here are a few tips to get started with theming your Instagram profile:

• Stick with the same filter: Get inspired by other brands or use your own variations (black and white with low saturation is my favorite). Let images blend in with a single filter, or keep it real (no filters).
• Take pictures of the same subject: If it's food, it should only be food; no other random images should break the flow.
• Think about every picture before you post: Does it fit your theme? If not, but it's worth sharing, tweet it, pin it on Pinterest, share it on Facebook, or upload it to your personal Instagram and tag your business. Or, ask a co-worker to do it from their profile.
• Crop all of your images the same way: Go with the traditional square with a white border, or give the background a blurry effect. Make your image narrow and long. When all your images are cropped identically, it makes your feed look soothing and much better.

Take a look at Lauren Conrad’s profile; all the photos are warm-toned and have a hazy vibe. She also has another Instagram profile for her website, where she shares mixed subjects with bright tones.

User Interaction

Take a genuine interest in other users' content too. Search for images and videos using the right hashtags (use allhashtag to generate hashtags, and use and search them too). Drop your opinions in comments, like, or share a tip in a DM. Respond to brand hashtag mentions and media tags, and re-share them on your profile. Users love it when brands interact with them.

Take a look at Amul India. Amul is an Indian dairy initiative that produces milk products. Their profile mostly features user-generated content that looks delicious. Their profile bio openly invites followers and others to contribute using #amul and #amulstories hashtags, which is a great Instagram marketing and growth strategy.

Tag and Win

This is a great Instagram strategy to increase brand awareness using your existing followers. Ask followers to tag people related to an image—it could be an inspirational quote, a funny image, a situation from the office, etc.

Furthermore, it would be more attractive for followers if you offer something in return.

Let’s look at an example to understand this better. A female hair styling brand asks people to tag a person(s) who always has messy hair, and in return, they will randomly choose 2 of them and give them a free haircut or discount coupons for exclusive services.

Hashtag Distribution

You must be well-versed in using the right hashtags for your business. Using too many hashtags can ruin your chances of delivering the right message to followers and looks spammy; while using too few hashtags can decrease your chances of getting more reach and growing organically.

Also, avoid #doing #this #to #your #posts. It’s annoying to read, childish, and will make people unfollow you.

Distributing hashtags is a good idea to balance both conditions. The trick is to use 4-5 powerful hashtags with your main content, i.e., the caption, and post them. Now, take another set of relevant hashtags and post them in the first comment. If you don’t want to clutter your hashtags, bury them beneath dots and line breaks. To make your content look neater, you can separate content and hashtags using comments.

Post in a Pattern

Post images to form a pattern on your profile. Check out this profile; do you see any similarity in the posts?

This profile recently started its Instagram journey and has adopted this growth hack tip. They have successfully created a pattern in their Instagram feed by efficiently using a grid format. The right column is all images and text, and the opposite two columns are plain images. You can experiment with different variations, including color filters, post types (image & video), and different subjects.

Track Your Followers

It's very necessary to keep track of monthly follows and unfollows. It helps businesses keep a record of their efforts and outcomes. Crowdfire is a mobile app that keeps a record of the number of follows and unfollows on your Instagram account. As a special feature, it tracks accounts that have gone inactive in the past one, three, and even six months.

Check this blog to read more about tracking your followers.

Visible CTA

Sometimes getting users to do what you want can be as easy as asking them to do it. While writing a caption, be clear about the CTA you will use and write accordingly. Most popular Instagram CTAs for businesses include asking followers to tag a friend in comments, check the link in the description, order now, limited offer, and DM us.

If you are writing a long caption, you can include the CTA twice—once in the middle of the post and another at the end. Be sure to capitalize the CTA to make it stand out.

Additionally, create a sense of urgency to improve the effectiveness of the post.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories, a new feature that lets you share all the moments of your day, other than the ones you want to keep on your profile. You can share multiple photos and videos, and combined, they will appear together in a slideshow format. The best part of stories is that they only show for 24 hours. Businesses can create and share real or transparent content like insider moments, snaps, and videos that correlate to create a story.

Businesses can take advantage of it and share offers that are bound to Instagram Stories.

Share from Instagram

Instagram offers sharing posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Instead of posting differently on every social network, post on Instagram and then share it on other supported platforms.

Did you know sharing from Instagram to Facebook boosts post impressions on Facebook?

To automate the process, you can use IFTTT recipes, which will automatically share your Instagram posts to Twitter and Facebook. Sharing through Instagram will attract followers from Twitter and Facebook to follow you on Instagram.

Encourage Your Network to Follow

That’s our 10th growth hacking tip. We suggest encouraging your followers, by offering a team lunch, goodies, a day off, or whatever is affordable for your business.

That’s confusing, I know. Ask your co-workers and colleagues to share your Instagram page, promote it, and invite people to like your page. We do not support buying followers but are totally in favor of asking a favor from teammates and colleagues.

In exchange, you can offer them the benefits mentioned above, or whatever is approved by your management.

That’s the end of our 10 evergreen growth hacks for Instagram. Do not apply all the hacks at once, or you will end up messing up your Instagram business account.

These growth hack tips will help you organically increase your Instagram followers and likes on your business profile. If you have any queries or doubts, mention them in the comment section below.