How to grow your Instagram organically
In today’s digital age, Instagram is more than just a photo-sharing app; it’s a powerful platform for building your brand, connecting with an audience around the world, and driving real business results. Whether you’re an influencer, a small business owner, or just someone looking to share their passion with the world, mastering the art of how to grow your Instagram can open doors to endless opportunities.
Growing organically on Instagram
Growing organically on Instagram is crucial for several reasons. It means that you have grown your Instagram following WITHOUT purchasing any fake followers or bots. Don’t do that. Not only are fake followers a huge turn off to others (because we all see them and know they are fake) but brands often include in contracts that none of your followers can be bought. Buying fake followers could cost you brand deals.
Growing organically ensures your account is authentic and credible. When your followers are genuinely interested in your social media content, such as your Instagram reels they engage more, creating a loyal and active community. This organic engagement not only boosts your visibility on the platform’s algorithm but also attracts more real followers who are likely to stick around. Like attracts like as they say!
Additionally, brands and potential partners look for influencers with authentic, engaged audiences, making organic growth essential for monetization opportunities. Organic, growth on Instagram will create genuine connections, sustainable engagement, and long-term success on Instagram.
Establish your niche for faster Instagram growth
As Michelle Phan says, “The beauty of the Internet is there’s a niche market for everything, and if you can focus on it, you can build a sustainable and viable business of it.” You can’t be everything to everyone, but you can be the pre-eminent authority on something to the right somebody.
For example, would you follow someone’s advice about the best training tips or snacks for a cat that doesn’t have a cat or isn’t a vet? No? Me neither! But if that person was a cat enthusiast with several adorable cats they post about regularly? All of a sudden, what they have to say about furry felines carries a lot more weight.
By focusing on a specific area, you can establish yourself as an expert, building credibility and trust with your audience. A defined niche provides clear direction for Instagram content creation, ensuring consistency and reinforcing your brand identity.
Find YOUR niche, whether it’s being an expert wrangler of fussy children, a dedicated keto diet follower, or a beauty bargain-hunting master. It doesn’t matter what the niche is, so long as you have expertise and street cred in the area.
In the examples listed above, the first influencer might target parents of kids aged 0-5 and elementary teachers, the second might try to get in front of CrossFitters, gym buffs, or people on a weight-loss journey, and the third might be hunting for Gen Z’ers, makeup artists, and babes on a budget.
Finding your target audience will be much easier when you know which problems you can help solve for various groups of Instagram users. Get to know your ideal customer, also known as your avatar.
Who is she? Where does she live? What stuff does she purchase? What’s her household like? As you create your content, imagine you’re speaking to that one person. You’ll find that as you create content that resonates with your instagram profile audience, you will see your follower count grow.
Best niches for growing an Instagram account
Some of the best niches that consistently attract high engagement and follower growth include:
- Lifestyle: Showcasing daily routines, travel adventures, and personal stories.
- Fashion: Sharing style tips, outfit inspiration, and the latest trends.
- Health & Fitness: Offering workout routines, nutrition advice, and wellness tips.
- Beauty & Skincare: Providing makeup tutorials, skincare routines, and product reviews.
- Food: Posting recipes, food photography, and restaurant reviews.
- Travel: Documenting travel experiences, tips, and breathtaking destinations.
- Technology: Reviewing gadgets, tech news, and digital innovation.
Remember these topics are high level, very broad niches. You’ll want to narrow the focus from health and wellness to postpartum moms or active women over 60 for example. If you choose food, what type of food content would you create? Healthy meals that cost under $10/pp? 101 ways to eat toast?
My client Jessica Serna of My Curly Adventures is in the travel space but she focuses 85% of her content on discovering the magic of Texas. My client Lorraine Ladish of Viva Fifty focuses on lifestyle, health and wellness for women over the age of 50 with her brand, VivaFifty.
How Instagram engagement drives growth
Regardless of where you are on your Instagram journey, you have to be are aware of the algorithm. The algorithm is what determines what content is shown to different audiences across Instagram. A lot of your work to build up your following is to demonstrate to the algorithm that people are liking, engaging, saving and sharing your content.
When you create engaging, captivating, interesting content that provides value to others, you are increasing the chances that your audience will engage in it. Everytime someone likes comments or shares your post, it’s a message to the algorithm. The more often that your audience does that, the more you’re increasing your chances of the algorithm serving up your content to others.
By getting in front of people who don’t already follow you increases your chances of growing your following. So yes, your growth is dependent on how great, interesting and valuable your content is.
Instagram engagement strategies for influencers
- Post engaging, high quality content.
- Engage with your own content – comment on it, post to Instagram stories, save it
- Reply to comments
- Post consistently so people know your account is active
- Use CTAs (Calls to Action)
Post consistently for more organic growth
When you post consistently, the algorithm will start to favor your content. In an ideal world, your content will be shown on the explore page as well as more frequently on your own follower’s pages.
By posting consistently, you’re teaching your followers to count on you for new content on a regular basis. You’re demonstrating that if they visit your page, you’ll have new, fresh content for them to engage with. Personally I don’t like when people I follow don’t post regularly. They drop off my radar and I stop going to their page because there’s nothing new.
Ensure you have a content calendar with different Instagram posts going live on different days of the week. In an ideal world, you can plan to have similar types of content going up on certain days. Better yet, use an app to schedule Instagram posts to save you time. Plan out your social media strategy to help you grow organically.
Consistency builds that trust with your audience by you continually showing up with new content. Regular posting is also great because you can create trendy, very timely relevant content, continuing to stay top of mind with your followers. At the end of the day, posting consistently helps you stay relevant with your followers.
What is a good posting schedule for Instagram?
In deciding when to post, there’s a number of factors to consider. Where do a majority of your followers live? In which time zone? When’s best for you to post? When are your followers most active?
As you explore a good posting schedule, try posting during different days of the week and at different times of the day. I recommend you do a few posts on a particular day in the morning and then try another few posts in the evening on a Saturday for example.
Before you commit, look at the analytics and metrics of each post to help you decide what’s the best posting schedule for you and your audience.
Non-Organic Instagram growth
Non-organic growth on Instagram is any method of increasing your following by way of purchasing followers, using engagement pods, giveaway loops or automated bots to respond to content.
The long and short of it is, don’t do it. We can all see it’s fake. It’s inauthentic activity and fake people commenting or liking your stuff. Your real audience will find it to be a huge turnoff and the algorithm will penalize you.
At the end of the day, while organic growth is slow, it’s the only way to go.
Why you should never buy followers for Instagram
You should never buy followers because it’s inauthentic growth. Everyone can see you bought your following. It doesn’t build any trust with your real audience. Buying followers will also cost you brand campaigns. It’s written into agreements that you can’t have bought followers. See the screenshot below from an agreement I recently worked on. Buying followers also is just gross and spammy.
Do giveaways help grow Instagram followers?
Theoretically giveaways can help you grow your followers but it’s also not considered organic growth. Their effectiveness and retention hasn’t been proven.
Giveaways used to be a big thing a couple years ago. I don’t see them happening as much anymore. Influencers did them to have huge jumps in their following by partnering with others to expand their reach. The giveaway requirements were to follow all the influencers involved in order to be entered to win a prize.
The reality is that one’s audience might have increased in followers after the giveaway. Yet oftentimes the audience would then fall off. If you’re forced to follow someone who you wouldn’t normally follow, after the giveaway, you’d unfollow. And that’s just what people did. The Influencer doing the giveaway didn’t retain those new followers.
A lot of Influencers also didn’t follow Instagram’s giveaway rules for compliance which made a lot of giveaways seem shady and get a bad name, rightfully so.
How many followers do you need to make money on Instagram
The number of followers you need on Instagram to make money varies but I’ve seen accounts with as little as 3,500 be able to monetize. The greater your engagement is within your audience, the more it helps your chances to monetize with less followers. Having a really well defined niche and content that is high quality and produces a lot of value also helps you make money.
Typically, micro-influencers (1,000 – 10,000 followers) can earn through partnerships, sponsored posts, and free products, with potential earnings increasing as your follower count and engagement grow.
The reality is that growing your Instagram organically takes time and effort, there’s no doubt about that. But the rewards of building a genuine and engaged community are invaluable. Embrace authenticity, connect with your audience, and watch your influence flourish naturally.
Now that you’ve got the steps to grow your following on Instagram, here’s what you need to do to get to 10k followers on Instagram.
Pro tip : If you’ve loved this article, sign up for my weekly newsletter HERE. It’s full of industry insights, brand negotiation tips and scripts, events I’m attending, perspective on how to grow your Influencer business and more. I keep it pretty scrappy and real – would love you to join us over there! CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP.