Growing Your Instagram Followers for Your Business: Best Practices

Running a business is a numbers game. It’s about the number of customers you have, sales, the number of successful years, and the number that represents customer reviews, among others. Growing your Instagram followers for your business is equal parts challenging and rewarding.

Pushing to get new followers every day is a tough climb for most. But with the right tools and strategy, you can power up your follower growth and improve your business performance. Here’s your guide to the best practices for growing your Instagram followers for your business.

Growing Your Instagram Followers for Your Business: What’s a Good Number?

Watching businesses and influencers on Instagram drawing in thousands of followers per post and raking in the dollars can either inspire you or frustrate you. Every brand wants to be the next big thing on the platform. The many successes made possible by Instagram make growing your followers for your business seem easy peasy.

For businesses, follower count is not just a vanity metric. It determines your authority in your niche/industry, credibility, page value, and how much you can make. It can keep doors to more opportunities wide open or tightly shut. It can attract even more followers or leave you unnoticed. When it comes to growing your Instagram followers for your business, what’s a good number?

It depends on several factors, including your niche, the audience demographics you’re targeting, and your business goals. Influencers, for example, must reach a certain number of followers to rank higher and earn more. You can be a nano-influencer if you have 1,000 to 10,000 followers. But you’ll need to go above 10k followers to become a micro-influencer.

To get a good idea of how many followers you need for your business, check out other brands within your niche. You can aim for as many followers or more than what your competitors have. But it would be best if you look beyond their follower count.

Engagement rate is a more critical metric than follower count. If you have 20,000 followers, but only a tiny percentage actively engages with your content on Instagram, then you’re performing poorly. If you only have 2,000 followers, but hundreds of them engage with you daily, then you’re a superstar, at least within your community. With higher engagement, you can have more significant opportunities to grow your Instagram followers for your business.

Growing Your Instagram Followers: The Whys

While engagement is a better indicator of business performance, steadily growing your Instagram followers is still crucial to your overall growth. New followers can translate into additional likes, comments, views, shares, and sales. Even after you’ve reached the 10k or 50k mark, you should keep growing your Instagram followers for your business. Here are all the reasons why.

• More followers convey credibility. Users are more likely to give you severe consideration and deem you reliable when you have built a decent following. A high follower count increases your likelihood of attracting new followers.
• More followers can lead to more earnings. For influencers, reaching a particular tier in follower numbers can mean higher payouts. For businesses, new followers are new opportunities to make more sales.
• More followers mean expanded influence for brands whose goal is to become an authority or a leader within a particular area of expertise. Follower growth can represent increased awareness for a cause, significant social or political influence, and more connections to tap.
• More followers increase your organic reach. Your current follower base creates a network of potential new followers you can reach quickly and organically. Each new follower you gain can branch out in many ways to connect you to other followers.
• More followers determine the strength of your brand. Growing your Instagram followers for your business will help you build a stronger community. The stronger your community is, the longer your brand will be successful.

Growing Your Instagram Followers Organically: The Hows

Growing your Instagram followers is considered by many as the golden standard for growth. It takes time and dedication to gain highly engaged and loyal followers. Here are five innovative, organic strategies for growing your Instagram followers for your business.

1. Reaching New Audiences by Conquering Instagram Reels

Reels are a relatively brand-new format for Instagram and mimic TikTok’s widely popular short-form videos. With Reels, you can use visual, audio, and other creative tools to create more entertaining content.

With users mindlessly scrolling through their feeds without actually seeing and appreciating posts, making them stop in their tracks is tricky. Videos compel users to pause their scrolling so they can see more. Videos also require a longer viewing time than still photos. This will help you increase the number of views and even prompt viewers to like, comment, or share your post. The higher your views and engagement, the higher your odds of having your Reel featured on Instagram Explore. It’s where you can get discovered by new followers.

2. Growing Your Instagram Followers for Your Business Through a Rewards Program

Growing your Instagram followers for your business through a rewards program has been proven effective by many big brands. Rewards such as discounts or freebies in exchange for followers facilitate a mutually beneficial arrangement and one that many customers find difficult to resist. Here are some ideas you can use for your rewards program:

1. Shoppers can earn additional points or gift cards by following your account on Instagram. 
2. Followers can earn extra points by inviting their friends to follow you via user-generated content. When tagged friends hit your follow button, they can get these bonus points.
3. Followers can become members of your Loyalty Program and enjoy special perks by bringing over new followers.
4. Customers can earn a free service (manicure, foot spa, etc.) or dessert on their next visit when they follow your Instagram account. 
5. Followers can earn loyalty points by sharing your featured post so you can reach more audiences. 

3. Increasing Your Visibility by Using Geotags in Your Posts

Hashtags are not the only valuable tags you can add to your posts to optimize your content for relevant searches. Tagging your location is relevant to your brand/target audience works the same way in growing your Instagram followers for your business. Tagging your business location is, of course, given when you have a physical store. If yours is purely an online business, you can still tag locations such as:

• Your general vicinity, such as your city. 
• A famous landmark or tourist spot near you. 
• Areas frequented by your target market. 
• The location of an event you’re attending. 
• Place where your customers are using your products or where they can use your products. 

4. Encouraging Audience Participation by Running Instagram Polls

You can increase your engagement and visibility by running Instagram polls in Stories, Reels, and regular feed posts. Polls also allow you to interact directly with your followers and get to know them better. You can get as creative as you want with your polls.

Use polls to find out what your customers think about a new product. Ask your customers for input about your next holiday theme. Poll results are real-time and actionable insights you can use to enhance your marketing and growth strategies.

5. Growing Your Instagram Followers for Your Business With Interactive Stickers

Stories are a huge favorite among Instagram users, and you can make a story even more engaging with interactive stickers. Stickers like the Questions, Emoji slider, and Quiz give users a fun break from the repetitious content that fills their feeds. Giving your followers an entertaining and interactive story-viewing experience makes them more likely to engage with your other content. And with higher engagement comes greater follower appeal.

How to Grow Your Instagram Business Account Like a Pro

Growing your Instagram business account like a pro involves using tried-and-tested promotional tools that require investment. Some tools don’t require marketing knowledge or experience, and others that would deliver more bang for your buck with the help of experts. Let’s take a look at each one.

How to Grow Instagram Followers for a Small Business

Growing Instagram followers for a small business is often challenging, given the fierce competition on the platform. Here are a few options that are worth a try. 

1. Set up and optimize Instagram Shopping

Make shopping convenient for your customers by setting up your shop on the platform. Growing your Instagram followers for your business requires preparing your shop for sales by creating and managing your product catalog. It also requires making your products easy to discover with product tags and encouraging customers to buy from you through Instagram’s promotional offers.

2. Collaborate with Instagram Creators

Collaborating with creators will help you get discovered by new audiences. Creators will also give your brand greater authenticity and the benefit of their creativity. When you use Instagram’s Creator Marketplace, you’ll be able to “find the best creators to promote your brand with advanced search and recommendation features.” You can select potential creator partners according to your budget, the creator’s follower count and portfolio, and the specific collaboration project you have in mind, etc.

3. Team up with nano influencers

Nano influencers are an excellent choice for growing your Instagram followers for your business for several reasons. First, they’re cheaper and are more flexible about what they can get in return for their promotional and creative services.

Influencers might agree to a partnership in exchange for complimentary products. Second, although their audience base is small, a niche audience/community is typically dedicated and highly engaged. So you can be sure that the people you’ll reach through the influencer are genuinely interested and will become your new followers.

Growing Your Instagram Followers for Your Business With Instagram Tools

Growing your Instagram followers for your business through boosted posts is SOP these days. The good news is that you don’t need any knowledge or experience in digital marketing or SEO to get started.

Boosting a post is the simplest way to convert a post into an only takes a few steps. You can reach more people by boosting a post and specifying your target audience. You can choose how long your boosted post will run according to your budget. You can also promote an Instagram Story, a Reel, or feed posts with product tags.

When you’re ready to level up your ads game, you can build multi-platform campaigns via the Ads Manager. Campaigns allow you to create ads across Instagram, Facebook, and more so you can reach a broader audience to fuel your growth.

Instagram Followers Growth Service

If you need expert help growing your Instagram followers for your business, you can subscribe to an Instagram followers growth service.

Remember that accelerating your follower growth should not compromise your brand’s integrity, so stay away from services that instantly deliver thousands of followers. Your priority should be high-quality Instagram followers and not a quick fix using counterfeit followers.

A good Instagram growth service should have advanced audience targeting capability and social media expertise for organic content promotion. Growing your Instagram followers for your business with the help of a growth service should mean getting real followers. Users who are genuinely interested via precise audience targeting and skillful and human-powered promotion. You should expect a gradual increase in follower numbers within a short period.

The growth service does all the heavy lifting involved in tracking down the right audience for your brand and putting your content in front of them. This way, you can spend more time creating unique content for your page. This leads to potential new followers not hesitating to hit your follow button when they discover you.

Growing Your Instagram Followers for Your Business the Right Way

You could fill a whole book with strategies for growing your Instagram followers for your business. Some are more effective than others, but only some formulas work the same for everybody. Your type of business, brand image, business goals, and target audience, among many others, will determine the right strategies to help you grow.

Getting expert help from a service with a proven track record in Instagram growth will take all the guesswork out of the equation. Path Social is such a company. You can rest assured that your business will grow with real followers who are genuinely interested and highly engaged. Path Social achieves this through its proprietary AI technology. Designed for precise audience targeting, combined with the established content promotion strategies employed by their in-house social media specialists.

Trusted by more than 20 thousand Instagram brands across all niches and industries, Path Social is your best bet for lasting and rewarding growth. Start growing and gaining Instagram followers today!