A few years ago I did not give much importance to Instagram as a marketing platform. That all changed last year when I promoted a product from one of my niche site through some pretty big IG accounts. For a few hundred dollars spent I made thousands of dollars and gained many followers. Today I am a believer in the power of Instagram.

It took me a while to see that Instagram is a powerful tool for marketing. Once I got a taste of it’s capabilities I began to learn how it works, how to get more likes and how to gain more followers at an insane rate.

How to get followers on Instagram

This graph shows the growth of my Instagram account from August 2012 to  February 2015

As you can see my followers grew once I started taking Instagram seriously.

It was not magic, I’ll explain how to get followers on Instagram using the techniques I learned.

What is the best time to publish on Instagram?

What is the best time? What is the best day of the week? How many times do you publish?

From my experience and from what I found through research the best time to post in order to get likes, comments and new followers are  2:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. This has also been confirmed by Instagram scheduling service Latergramme as shown in the graph below.

 

Latergramme also added agraph to show the best days of the week to post. According to the graph below there is not a huge difference in  engagement with the days you post.

 

 

Schedule Your Instagram Posts

The Instagram app does not allow you to schedule posts but there are apps that can do this for you. The reason you want to schedule your posts is because most marketers have several accounts and are very busy. Scheduling your posts will keep you constantly interacting and reaching your audience.

Some tools for Scheduling Instagram posts:

• Schedugram : The Schedugram tool allows you to manage multiple Instagram accounts and  schedule posts using a desktop application. This tool, like any great tool has a price, it’s not free, it cost about $20 a month.
• TakeOff : I have already talked about it in the previous point. It’s free and you can manage your mobile phone.
• Latergram : available for mobile is free to sign up and then charges a monthly fee, and it can program publications but like TakeOff, alerts you to do it yourself.

 

Using hashtags

Putting hashtag on your pictures makes a huge difference when it comes to people finding you on Instagram. I realized this one day when looking at my daughters Instagram. She is 13 years old and has a IG account for One Direction Fans with over 20k followers and she accomplished that in 2 months. I asked her how she had so many followers in so little time and her response was that she used hashtags that she knew were trending at the moment, she new that One Direction Fans followed and that she new people searched for everyday. She would add the max of 30 hashtags to each picture. She would add the top 10 trending hashtags, 10 hashtags that One Direction Fans Follow and 10 hashtags that Instagramers use every day ex: (#RP #love #cute #money #TBT ). With in seconds of her posting the pic she would have 20+ likes and at least 3 follows.  She would do this at least 5-10 a day and the account just grew and grew

Here are two sites to figure out which hashtags are good to use  100 most popular hashtags and  TagsForLikes.

Filters most commonly used

Filters play an important role on Instagram. One of the ones I like to use is Valencia, and apparently it is also one of the most popular Instagram filters.

Personally, when I upload a photo I almost always use the same filters.

A good strategy is to use the filter that you see everyone else using at the moment. If you use the same filters you are more likely to get more likes, more comments, more engagement, and more followers.

Huffington Post did a ranking of the filters which could be found here – Every Instagram Filter, Definitively Ranked

Comment, like and follow other Instagram Users

This step is very important. In order to gain followers you need to interact with other people on their page (Do Not Spam). By engage I mean, find pages within your niche and like their page, photos and talk to them in their comment section. By interacting on other pages you get yourself seen by their fans who might click over to look at your page. Once they click over to see your page as long as you have great photos and they are interested in your niche they will follow you.

 

Conclusion

If you follow the advice in this post you will receive many followers quickly. If you have any advice of your own please leave a comment below.