I am so excited to share with y'all how I reached 2,000 Instagram followers. On Christmas 2014, I decided to turn my Instagram into a fashion, beauty, food, and lifestyle feed. I was able to reach 2,000 followers in just two months. Before I get started, I just want to make sure to mention results might be different for everyone. I cannot guarantee these methods will work for everyone, but it worked for me, and I believe it could be useful to many others.
If you are interested in tracking your progress, I recommend creating an account at Iconosquare formerly known as Statigr.am. This will allow you to see how many followers you are getting each week, who is unfollowing you, which hashtags are working, and many more awesome stats. One of my favorite stats tells you when is the best time of day to post, each day of the week. I know when to plan my photos, and to rest at less ample times. You also get images like the one above at Iconosquare, which you can email yourself, and keep track of your progress in images. I am still a little new to Iconosquare, so I am probably going to skip over a lot of other benefits of using this site, but I will follow up later with a blog post dedicated just to Iconosquare.
I also did not understand very much about Instagram when I first started, but now it makes a lot more sense thanks to advice from other bloggers, such as Quick Sprout, in the article "The Science of Instagram: How to Get More Followers and Likes". Here, I discovered what are the most popular hashtags and filters. This is also where I discovered Iconosquare. There is so much information in this article, I highly recommend reading it thoroughly and bookmarking it, because you will be referring to this article over time.
If I were to give one tip to immediately start increasing your followers, it would be to like as many photos from other accounts as possible. I will warn that Instagram does have caps on how many followers, likes, hashtags and characters allowed per hour. You can read more about that here at Jenn's Trends. I discovered this one day when I thought following a lot of people would increase my followers. After so many followings, I had to wait until the next hour to add more. I suggest liking many photos before you spend time following a ton of people. You are also only allowed to follow 7,500 accounts on Instagram. The reason for this was to keep spammers to a limit.
Another tip I want to share is about learning how to target hashtags when you are liking photos. I am a fan of Ipsy and Julep. I get their monthly subscription boxes, and there are thousands of others with this same interest. What I like to do is go to these two hashtags, #ipsy and #julep, for example, and like as many of the people with similar stuff as myself. Or if I go on vacation, I will look for similar tourist photos under more specific hashtags, such as #worldaquarium. I find that I get a lot of followers this way, but I cannot say for a fact that it is more effective than liking random photos under the Discover or Populars page on Instagram. But I can say I get a lot of followers. I think you find more solid followers this way, than just liking popular posts. I find that accounts with less followers are more likely to follow back and stay a follower than more popular accounts, but it is not always the case.
Also, make sure you post high quality photos. I recommend posting a few photos throughout the day. I do not know how many is too many yet, but I myself post between three and twelve photos a day. Every now and then I find my less quality photos are still getting likes and comments, but you will get more followers if your lighting and focus is done well. The thumbnail of your image should be clear to make out from afar. I would recommend looking into online education for beginner's photography at websites, such as MOOC and Open2Study. I sell items on Etsy, and one of the benefits of doing that is the education available to sellers. My first product photos in 2009 looked nothing like they do now. I learned from taking many pictures, and reading advice from other sellers and bloggers, as well as these online education sites. Everything I know is self-taught.
I just want to leave one last word about how much time I spend on Instagram. Typically I am on Instagram between two and twelve hours a day. On average, I would say I spend six hours a day on Instagram. I also have other work, so the only way I am able to post so many pictures is to take pictures ahead of time, and release them little by little. When I first started posting on Instagram, I would post all of my pictures at once, and then have nothing else to post for the rest of the day. And this is not as effective. So make sure you build an inventory on your phone or elsewhere to post throughout the day, so that you can use Iconosquare and discover your best time to post pictures.
I hope this article was useful. If there are any questions, please leave them below. I will follow up with another post if I get a lot of questions. If not, I will still write a post about Iconosquare once I learn a little more about it. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @dressdynamicdallas. I also have a YouTube channel, where I will also be posting a video about "How to Get 2000 Instagram Follower" in the next week or so. I'd love your feedback.
-xoxo-
Stephanie
