Instagram has over 600 million users that are scrolling through their feeds everyday. People are engaging with their favorite brands on social media and having a strong Instagram profile is a smart move to connect with your audience and grow your brand’s awareness.

These five strategies will help you boost your follower count, increase exposure and engagement and improve your overall once presence.

1. Use hashtags

Using hashtags on Instagram allows people to search for your content easier. Even if someone has never heard of your brand before they will find it through a hashtag and look at your content.

Hashtags allow you to reach a larger audience and increase your exposure. More eyeballs on all of your content = more followers!

Two tools that we use for discovering new and exciting hashtags are Top-Hashtags.com and Hashtagify.me. These apps let you see the highest rating hashtags for your audience and see what posts are currently using them. From there you also see what hashtags your competitors and influencers are using to engage a new audience.

2. Host a contest or giveaway

You always want to encourage your followers to engage and interact with your brand. A sure-fire way of getting them to interact is to host a contest or a free giveaway. Not only does it get the word out about your brand but it can show off your personality as a brand!

Stuck on what contents to run? Here are a few jumping off points:

• “Like My Post to Win” or “Repost this”
• “Selfie” Photo Contest or “share your experience with us!”
• “Follow this link to our website to enter”

For your contest giveaway, be sure that it’s something your audience would enjoy winning!

3. Use Instagram tools

There are so many apps out there to help improve your Instagram marketing from better photo filter options, analytics and scheduling your posts, to finding your key influencers.

These are our favorites:

• Crowdfire -  provides a list of new followers, those who have unfollowed you and gives suggestions of other users that may be interested in your service.
• SnapWidget - Lets you embed your Instagram feed onto your website
• Repost - tool that lets you repost content from your followers

4. Engage with Instagram stories

Instagram Stories allows your followers to see an inside view of your brand. It is great for showing off new products, doing a quick Q&A or giving people a sneak peek into the behind- the- scenes of your brand.

Personalized touches to your Instagram allows your brand to be more relatable and memorable!

5. Post Your Content at the right time

As we have mentioned before, in 10 metrics to pay attention to for social media, posting your content at the right time makes sure that your followers will see it instead of it being stuck at the bottom of their feed.

According to Hootsuite, the best time to post on Instagram is between 12pm-1pm, Monday-Friday. That, of course, can change based on your audience but it is a good place to start.

Several social media management tools like Buffer and CoSchedule that have built-in analytic features giving you the optimal times to post on Instagram for better engagement. We use CoSchedule and love the ‘best time”   feature to post. It takes away all the guessing.

Instagram is a great way to bring more awareness to your brand and when done correctly can engage your audience and followers. Implement some of the strategies above, test your results, and focus on what works for you!

Let us know what works for you on Instagram and comment below.

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