Instagrammers and other social media marketers have benefited from the recent COVID and work-from-home limitations, but only if they have been providing their followers with excellent, compelling material. While their followers were stuck inside, interesting visual content linked those with wanderlust to groups all over the world. However, posting attractive photos is only part of what’s required to expand your Instagram following.

You’ll need a well thought-out plan.

There are a lot of factors to think about when posting to social media, such as how to utilise tags and captions, the best time of day to publish, the optimal frequency of posting, and the types of content that are most likely to resonate with your audience.

Can you recommend five proven strategies for boosting Instagram followers right this minute?

Involve influential people.
Increase your exposure and interaction by making use of hashtags, tags, captions, and @mentions.
Increase the scope of your material.
Post at odd hours and on weekends.
Try new things and see what works.
To begin, you must have a standard.
Significant year-over-year gains in followers were seen by Instagram account holders: By the year 2020, 52% of all accounts had between 100 and 1000 followers. About a third (34.7%) of all accounts in 2021 had between 100 and 1,000 followers. Because so many of those accounts had gained enough traction to enter the next tier, those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers now make up 45.7% of all accounts, up from 38.0% in 2020.
Get your starting point so you can evaluate progress. Total the amount of likes and comments, then divide that total by the number of posts to find the average overall involvement. To get your engagement rate, just divide that sum by the total number of your account’s followers.

The average interaction rate on Instagram is 5.86%. To determine your target, you may use either your current engagement rate or Instagram’s average as a benchmark.

Remember the power of influencers

There are a lot of people to follow on Instagram, with 1.4 million active members all across the world. More than half of Instagram’s most popular users have 100 million followers, the survey claims. One way to increase your impact is to devise a plan to use their clout.
The initial stages of your influencer campaign need not be financially rewarding. As a first step, try implementing the aforementioned suggestions for getting your material in front of an influencer’s audience. Test your ideas with a nano-influencer before committing to a larger sponsored influencer campaign.

Use hashtags, tags, captions, and @mentions to increase exposure and participation, as a second nugget of wisdom.
Captions, hashtags, tags, and @mentions are all ways to increase the exposure of your material. Since the difference between tagging and @mentioning seems to be the most confusing to Instagram users, I’ll start there. While these two things are distinct, they both attract the interest of another Instagram user.
The proper way to employ hashtags is a topic of heated discussion. The research suggests that people make liberal use of them. However, Instagram suggests using only three to five hashtags per post on the Creator’s Account. My recommendation is to see what resonates most with your target demographic.

Use a wider variety of content

In its early days, Instagram was a dream come true for amateur photographers. You may become an Instagram sensation just by taking a picture on your phone (it doesn’t even have to be very good), experimenting with a filter, posting the result with a clever caption, and hash-tagging it. This adolescent’s use of social media has matured. Four distinct types of video, including live, are now supported for uploading.

But if you’re a real stickler for still photography, think about displaying your work in rotating photo galleries. Hootsuite discovered that “on average, their carousel posts get 1.4x more reach and 3.1x more engagement than regular posts on Instagram.”

Post on Instagram at night and on the weekends

After a long day at work or before turning in for the night, many Instagram users find the app to be a welcome distraction. These results make sense, given that most people have daytime jobs.
Between 6 and 9 at night is prime posting time. Inversely, the hours between 5 and 8 in the morning are the most dangerous. Sunday has the most engagement of any day of the week, so make sure to schedule some posts for then.

Like every other report takeaway, this one requires testing with the intended audience. The workday might be when people are most interested in your Excel tutorials or other business-related articles.

Bonus Thoughts: Check, adjust, check, and adjust

Although it isn’t emphasised too heavily in the report, keeping tabs on your progress and adjusting your strategy based on what’s working and what isn’t is crucial to your success. You may learn more about your reach, engagement, followers, and the efficacy of your Instagram ads with the help of Instagram’s built-in analytics tools. Hootsuite, Iconosquare, and SproutSocial are just a few of the vendors who offer advanced analytics with downloadable, editable reports.

When you’ve settled on a reporting tool, you should check out Zontee Hou’s “Which Social Media Measurements Matter Most?” The Customer’s Experience Is Crucial. She draws a diagram of the customer’s journey, outlining key data at each stage.