One of the most important things I notice from popular Instagram accounts is that all their photos are personal, humanized, and relatable. What this means is to they take photos that their audience can emotionally connect with, including behind-the-scene shots, current activities they are doing, inspirational scenery, etc. The photos do NOT have to be perfect; the more important thing is to let the audience feel it was taken by another human being, not a “brand.” Social media is about connecting with your audiences, so if you give them great images they draw some sort of emotion to, they will like it, comment on it, and follow you for more great photos.
After studying people’s behavior and reading up a lot of blog posts about effective techniques to get more followers on Instagram, I wanted to share with you 8 simple and practical tips you can implement today. Here they are:
1. Think about your series as stories. People like stories, and enjoy following along a thread and seeing how the stories progress. Add personal hashtags to your series to make them searchable, findable and readable from start to finish.
2. The filters… the feature that made Instagram take off. Filters give beauty and uniqueness to each photo. By making your photo breathless, inspirational, or memorable, people will be more likely to engage with your photo, and want to follow you because they want more beautiful photos.
3. Study your feed and find a common thread of the types of images that get the most attention. In my case, my audience can’t get enough of flowers and interiors. That doesn’t mean that I don’t post other things–but it does help to get a sense of what really resonates.
4. I’m not talking about slapping a filter on here, that’s just nonsense. The Instagram filter days are long gone and now it’s all about what apps you need to download to get your serious editing on! Even if you are a fantastic photographer people can miss your photos if they are scanning through a lot of “same-y” looking images. Turn up the contrast and brightness ever so slightly on your images and you’ll see for yourself how a little editing can go a long way.
5. It’s not exactly cheap to buy all these followers, you may even end up losing money, especially since you it’s likely have to repeatedly buy more over and over. Original organic followers might take notice to your influx of spammers, and may even become disgruntled by your “unethical” practices.