If you are new to marketing on Instagram, you have probably discovered that building your brand’s presence is more complicated than it seems. Growing an audience requires much more than simply posting content and hoping it attracts people like a magnet; instead, you need to follow and unfollow the right people, like and comment on their posts, publish content at strategic times, engage with your followers, and much more. It is tiresome, isn’t it?
Fortunately, Instagram growth tools exist to help you achieve your marketing goals without draining you creatively or consuming more of your time that would be better spent on other aspects of your business.
From increasing your follower base to better understanding your audience’s preferences, there is a tool out there for you. That being said, here are seven of the best Instagram growth resources:
1) Magic Social
Not only is liking other people’s posts time-consuming, it’s also tedious. Your fingers will be exhausted if you attempt to do everything manually. Not just that, but you are wasting your time if you like posts from every account you come across—it is far more strategic to focus on users who are likely to find your brand interesting. So how can you narrow down Instagram’s vast user base to find these people quickly? And how do you target the right niche audience?
This is where Magic Social comes in. Partnering with Magic Social connects you with an Instagram growth expert that employs smart filters that let you select people based on geographic location, username, etc., to pinpoint the audience you want to target. For instance, let’s say you want to run a fitness brand; Magic Social will help you skip over the people concerned with topics that are irrelevant to you, and bring you straight to the crowd that expresses interest in health.
2) Social Steeze
Similar to Magic Social, Social Steeze partners you with a growth expert that handles aspects of your Instagram strategy on your behalf. It’s likely that you have far more important things to do than like other people’s posts. Therefore, you should let a third-party like Social Steeze grow your audience while you focus on the more critical parts of your Instagram strategy, like creating engaging content.
3) Hashtags for Likes
Hashtags are vital to Instagram; they are what categorizes content and makes it discoverable for both creators and potential audience members. However, you can only use 30 hashtags per post–and some social media marketers say using all 30 is not optimal. Trending hashtags change all the time, and the relatively popular tags might even bury your material in a pool of popular posts; other hashtags are used so little, that very few people will see it to begin with. Hashtags for Likes can update you on the best hashtags to use in real time; this helps you stay on top of your hashtag game and makes your content as visible as possible.
4) Sprout Social
You do not want—and can not—grow your audience if you do not understand them. With Sprout Social, you can learn more about what your followers are interested in, where they are located, when they are active online, and more. The more you know about your followers, the better you can create content that appeals to them, down to the publishing times where they are most likely to see your content.
Stumbling around Instagram blindfolded will not help you achieve your goals, so Sprout Social can provide you with actionable insights into how well your campaigns are performing.
5) Iconosquare
Iconosquare is similar to Sprout Social in that it can tell you more about your engagement rates and how you should amend your strategy to make it more effective. You can manage multiple social media accounts from one dashboard, schedule content ahead of time (which saves you the trouble of having to post manually), and compare how your campaign measures against your competitors’. Instagram requires a significant amount of work, so while you can certainly work harder, Iconosquare helps you work smarter. Overall, with this platform, you can get more done without having to put in more effort.
6) Magisto
Magisto is not exclusively for Instagram, but it can help you create well-produced videos even if you are not an experienced videographer—and videos are an essential medium on Instagram. With Magisto, you can quickly create videos for your posts or Instagram Stories that inform people about your business, make them laugh, and educate them about your industry. Video drives a significant amount of traffic on social media, so it helps to have a resource that can keep you up to speed.
7) Repost
Unlike Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, you cannot easily re-share content on Instagram. However, with the app Repost, you can—and it’s an excellent way to post unoriginal content while still crediting the original creators. You can share articles, photography, videos, and other material that your followers would be interested in, and it firmly integrates your brand into your industry’s corner of Instagram. Repost is also an excellent way to re-share user-generated content, so you can acknowledge material that your audience creates and appreciate them for it.
It takes work to build your presence on Instagram, but hopefully, we have laid out a few tools that can smooth out the process for you!
Which growth tools do you plan on using? Are you using any of the Instagram growth tools that with mentioned in the article? What are some ones that we should be aware of to add to our list? Let us know in the comments! Your feedback can help other Instagram marketers out.