Why won’t people follow my Instagram account? Why won’t people like and comment on my Instagram posts? Why am I not getting more visibility on my Instagram? Do people think I do not exist on Instagram? Help!
I have a very fast and simple response for those of you who do not like to spend much time reading. The answer to the questions you asked and more can be found in the outstanding book, “How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. You may have already read this book, as it is one of the first bestselling self-help books.
Let me be more specific. If all you are caring about is yourself and not your audience, then you will not get anywhere on Instagram. One of the many principles that works when making new friends in Carnegie’s book is: You have to be genuinely interested in other people. Do you know who your audience is?
“You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you.”
– Dale Carnegie
Once you discover who you are trying to befriend (get to follow you), then pin-point your content that you share on Instagram to those people. Whether it is moms looking to shed post-baby weight or teenagers with money they don’t know how to spend, you must know whom you wish to sell to.
What is the point of your Instagram account? What are you trying to do? Who are you trying to reach?
Those are more productive questions to ask instead of why people will not come to you. How can a fish be caught without any bait? You get the idea. You put out your bait, which is quality content that is marketed to your intended audience, then you reel them in!
As for how to market to your intended audience, that is a whale of a tale! If you do not know how, then you should read this awesome article as a starting point. One if you don’t have the time or marketing is out of your area of expertise? You can always hire an expert like myself to help you target the right audience and to develop savvy web content.
On Instagram, hashtags underneath your target-marketed photo or video content and written caption play a big part too. When you start typing a “#” on Instagram and then a word, you can see how many posts about that subject are already on Instagram. Yes, Instagram is a great resource in itself. How should you go about putting hashtags that are most searched, though?
What I do is use Google Adwords, but not to purchase. There is a quality keyword tool built in that tells you how many people are searching for particular words each month. Google Trends is another great resource to check to see which keywords are trending with customers in your target marketplace.
Once you have a good list of ten keywords , you can convert them to hashtags by placing the “#” in front of the word. After your photo or video caption, you can put the targeted hashtags, with a limit of thirty for each post. Why thirty? That is the limit that I notice Instagram allows as of this publishing.
I know all of those hashtags look somewhat unsightly under your nicely written caption and lovely photo or video. What I do is put a line of eighteen lovely Emojis to create a barrier that just looks more visually appealing. I started doing the Emoji divider to my own Instagram and I like the look much better than immediately going into hashtags.
Now, tap on one of the hashtags you have published on your posting. What do you see? There are top posts and most recent posts listed for each and every hashtag with more than ten posts of content.
“One of these things is not like the other – One of these things just doesn’t belong…”
I hope the above quote does not pertain to your content. If anything, the item that you just posted should stand out. If you don’t know if it does, then squint and look at your picture. Does it have colors or composition that stand out from the crowd of other Instagram photos or videos on the same hashtag? If not, you should re-upload if you want to attract the right fish to your lure.
If you really don’t care about having an attractive, eye-catching image then just skip this paragraph, you might as well skip this article even. Bold colors like red and bright yellow get the most attention on Instagram, I’ve found. Why do you think stop signs are red? Why are school buses yellow? You don’t have to just use red, but any bright bold hue will work and help your image stand out. Use Photoshop or a filter app to increase the image’s saturation so more bright colors and dark tones stand out.
Your content now looks better and you have hashtags and captions. What do you do now? Well, do you have any followers thus far? If you are just starting out with under 1,000 followers, you should follow all of your followers. It is advisable to put “#Follow4Follow”, “#FollowMe” and “#Follow” on your posts with your Google Trend/Adword hashtag collection. I just now decided for myself to stop following all of my new followers so removed the tag on new posts. The reason being, I now have almost 2,500 followers and am following almost 5,000 people. Someday, I hope to convert the others I am following into my own followers.
Now, you can see your audience in your recent feed. To start off, only follow your own followers. You can use another account if you want to collect relevant follows in your industry to improve your content. Comment and like the posts of your followers, don’t just ignore them.
They are your new “friends”. Just because they have decided to follow you, doesn’t mean you should stop feeding them with flakes of your attention.
Maybe spend thirty minutes a week liking and commenting on your followers’ own content. It doesn’t take much of your time, believe me. The most popular times on Instagram are between 3-6 pm I have noticed, so that is prime for posting new content, liking and commenting.
What commenting and liking the posts of your followers does is attract other followers to you. Wouldn’t you want to have people who like and comment on your posts to follow you too?
Get inside the mind of the average Instagram person who has followed you. Why are they on Instagram? If you don’t know, look at their page. What do you see there?
If you’d like to know more social media strategies then please visit my website, BeckBeach.com to hire me for my services in Digital Media Strategy. I also create websites that have great conversion, write attention-getting content like this, illustrate, create web comics, write and sing business jingles and other savvy creative marketing tactics.
Do you have any tips on how to get noticed on Instagram?! Please share them with the rest of us. 🙂
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