Instagram followers numbers boost and growth tricks: However, the days of buying thousands of followers, likes, and views and then raking in big dollars through influencer outreach are long gone. In today’s world, there are lots of tools available to brands that can help them figure out what percentage of someone’s following and activity is fake or botted. That’s why you need free views and interaction from real people! We’re talking about real users who frequently use Instagram and actually have something to do with your niche of content.

Here’s a trick that I use for my ecommerce businesses. For every product and product category for my stores, I have done the research to see which are the most popular Instagram hashtags around those product categories. I came up with 15-20 popular hashtags for each category of products I sell, as well as a base of 5-10 popular tags that describe my brand and product offering overall. Finally, I also created a list of popular local specific hashtags that relate to my brand. I can easily open my Evernote and copy my standard brand, product and location specific hashtags to post with each photo. Some Instagram scheduling tools also let you save caption templates that you can use to store your hashtag groups.

Keyword hashtags aren’t the only thing you should pay attention to. The Instagram community responds to certain photo filters more favorably than others. Using these preferred filters can have an impact on your engagement. But more important than the general Instagram community’s favorite filters, are your particular audience’s favorite filters. Consider this custom graph which correlates filter usage to engagement from my own Instagram account: You can use IconoSquare to review the performance of your own account to understand what is and is not currently working for you. For a few extra details you could look here and get Instagram followers.

Remember that Instagram is first and foremost, a social space. And the best way to let the Instagram algorithm know you have a “relationship” with another account is to like, engage, and comment on other brands’ posts. Take for example Later and Fohr – while we may have completely different businesses, there is some strong overlap on who our audience is and what they’re interested in. They could be small business owners interested in Instagram marketing, or influencers looking to build relationships with brands. Plus, we collaborated on special projects and support each other’s work. So it’s easy to see why a new Later follower might also be interested in learning more from Fohr!

Since Instagram started to hide likes, it’s harder to gauge what content performs best. While you can see how many likes your posts get, your followers can’t, so there’s no bias in getting a double-tap on a post just because it looks like a popular content. Today brands need to look further into their performance metrics and track comments, saves, Instagram Stories views, shares, and even DMs to understand how their content performed.