Needmore Instagram photos with coffee

Needmore Instagram Followers?

How to win friends and influence people on Instagram.

  1. Get out of the house. Put bluntly, be interesting. Take pictures of your adventures. Content is king. Period. Don’t get me wrong, I like cat pictures as much as the next girl, but mix it up people. Keep it fresh.
  2. Be yourself.  A little personality goes a long way, add comments to your posts. Be conversational, let people get a sense for your personality.  People are more likely to engage with you when you comment on their work and remember you in a sea of instagramers.
  3. Be a social butterfly. Looking for more followers? It takes a friend to make a friend, Hombre. Be nice, like other people’s work, follow other people you like, ask questions, share your thoughts with them.  Spread the love and make someone’s day. People will take notice and reciprocate in time.
  4. Don’t change your profile picture every ten seconds. Select a good profile picture and change it as little as possible. I follow a lot of people on Instagram and I remember people’s profile shots better than their handle name. Change your profile if you must, but keep it to a minimum to avoid confusion. Remember you want people to recognize you. It also helps if it is an actual picture of you, or part of your face. Nobody wants to follow the guy in the wrestling mask. You feel me? We want to know you are a real human being and we can relate to you. Being able to see your smiling face builds trust and raises your chances of a follow back.
  5. Tag, tag, tagity, #tag. While excessive tagging is annoying. You should be using hashtags to reach more people.  A hashtag is a way for users to find people with the same interests and see what is going on. A hashtag is any word that has the  # symbol attached to the word. (For example, #happy, #fall, #goducks).  This ‘tags’ your photograph with the word or phrase, so that when people search that term in Instagram, your image will appear.  For example, I use #pdx to tag things out and about in Portland, Oregon.
  6. Location, Location, Location. Along the same lines as a hashtag, a location can help people find your work. I always use locations tags when I am out of the house. I never use this feature when I am home for safety reasons. I don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry to know where I live. But, when I am out, you better believe I am geotagging the location. For example, the Coffee shop, the park, work, you name it.

Other tips to increase followers on Instagram:

Are you curious about who is following and unfollowing you? Use a free program like statigram to review your data. It will show you lost followers, most popular pictures, most engaged followers, etc.

Remember, it is quality over quantity. Yes you want a a bunch of followers, sure, fine. But the truth is you want more likes. Good content brings more followers. It’s the whole “If you build it, they will come” philosophy.

So, that is all well and good in theory, but how to you go about getting more likes?

First, review the data you have. What are your most popular pictures? Why do people react to these, do you think? Is there something they have in common? What makes them different than the less popular pictures? Once you figure out what the people want, give it to them.

(Feel free to connect with me via my Instagram profile and say hey!)

Kandace Brigleb

Producer, co-founder of Needmore. Currently residing on the left coast.