9 Ways to Gain 10K Followers on Instagram in 6 Months

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“Quality content means content that is packed with clear utility and is brimming with inspiration, and it has relentless empathy for the audience.”- Ann Handley
(Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs)

Great content has the power to move hearts. Content is at the heart of all marketing techniques and great content can drive great success for your brands. When it comes to influencer marketing, great content bears the potential of getting your prospective clients and customers on board. Influencers create niche centric, authentic content that their audience loves to consume. Brands, through collaboration with influencers, can ensure their brand’s growth. 

Instagram influencer marketing is one of the most sought after marketing technique in the current influencer marketing landscape since Instagram influencers have a major impact on the buying decisions of their audience. No wonder there’s a large number of people aspiring to be an influencer and take it to Instagram to create content, and build communities.  According to a study, Instagram holds 500,000 active influencer profiles, and 81% of these profiles have followers ranging from 15,000 to 100,000

However, being an influencer, and consistently creating content that the audience would love, is not as easy as it may seem. So, how do start out in a pool of influencers? How do you step on platforms like Instagram where there are millions of influencers, how do you make your mark? How to get 10K followers on Instagram? What do you do to gain followers and engagement? Dive right in and get all your questions answered.

Here are the 9 ways to Get 10K Followers on Instagram:

1.Instagram Grids Are Everything

how to gain 10k followers on instagram fast

After the bio, your grid stands out as a point of influence for visitors and the likelihood of whether they’ll continue browsing your page or not.

Your grid consists of your feed and is the first visual impression that the visitor gets upon visiting your profile. Not only consistency but there’s also a certain level of art and engagement that can be portrayed through the way your posts are assembled on your IG grid. A shabby grid is bound to subconsciously put off the viewer.

Visual aesthetics often trigger relaxation and viewers leave with a fresh and calm aura. This makes the viewers want to keep coming back to your feed for just another look. Further, optimise your profile’s details such that it is easier for Instagram to find you if any user ever comes looking for profiles in your niche.

Checklist

  • Catchy profile picture – Determines if the viewer would open your profile or not in the first place
  • Highlights – Gives them an idea of your niche and personality
  • SEO rooted username – Users search for generalized keywords so make sure you use keywords from your niche to be found easily through Instagram search
  • Inspiring and explanatory Bio – Your bio is like your resume. Make it crisp, concise and to-the-point
  • Harmonized posts – Maintain a smooth flow to achieve repetitive profile visits
  • Colour scheme – Choose a colour palette for your feed for an aesthetic look 
  • Simple username – Keep your username simple, so that people find it easier to remember and mention in any conversations

IG stories are what we like to call ‘the new memento moments’. With a 24 hour window to impress, do your best to prompt immediate action. With short-form content taking over, Instagram stories had gained over 200 million active users in its initial 8 months. Users open one profile’s stories and go on tapping for 5-10 minutes straight, covering stories by almost 150 people in the time they would’ve taken to scroll and see less than 70 posts. 

While posts are a more detailed form of expression for Instagram users, stories are like texting. Posts may convey your morals, but stories give the audience a quick look into your life and can appear more personalised than posts thus increasing your chance of getting 10K followers on Instagram. One rarely crosses a good personality through IG stories and when they do, they don’t forget.

Checklist

  • 24-hour Contests – Ask questions. Give a shoutout to the best answers
  • Shout-outs under a custom hashtag – Share the best work tagged with your custom hashtag
  • Collage – Copy photos from your gallery and paste them one after the other.
  • Boomerang – Boomerangs, ugly or pretty, are great engagers.
  • Geotags and hashtags – Hashtags and Location pages display stories posted by users, with the respective tags
  • No landscaping – Having to tilt their heads or phones for viewing a story pulls the viewer away 
  • Poll – Everybody likes having an opinion and hence polls on your stories are a great way to engage your audience 
  • Selfies/videos – Give a personalised touch to your stories by adding selfies or video updates often.
  • Craft a compelling CTA- Compel the viewers to take an action through your stories. Direct them to your website link, or your IG feed

2. Make IG Stories Count

social media influencers

3.#HashtagsAreBAE

how to gain 10k followers on instagram in 6 month

Hashtags have a very important role to play on Instagram. By adding relevant hashtags, you allow Instagram to discover your posts as ‘relevant’ and viewers are most likely to find you through the ‘explore’ page. This way, you can enhance your reach and can connect with users. Using hashtags gets your posts featured in the explore section and can get you more users visiting your page. With more people seeing your content, more is the possibility of getting 10K followers on Instagram, since if people like your content, they are bound to follow. Hashtags act as a harbour to all the relevant posts and users prefer following hashtags as they diversify and condition their feed. Using apt and relevant hashtags would help you to be found and for people to find you and your content.

Checklist

  • Specific hashtags – Use hashtags relevant to your post and niche
  • Branded hashtags – Branded hashtags usually have a higher engagement rate
  • 13-20 hashtags per post – Lesser hashtags wouldn’t give you proper exposure and excess would spoil your post’s aesthetics
  • Limited popularity – Exclusively popular hashtags would refresh every second with 100 new posts, your post would just get lost somewhere in the crowd
  • Feature accounts – Feature accounts are hubs for quality content. They usually have custom hashtags for getting featured.
  • Comment, not caption – Posting the hashtags in your post’s comment section rather than the caption would make the post look better.
  • Top 9 – Every hashtag page displays the top 9 posts of the moment which get the maximum engagement.
  • Daily feature hashtags – Keep an eye on custom hashtags created by fellow influencers that share the top posts on their stories
  • Bio – Add niche hashtags to your bio to feature in the explore section.

One of the many answers to the question ‘how to get 10K followers on Instagram’ is Engagement. Engagement is an all-rounding beneficial aspect as it drives more traffic to your page, steadily grows your follower base, and keeps them hooked. It is important to keep reminding yourself that you are initially and eventually building a community, an e-family where people share similar interests as that yours. 

Allowing your followers to express their thoughts adds an extra layer of engagement through conversation on your page, intensifying your presence as an individual as opposed to a page. It becomes imperative to respond to them. Starting off, engaging those who ‘act’ through messages, acknowledgements, and appreciation posts goes a long way. Subsequently, your followers start recognizing your content as emotional triggers rather than mere sources of interim amusement. And boom! You are one step closer to getting 10K followers on Instagram.

4.Romp Up Engagement

social media influencers

Checklist

  • Giveaways – Lure them in with interesting contests and even more interesting prizes.
  • Quizzes – Ask out of the box questions that would make people comment on their answers in your comment section 
  • Share – Share content that you like in your story
  • Suggestions – Who’ll give you better tips than your audience itself? Ask them for post suggestions.
  • Live videos – Go live on Instagram, answer their queries, talk to them.
  • Replying to comments and DMs -It is important to respond to your audience. Responding to your audience gives them a feeling of being heard, and cared
  • Comment – Comment on fellow influencers’ posts; let them know you care for them too.
  • Follow under one niche – Follow pages under one niche. This will put you up on their profile’s suggested list.

5.Collaborate

influencer marketing strategy

“All-for-one, and one-for-all” is no longer limited to the three musketeers. Collaboration and peer features are a super way to tap into new audiences.

If there’s something that internet people trust more than Wikipedia, it’s the people they follow. Because you can count on them for thorough reviewing, and then follow only those accounts that they’re analyzed to be a good fit for their everyday stimulus.

Consider leveraging a Wikipedia writing service for meticulous content creation and editing to enhance your online credibility.

The quickest yet organic way of gaining followers is having other pages in the same niche advise your content to their followers.

Professionalism comes with a better eye for the respective profession. Precisely why a photographer would be a better judge of photographs rather than a writer? So, along with sparking a flame of trust in their followers, getting featured by the big players would substantiate your content’s acceptability and give you an insight into the whats and hows of posting.

Checklist

  • An incentive for the incentive – Give your followers a shout-out in exchange for a shout-out for your page.
  • Co-publish – Team up with fellow creators from diversified niches to produce multimedia content.
  • Repost – Reposting will convey your appreciation for their hard work and attract their appreciation and audience in turn.
  • Like/ Comment Pods – This increases its engagement rate. Join a pod or make one with other budding influencers.

While IG feeds, grids, and stories provide the required weight to your account, nothing comes close to gravitating visitors’ attention and loyalty to providing unique, authentic content. Having been a user, you’re no stranger to the fact that there are hundreds of sensibilities that exist on the platform. So needless to say, your followers are your customers and their taste will determine the nature of your content. Keep analyzing your past posts’ performance in order to track your followers’ preferences.

It is important to create content that not just engages but also triggers a thought process in the minds of your audience. All your hashtags and collaborations can go in vain if your content isn’t phenomenal.

6. The Content Dish

how to gain 10k in 6 month

Checklist

  • Portrait images – Portrait posts take up more space thus engaging your viewers for a longer time span
  • Make video content – Video posts engage the audience better and are more sharable, than static posts
  • Niche-centralism – Try and keep your niche monotonous, let your followers associate you with a particular feeling.
  • Consistency and Frequency – Post content in a consistent pattern that makes your feed look aesthetic and post after equal intervals of time
  • Descriptive captions – Your visuals may capture the viewer’s eyes but it is your captions that will really help you get in their heads.
  • Micro-blogging – You may even use your posts’ captions for micro-blogging on a daily basis. Your viewers wouldn’t have to switch platforms if they feel like reading something interesting.
  • IGTV – Make use of Instagram’s new features as they’re launched as there would be less competition. Start with making IGTV optimized content.

7.Multi-Platform Engagement

social media influencers

Here’s a thought for every day to align yourself to this point. People follow more than a 1000 Instagrammers, have subscribed to only 300 YouTubers, and have about 500 friends on Facebook. And so, YOU are the one on their minds, day and night. This is one way to motivate yourself to elevate engagement on multiple platforms.

On a realistic note, quality over quantity is the road to higher engagement and revenue. But that shouldn’t stop you from maintaining that content and quality over other platforms as well. Engaging your audience via multiple platforms gives you a greater share of their time and attention and be visible wherever they go. Moreover, being present on different platforms helps you funnel your audience from one platform to another, collectively increasing your audience in itself. We’d say, cross-platform promotions are another way of reaching the 10K follower mark on Instagram.

Checklist

  • Cross-pollinating – Funneling another platform’s audience to Instagram, by promoting your profile’s link in the content uploaded on that platform.
  • Sharing posts on other platforms – Share your Instagram content on your Facebook, Twitter etc. to attract your audience on those platforms and give them the gist of what you upload.
  • Turn On notifications – Ask your audience to turn on Post Notifications on Instagram so they can get informed every time you make a new post.
  • Share and earn – Ask your audience to share your content on their social media platforms in exchange for lucky draw incentives.
  • Common username – Use a common username for all your platforms and save your followers from the trouble of hunting for your ID.

9.Keep an eye on Analytics

Influencer Marketing for Consumer Tech Brand Awareness

Analytics may spell a whole lot of technical jargon on the backend, but we can’t stress enough the value it adds to your page’s growth prospect. Analytics help keep track of the engagement, and followers, and they aesthetically display progress for you to track and act on. Unfortunately, the motivation to grow on platforms like Instagram cannot be left up in the air. It requires the deliberation that can be achieved with analytics.

For instance, you might only have 5000 followers but if you’re actually triggering a thought process in 500 of their heads every time you post, you’re doing a much better job than Instagram itself. That’s one of the ways to gain 10k+ followers on Instagram.

Checklist

  • Business profile – Switching to a business profile will give you access to a variety of features, including insights and a contact button in your bio.
  • Daily updates – Keep a regular track of the activities on your posts.
  • External analysis tools – Sprout Social, Simply measured etc. are Instagram analysis tools built to give you a better understanding of your posts’ and profile’s performance.
  • Insights – Instagram has several inbuilt analysis features provided under Instagram insights that help you keep a live track of your performance.
  • Schedule – Altogether, keeping a track of your performance will allow you to schedule your future posts such that they can fruit maximum engagement.

Instagram Statistics 2021

Current Instagram statistics show there are currently more than 1 billion active users.

1 %
Instagram accounts are active everyday
1 %
Users are following a business
1 %
Influencers use Instagram for brand collaboration
1 %
more engagement on posts with locations.

Conclusion:

We’re sure the above-listed 9 tips and supporting checklists answer your question on how to gain 10k+ followers on Instagram. Instagram can yield great results if you give it your all. Getting 10k followers on Instagram is the baseline. It is equally important to keep engaging them t the same rate even when you grow past 10k followers. Followers look for the above-mentioned traits collectively in their influencer’s personality. Provided that these traits are pretty easy to adapt to once you get into the routine, so you should be gaining your first 10K followers on Instagram if you’ve paid attention.

We at Confluencr, being a leading influencer marketing agency, help creators create content that is creative and engaging. With a network of 15000+ influencers, we can help you get fruitful brand collaborations. If this blog popped questions in your mind, do drop them below or write to us at [email protected] and we will get right back to you.

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