Instagram is undoubtedly one of the best marketing platforms we have at our disposal; but at the same time, its popularity also means that you have to compete with a plethora of content creators and similar businesses, all fighting to get the same audience’s attention – and keep it. So, how do you build up a strong presence on Instagram and continue growing your followers over time? What Instagram growth strategy actually works?

What are the best practices for creating a growth strategy that gets results?

In this blog post, discover an Instagram growth strategy that actually works – and takes minutes of your time.

The ingredients of an awesome Instagram strategy: great content and lots of interaction (with the right people)

As a highly visual platform, great content is, of course, imperative to a winning Instagram strategy.

That means that you need to:

• Post new content on a consistent basis, following a set calendar: if you’re not going to post anything new for days on end, people will simply stop following you!
• Post various types of content: short and long-form videos, images, Stories, all are necessary for a winning Instagram strategy
• Diversify your content: not just the content formats, but also the type of content you post (from images with funny captions to educational videos, the more you diversify, the better!)

That said, I’ve covered Instagram visual content strategies in-depth in past articles on this blog. So, I’d rather focus now on the other elements that help you grow your Instagram account: finding the right people to interact with and, well… actually interacting with them. And doing it consistently.

I’ve recently found a very cool Instagram tool that’s all about proactive, yet organic growth: Combin. Here’s how it can help you grow your Instagram account easily and effectively.

What is Combin?

Quite simply, Combin is an Instagram growth tool which you can easily download as an app for your Mac or Windows computer or laptop – it’s completely free to download (although you can also upgrade your account if you want to have unlimited access to the platform + add multiple Instagram account to manage) and it’s super quick to set up: just enter your Instagram login information to get started immediately.

The app has several useful features that will help with your Instagram growth strategy:

• In-depth searches of Instagram users by hashtags, geo-locations and alternatively, by another user’s followers
• Easy Instagram follower management
• Automated and super quick engagement, from following new users to commenting and liking updates
• Analytics for your activity, followers and engagement (comments and likes)

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to develop an #instagram #growth strategy that actually work with @getcombin” quote=”How to develop an #instagram #growth strategy that actually work with @getcombin”]

And as I mentioned just before, if you want to upgrade to a business account, you’ll get quite a few extra features:

However, I don’t want to just talk about the app, its features and how it works; rather, here’s what you can do with it to grow your Instagram account:

Grow your Instagram with targeted followers

The key to growing your Instagram account the right way is to get your target audience to follow you. That means:

• People who are interested in and using the same hashtags as you (or any hashtags that are highly relevant to your niche/audience)
• People who live in specific locations (particularly relevant if you have a local business or only operating in certain cities/countries)
• People who are following and engaging with accounts similar to yours (anything from content creators to influencers and to your direct competitors)

With Combin, you have several ways of searching for relevant Instagrammers:

• By their posts (and specifically, the hashtags they use, or the location they tagged)
• By users (aka, a users’ followers)

Let’s look at first option; to start with, you can search for posts using one (or several) hashtags:

One really cool thing here is that when you start typing in your hashtag, you’ll see suggestions of similar hashtags, together with their numbers (i.e. how many posts there are per hashtag so that you can gauge their popularity).

And, as you can see above, you can also add several locations at this stage to ensure you’re only getting the most relevant results.

If you want to search for more hashtags in one monitoring search, you can do that as well; however, it’s worth noting that the app will pull updates using either of the hashtags you entered. Alternatively, you can create several monitoring searches, for each hashtag you want to research.

There are a few more options here; for one, you can select a time limit (it can be posts from any time, or it can be recent updates, if you want to make sure you’re finding people who are definitely still active) and secondly, you can place a search limit to control how many results you’re seeing.

And finally, you can also have the app analyse users when performing the search; Combin uses machine learning to study the users in order to filter out any who are not likely to be interested in your account/content, such as spam accounts, other shops and competitors or celebrities’ accounts.

Once you’ve set up your search – or multiple searches – you’ll be able to see the results in the search tab:

If you hover a specific update, you’ll be able to see the image’s caption; or, you can click on the expand icon to see the update in full:

And now that the searches are set up, I can start engaging with the people I discovered; for example, I can select the updates I want to interact with and take actions in bulk; I can:

• Like the posts, so that I can get their attention
• Leave comments on the posts so that I can get a conversation started
• Follow the authors of the posts to connect with them

And did I mention that I can do all of this in bulk?

I did?

Well, it’s worth mentioning again, to be honest.

Each of these actions (liking, commenting, following), will then be listed as tasks, which will appear in your Tasks tab; the tool won’t take all of these actions immediately (as that might get your account removed by the Instagram overlords), but rather transform them into tasks that are scheduled to go out in accordance to your own settings and to Instagram’s algorithm:

In other words, you can take these actions in bulk in just a few minutes and then rest assured that Combin will handle all of these interactions without you.

This is the best way to grow your followers on Instagram: by interacting and following people who are part of your target audience and likely to be interested in your business.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to develop an #instagram #growth strategy that actually work with @getcombin” quote=”How to develop an #instagram #growth strategy that actually work with @getcombin”]

It’s also worth noting that this should be something you do continuously if you want to keep growing and growing; it can be a time consuming task, but with Combin, once you’ve set up enough monitoring searches, you can simply log in every day to select some posts/accounts to interact with or follow and let the tool do the rest – it literally takes a few minutes per day, at most.

As I mentioned a bit earlier, another way to search for relevant users is to look up an account and their followers:

Once you’ve set up these searches, you have similar options as before:

• Select the accounts you want to interact with and take actions in bulk
• Like their last post
• Leave a comment on their last update
• Follow them

Follower management

Managing your existing followers is just as important (if not more so) as engaging with and finding potential new followers; not only should you post new content consistently to keep them interested in your account, but you should also engage with them regularly to get them to engage with you in return, share your content out with their followers, and ultimately so that you can grow them into paying customers or even brand ambassadors.

In Combin, you can see and manage all of your followers in the Users tab:

As before, you can select as many users as you want to set up bulk tasks of liking their latest posts, commenting on their latest updates or unfollow them.

You can also add certain users to the so-called “safe list”, which essentially means that they are protected from being unfollowed should you accidentally select them when you’re unfollowing users.

Plus, see exactly who is not following you back so that you can take action: either unfollow them directly or start engaging with them to get them interested in your account and follow you back.

Once you’ve started using the tool to its full extent, track your results – aka your follower and engagement growth – in the Stats section:

Find and interact with Instagram influencers

Influencers are a huge part of Instagram; from micro-influencers who have a few thousand of followers to major celebrities, you’re bound to find a plethora of influencers to collaborate with – or simply engage with them.

There are 2 easy ways to use Combin to find relevant influencers:

• Look up relevant hashtags and locations and then sort out your results by number of likes or comments; usually, the more engagement a post gets, the more likely its author is an influencer. That said, make sure to look up their profile and see what kind of content they usually publish. Then, simply use Combin as shown earlier to like their posts, leave comments and follow them; or, you can also look up event-specific hashtags to find relevant influencers who attended

• Look up competitors’ accounts to see their followers; then, simply sort their followers by number of followers – take the time to look up their accounts to see if they’re actually influential, or they gained that many followers by nefarious reasons…

And, in fact, don’t rely on follower numbers alone; while it can be a sign of influence, a large number of followers is certainly not synonymous with influence. Rather, spend some time looking at their past updates to see how many people comments on their posts, like them, view them or share them out with their audience.

Leverage user generated content to engage your audience

User generated content – or UGC for short – basically means sharing out content that others created, on your own Instagram account. You’ll also need to give a shout out to the actual author and in some cases, ask for their permission before reposting.

Leveraging UGC on Instagram is a strategy that can yield great results for your business; most notably, it’s a great way to interact with your followers and keep them happy, connect with new users and populate your account with new and exciting content.

However, finding great (and relevant) user generated content to share on your account can be a surprisingly difficult and time-consuming task; but – although it might not be built for this specifically – Combin makes it quite easy.

All you have to do is set up monitoring searches for relevant hashtags and locations, check them when needed and find updates that would work great as UGC.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to develop an #instagram #growth strategy that actually work with @getcombin” quote=”How to develop an #instagram #growth strategy that actually work with @getcombin”]

Summing up: an Instagram growth strategy in 3 easy steps

To sum up what I’ve showed you so far, you can start growing your Instagram immediately following these 3 easy steps:

• Get the Combin app for your computer, here and log in with your Instagram account (or add multiple accounts if needed)
• Set up several searches for relevant keywords, geo-locations and relevant users/competitors from your niche
• Log in every day and spend 5-10 minutes going through your monitoring searches and take bulk actions (liking, commenting and following/unfollowing users)

Conclusion

I love Combin’s simplicity and ease-of-use; and if you use Instagram to promote your business, this tool will make a real difference to your engagement and growth. Just follow the steps outlined just above for an Instagram growth strategy and you’re on your way to building up an increasingly successful account, helping you to not only gain more new followers every day, but also to boost your likes and comments (because the more you interact with other users, the more they’ll interact with you in return!).

Have you tried Combin yet? If you try it out, make sure to let me know how it worked out for you, in the comments section below. Oh and please do share if you enjoyed the post 🙂