So You Wanna Be An IG Influencer: 7 Key Tricks to Growing Your Instagram

Social media started as, well, a way for people to be social. To keep in touch with friends from wherever they are, meet new friends, and feel connected. It quickly morphed into a marketing bonanza, with brands and regular people competing to become “Instagram Famous”. How, exactly, DO you grow your IG enough to become IG famous? Read on for 7 hacks!

1. Interact Before & After Posting

The IG algorithm loves engagement, especially in the 30 minutes after you post. It helps the algorithm see that the post is, for lack of a better word, “worth” pushing to the top of fans’ feeds. For 15 minutes before posting an image to your IG page, and 30 minutes after, do this:
Search for your post’s most relevant hashtags, and “like” as many recent pictures in that hashtag as possible.
Comment on several of the posts.
Once your post is live, make it a goal to respond to as many comments as possible in 30 minutes, and go to the first 10 commenters’ pages and like or comment on something of theirs.

2. Hide Yo’ Hashtags

Too many hashtags feels spammy and inauthentic – because it IS. But it’s necessary to getting your post seen by more people. What to do? Write your caption, then add 5 dots in 5 lines just before you add all the hashtags. This requires users to click the “read more” button if they want to see the whole thing – which most won’t, but it’ll get you seen more by the algorithm, anyway.

3. Invest In Your Equipment

A good camera, lighting, editing software, and photographer are key to having quality images that POP off a user’s phone screen. You can do a lot on your own, but for truly good pics, hire a pro (and credit them in the posts!).

4. Put Keywords In Your Bio

A good IG bio pulls people in. It should be short, concise, and a good summation of you as a creator and person. It should also include keywords that you want users to search for you by (fashion, beauty, travel, plus-size, cooking, vegan, etc.). Take a look at the IG bios of MagicLinks creators’ Crystal Coons, aka SometimesGlam, and Tasha Farsaci, below.

5. Document Your Life

You’re a creator, but the main reason people love influencers is because they feel like they’re getting an unfiltered look at your real life. Going to the dentist for a filling? Document it. Stuck in line at the DMV? Document it. Tried making a going-viral-on-Pinterest recipe and it bombed? Document it.

6. Don’t Be a Wallflower

Your fans want a relationship with YOU, so give them the real you when you post! Curating your content and editing photos & videos is all well & good, but influencers with the highest Instagram followings show their fans their flaws. They respond back to comments. They do livestreams where they might *oops* accidentally swear or drop a bite of food on their shirt mid-mukbang. They share outtakes from photo & video shoots.

7. Pick an Aesthetic

Before you even glance at a username in your IG feed, can you instantly tell who posted the image? If so, then you know that ‘grammer has a good aesthetic. Curate a color palette, filter presets, poses, and more, and stick to it. Sounds boring, but you can deviate in your IG stories, never fear. A cohesive feed will keep people on your IG page, interacting with more and more of your posts.