How To Grow Your First 1000 Followers On Instagram

In this post, I’ll share several tips to achieve the first 1000 followers on your Instagram page.

This applies to beginners who are looking to start leveraging their first quality followers and hopefully apply some fixes to their pages’ performance.

Let’s get right into it:

1- Refine and complete your Instagram profile: The first thing you should look for, is the first thing someone looks at when visiting your page. That is its profile.

If your page’s profile isn’t attractive, it will chase new visitors away.

Therefore, it’s CRUCIAL to have a clean and objective profile that is congruent with your feed, even more when your page is still fairly unknown.

Make sure that your page’s profile complies with the following aspects:

Logo: Should be clear, aesthetically pleasing and congruent with your page's niche and theme. It should be about you as a person or about your brand as a business.

Username: Should be short and concise, preferably without too many numbers, dots or underscores. Not to mention it should also resonate with your page's theme.

Name: Instead of making your name the same as your username, which is what most people usually do, make it about a few keywords that describe what your page is all about. You should do this because names are also searchable, and that enhances the likelihood of your page being discovered.

That said, your name should serve as a headline that’s interesting to page visitors of your niche.

Note: Emojis are searchable as well, so you can also include those if you want.

Bio: Should include at least 2 / 3 of the following: Your location; a catchphrase about you or your brand; a CTA towards an external website or app; what you or your business does; a link towards that website or app.

Story Highlights: Don't underestimate the effect that these have on your page. A page that has no story highlights just seems emptier nowadays and loses its "personality". Story highlights are a great way to preview or portray what your page is about, so it's like an abstract of your feed or a set of - as the name suggests - highlights about it.

This is a great asset for business pages and for bloggers, as a way of showcasing their work or their day-to-day life.

2- Do market research within your niche: Now it’s time for you to select the type of content that you want to be posting/reposting. The goal is that you’re able to tell what kind of content is performing better amongst the top pages of your niche.

In order to do this, select 10 pages that you want to research and calculate the average number of likes of their last 20 posts.

Then on, every post that has at least 30%+ likes than the average, may be considered a post with viral potential.

If you run a reposting page, you can repost these pieces of content if they resonate with your niche and sub-niche (for example, if you run a page in the travel niche and you just want to focus in one country – then that’s your sub-niche, so a more specific thematic).

If you run a personal page, recreate that type of content without disregarding your own personal touch.

3- Exclusively interact with pages that belong to your niche: There’s something called niche categorization, which succinctly consists in your page’s niche identity.

This identity is formed within Instagram’s algorithm. It filters your page’s action and behavior patterns since the moment you create your page.

That applies to the smallest things, such as liking a certain post, comment or message, to the type of content you post, stories you watch and engage with, hashtags and location tags you insert, pages you tag in your posts, etc.

The goal is to interact exclusively with pages that belong to your niche, and post content that is exclusively related to your niche so that your explore page looks like a certain niche’s feed.

What this will do is put your page in a niche “box”, so that your content is more easily spread throughout other users’ explore pages who share the same interest in that type of content.

That’s how you can leverage high-quality followers from the explore page – they’re already interested in your type of content because they too are in that niche box, which allows Instagram to recommend your content to them, by enabling it to reach their explore page.

4- Publish your first 6 posts within the first 24 hours of creating your page: If your page doesn’t have any content to showcase, then it’s no surprise that no one follows it. By having at least your first 6 posts in place, your page starts to build a certain “personality”.

5- Do hashtag research: Hashtags will be the main driving force of your posts’ reach. It’s fundamental to just go for niche-related and location-relevant hashtags, as your page’s niche categorization will still be incomplete.

As you’re still running a small page, make sure to use a strategy called the hashtag snowball effect or ladder effect.

Here’s how it works:

Apply a mix of small, medium and big hashtags. The reason why this is so effective is that it’s easier for your page to rank higher on smaller hashtags in the first instance, as the level of competition on those is much lower than compared to bigger, more popular hashtags. As you rank on these smaller hashtags, you will already leverage significant reach traction, which will result in a snowball effect around your post.

This snowball effect enables your post to progressively rank higher on bigger hashtags, as Instagram’s algorithm allows posts that are highly engaged with, to reach a wider audience, as it perceives it as viral content. The reason for this is because it is Instagram’s goal to keep users in the platform for as long as possible – that’s how their platform survives and prospers.

6- Post consistently: This is one of the most vital aspects of Instagram growth. If you consistently post quality content and apply a competent strategy towards your page, you will succeed.

Hope this helps! Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions! 😊