Instagram is a must for a business. With 1 billion people using the platform each month and at least 200 millions people visiting at least one profile daily, there is really no reason why to skip Instagram in your business plans. So here are some strategies for your Instagram growth.

Post consistently

Without consistent posting you might not engage the audience enough to gain constant following. And if you do post often, then stop for some reason you will confuse your followers and might start losing them and eventually they might forget about you overall even if you get back on regular posting after a dry period.

Use scheduling tools

This is connected with the first strategy. If you have trouble posting regularly, maybe it is time to use some tool that will post instead of you. You can set a schedule for the whole month and relax, not worrying about keeping your Instagram posting consistent.

Give Instagram Live a chance

Some stats say that 82% of people would rather watch a live video than to see a post. So why not give it a try. Long time ago it was said in the SEO world that content is the king. Well in Social world Video is the queen it seems since Instagram really loves it and even it’s algorithm will favor businesses that use this feature by boosting their organic engagement and making their profiles easier to discover.

Partner with other brands

Two heads are better than one. One of the better strategies on instagram is to connect with a similar brand and try to push marketing plans together. When you connect with a similar brand, you are exposed to their followers who might be interested in your products, and vice versa. Connecting two similar brands with products in similar niche and making a marketing campaign together might help both brands to catch a larger audience.

Run contests

If you want to get bigger exposure to your brand, a good idea is giving incentives to your followers by running a contest and in the end giving away rewards. People love gifts and free stuff and just for that only they are willing to give an extra friend tag, reshare a post or give some post a like. Without that extra incentive which in longer run doesn’t really cost a brand a lot, has a possibility to grab a bigger reach of new people who might become new followers or get more activity from people who are already following the brand.

Instagram stories

Same thing as Instagram Live, the Stories should be your friend because more than half a billion people use Instagram Stories every day and one third of those are related to businesses. Stories started growing in popularity and using them with your brand gives another way to engage with your audience. And the best part about stories is that they are really easy to do – a quick video or an image that will be live for 24 hours.

Make your Instagram page cohesive

Keep your page posting looking like they really belong to the same brand. If you shift your style with every post you make about your brand, you will lose the cohesiveness with your posts around your brand. Your followers will expect a certain style throughout your brand and you might confuse them. That is of course if you are not launching a new product that requires a new style, but even then you need to stick with that new style you have chosen for your new product.

Use the hashtags

Instagram posts that use hashtags get 12-13% more engagement when compared to those without any hashtags. They help your post to fit into a certain category and they are more easily discovered. Only problem with hashtags is they quickly lose the exposure they give you due to high volume of posts coming all the time, so they are good for 24-48 hours before something else in the same category is pushed forward in trends. So this is connected with the strategy of posting often.

Pay to play

While Instagram for growing business organically is a viable option, of course there is a pay to win option too. Since Instagram is a Facebook  company their ads work pretty much the same. You can for a certain budget target a specific audience and without too much problems get exposure you want for your brand. Sure organical traffic is great, but if you want faster results targeted ads can do miracles.