5 Tips to help you build a niche following on Instagram
Instagram is one of the most important social media platforms to consider if you want to develop your e-business in T-shirt marketing. With its infinite possibilities of interaction and commitment, Instagram offers a new space in order to reach a new audience for your campaign.
In this article, we will discuss how to support your business by using Instagram. Ideally, by setting up an Instagram account you will be able to bring your campaigns that are successful on Facebook to another platform.
Step 1: Preparing your profile
Before you can start using Instagram you need to make sure your profile looks appealing so that people will want to follow you. Your profile must look organized and professional, yet interesting and fun. Create a short but powerful bio and add the link to your website or Facebook page and add a profile picture. Post around 9-12 photos/videos/boomerangs so that your profile does not look empty.
Step 2: Defining an audience
Decide who your audience should be based on the niche themes of your successful campaigns. If your niche is pets, then you should find followers who are interested in pets, if your niche targets a specific hobby such as fishing then you should find Instagrammers who are interested in fishing, etc.
Step 3: Finding your audience
Once you have identified who your audience should be, how do you find that audience? There several approaches:
Approach #1: Find popular hashtags related to your niche and do some research. Finding posts that use this hashtags allows you to find individuals that are interested in the subject of your niche. You may even find Instagram accounts dedicated to the subjects. If you do it is likely that the followers of that account will be interested in your products as well. You can find the most popular hashtags online by simply Googling and using free online programs such as Iconosquare or Webstagram.
Hashtags are incredibly useful when you are using Instagram to support and promote your e-business. They help you find an audience that is interested in your niche theme, and they help those interested in your content find you. Additionally, hashtags can help you find out who the competition is, which allows you to keep an eye on the competition.
Approach #2: Study the profiles of the people who have used hashtags that relate to your niche theme. Look at their followers and check out their profile. Try to interact with them and hope for a follow back.
Approach #3: Follow the hashtag and location tag to an event linked to your niche theme and interact with the participants. For example: if your niche is about extreme sports such as motocross of snowboarding you could find events for extreme sports such as tournaments or games.
Step 4: Interacting with your potential audience
When you have found interesting and appropriate profiles you need to interact with them to catch their attention. Again, there are several approaches for this.
Approach #1: Start following the appropriate profiles. This communicates to the user behind the profile that you are interested in what they are posting and it will make them notice you. It is likely that a user will have a look at your profile when they see you started following them. If they are interested they will start following you back.
Approach #2: Liking and commenting a post. It is easy to do and everyone appreciates receiving likes and comments on their picture. Liking and commenting will get your audience’s attention and will make them notice you, even if the post has already received dozens of likes and comments. Hopefully they will start following you.
Step 5: Tips to interact with your audience
You can use the method called “Follow, like, like, like”. It is simple – search the hashtags that you are targeting and choose the best pictures. Follow the account that posted the picture, and then like three random pictures. Many people like the three most recent people, but that comes across as if you are not genuinely interested in their photos and you are just looking for a follow back (which you are, but your audience does not have to know that). It is best to choose three pictures that are several weeks or even months apart, this way it appears that you were interested in their profile. The user will notice that you followed them, and that you took time to look through their pictures and you liked their content.
It has been shown that the rate of follow-back is about 25%. That means that for every 4 persons that you follow, one of them will follow you back. If you time accordingly you could get a significant amount of visitors to your page right before the launch of a campaign.
The researchers of the previously mentioned study stated the following about their experiences with Instagram: “We experienced it for a whole week before launching our product, and by the end of the week, we had already reached 10K followers. In just a week. Every picture received at least 100 likes and other people were tagged in our pictures by their friends. The content was awesome and everyone was feeling very concerned about what the company was going to do. And, the best part was that all of this was legitimate, without (I hope) people being annoyed by us. Only, after a while, it became exhausting to like Instagram pictures all day long. But it was worth it when the launching day arrived.”
Take a look at this lists of hashtags and download the pdf here.
