How to Gain Your First (or Next) 1,000 Instagram Followers

Introduction

Instagram is an incredibly popular social media platform. It's a photo-sharing app that allows users to post images that they can then customize with filters and share with their friends, family, and followers. #Instagram has more than 800 million active users worldwide, and it's growing every day.

However, gaining your first 1,000 Instagram followers (or even your second or third thousand) isn't always easy if you're just starting out on the platform. Here are some strategies we've found helpful for getting our first 1K followers:

Pick Your Niche

You can't just start posting on Instagram to gain followers. You have to pick your #niche and make sure that the content you're sharing is relevant. You should also be sure that the type of people you want to attract will find your niche interesting, while still being unique enough so that they don't feel like they've seen it before.

Think about what kind of topics are important in your area of expertise, or what kinds of things are most important for you to share with others based on what drives your interest in photography or videography as a hobby or career. For example, if you love photographing animals but aren't very good at drawing them (or drawing anything), then it might be better for you not to post drawings instead of photographs with sketches made over top them—but if you're great at sketching and enjoy doing it on your own time anyway, then feel free! Just make sure there's something about this project that will make it easier for other people who follow along with their own projects too--maybe by showing how easy it is to use different tools like markers or colored pencils when adding layers under images taken using cameras instead than smartphones since most people nowadays don't even own SLR cameras anymore...

Do Your Research

Before you go out and start posting, you need to do some research. If you're new to Instagram, chances are that the first time someone suggested following or unfollowing accounts for your business or brand was in a blog post like this one. You need to get onto the platforms and see how others are doing it so that you can create an account that stands out from everyone else's!

Define Your Aesthetic

This is a crucial step. If you don’t know who you are and what your brand stands for, how can anyone else? It's important to define what your brand is about before jumping into Instagram marketing.

What does my brand look like? What does it sound like? Feel like? Smell like? Taste like? Touch like? When someone thinks about my business, how do they feel in response to those thoughts and feelings?

Create a Content Calendar

One of the best ways to guarantee that your posts are consistently interesting is by creating a content calendar. A good content calendar will help ensure you stay on top of posting regularly and keep your followers engaged.

First, write down a list of topics you want to cover. For example, if you're blogging about fitness and nutrition, maybe one week's theme is "protein," another week's theme could be "exercise tips," and so on. Once you have this list in place, use it to schedule out when each post will go up over the next month or so (if not longer). You can do this manually or with a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite (or both).

Post at the Right Time

Posting at the right time is another way to gain followers, engagement, and likes. You want to post consistently, but you also want to be mindful of when your audience is most likely to see your content.

It's easy for a newbie with no followers to schedule their posts all throughout the day—and just as easy for someone who has been posting for a while and has gained some traction in their account. But if you're like me, then you might think twice about posting at 3 am or 12 pm because those times are either too early or too late for many people (especially if they're living in different time zones). And even if those are the only times available on Instagram's scheduler tool, I would still want to avoid them because they aren't what I would normally consider "prime hours."

Use Hashtags

Hashtags are one of the most important tools for increasing your Instagram presence, but using them can be intimidating. Here's how to do it right:

• Choose hashtags based on your content. If you're posting about travel, use hashtags like #travel and #wanderlust. If you're posting about fashion, use hashtags like #fashionista or #leopardprint. Your goal is to make it easy for people who love that kind of thing—in this case, travel or fashion—to find your photos in their feed.

• Use at least one hashtag per post, but don't overdo it! As with any social media platform (or any other aspect of life), moderation is key here; as we've already learned with likes and comments on posts, too many hashtags will alienate potential new followers by making it seem like you're spamming them with promotional material instead of simply sharing updates from your day-to-day life with friends and family members who actually care about what's going on inside your headspace (and heart).

• Don't just put random words into the search bar and hope for the best! This may sound obvious at first glance but there are a lot of people out there who don't know what they're doing when it comes time to actually type out those three little letters before calling themselves done; make sure every word counts by choosing ones that describe something specific about both yourself AND whatever else might be happening around you in real life (or even better yet: both!).

Engage With Other Users

Now that you've got your first 1,000 followers, it's time to figure out how to get more.

The answer: engagement.

Engagement is the art of getting others to interact with your content by liking, commenting, or tagging their own posts with yours. This will help them build their following as well as raise awareness of who you are and what your account is about in their networks.

To start gaining engagement:

#Analyze and #Track Your Progress

Once you’ve got a handle on what you want to do, it’s time to start doing it. The first step is to track your progress so you can see how far along your journey is and whether or not you need to make changes in order to keep up with it.

To begin tracking your progress, simply:

• Analyze your followers and engagement

• Analyze your content and how it is performing

• Analyze your hashtags and how they are performing

• Analyze your audience and how they are interacting with the content

These strategies will help you gain your first 1,000 Instagram followers

These strategies are not guaranteed to work for you. They may not work for everyone, and they definitely won't work for every industry. These strategies are meant to be a starting point for your Instagram marketing journey—one that will hopefully give you some clarity on what steps you need to take in order to get more followers on Instagram.

So, without further ado: here’s how we gained our first 1,000 followers on Instagram.

Conclusion

We hope that you found our advice useful, and we wish you the best of luck in your journey to 1,000 Instagram followers. Keep in mind that gaining this many followers is not something that will happen overnight—it may take some time before you see results from any of these strategies. But with steady effort and dedication on your end (and maybe a little luck), it’s possible!