Discover Best Ways to Get Free Instagram Followers

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Why I chose Instagram, not because I like it or I really admire the quality of images posted by users there
Well I know 6 reasons why you should consider finding ways to get free Instagram Followers

1. Instagram has 800 million active users that log on every month
2. Instagram is growing very rapidly, only in 2017 it got so many users than ever before
3. Comparing Instagram vs Pinterest, well Instagram has 3x more users than  Pinterest
4. Comparing Instagram vs Snapchat, again Instagram has 4x more users than Snapchat
5. Visual content is dominating, Yes Instagram is the king of visual contents because it is not like Pinterest where you put text on Image to entice visitors to click but it is different on Instagram, you make fascinating images to attract visitors to check your profile
6. Instagram has the highest engagement rate compared to other social media sites where it is 2-7% where Facebook is 0.12-1.54% and Twitter is the lowest of 0.02%

Having said the above does not mean that I am against Facebook and Twitter, absolutely no, if you feel like you are gaining more traffic when using Facebook or Twitter then I would say focus on whatever brings you the most traffic based on your friend Google Analytics

That’s why in my two previous posts, I tried to write about my learning experience on How to Massively Grow Your Facebook Page Organically as a New Blogger and also with my practical implementation on How to Get Twitter Followers Instantly Free

Never hold up your entire group of friends in real life trying to capture a perfect Instagram pose. Nobody cares. (Mary H.K. Choi) Click To Tweet

Having said that, I will show down below my best methods to explode your Instagram account most of them are free and only one paid method (even it is not expensive as you will see) plus I will show you a 2 must to use Social automation tools that it is nearly impossible to grow your Instagram and any Social media accounts without using them, so let’s begin by

• Follow you target audience 

This is the best most straightforward, easy and effective method to gain followers, I am using this method currently and I gained 300 followers since writing this post for my Instagram account @DoYourBlogWithMe (Please I would like to connect with me)

Yes I know what you think, I don’t have many followers but I can say most of the big accounts used this method when they started as a way to boost their accounts’ followers and it takes around 6 months doing it consistently everyday so I did not want to wait till I get 30K followers to share this post with you. it works for me and it will work for you if you try it

There is nothing wrong about it, simply search for users following similar account like yours and start following them

Following your target audience is the top best way to get free Instagram followers Click To Tweet

If they follow this similar accounts then there is a high chance that they will follow you
Some of them will follow you because they will check their accounts and find that you followed them (it is a human nature especially if your account appeal similar to what they like)

To do this professionally without spamming or to be flagged by Instagram (I will explain below what I mean by that), I suggest you use one of tFohe Instagram mobile apps like FollowMeter or Followers (I use both of them)

There are so many opinions on how many accounts to follow/unfollow when you are just starting

I stick to following 60 accounts every hour and a maximum of 300 – 350 accounts per day

Of course it happened to me before that I notice that when I click on the follow button it says following and then it sets itself back to follow

Right away I realize that I hit the spam flag from Instagram’s perspective, I wait for 24 hours and it returns back to normal

Now wait around a week for the first 300-350 accounts which you followed on day 1 and start unfollowing all accounts whom did not follow you back

Doing this from FollowMeters or Folllowers are way easier and practical as these mobile apps will show you directly all accounts who don’t follow you back as shown below

Image of FollowMeters and Followers

Just to let you know, doing this unfollowing practice from Instagram itself, it is very time wasting as first you have to click on each and every profile from your followers list then click on their following link and search for your Instagram username

If you find your username then this means that this profile is following you back otherwise you have to go to your account and unfollow him/her (what a waste of time)

Anyway one last note, FollowMeters will let you follow/unfollow around 15 accounts and then it forbids you from following/unfollowing within I believe 15 minutes to protect you from being temporarily banned by Instagram

• S4S or as known as Share For Shares

From its name it is simply you go and find an account similar to you in niche and audience size
Try to reach out to them by DM (stands for Direct Message if you follow each other) or by email or KiK (it is iPhone messaging app for Instagrammers)

Note if you DM an account which is not following you, your message will be filtered into the “Message Requests” folder instead of their folder
You message should be simple like “Hi, do you want to do Share For Share”

When doing the Share For Share, take a screenshot of the agreed post and resize it on Instagram app
First you have to tag the other account by adding the @ sign before the username

Then mention in this post to follow that account

• Use Niche Specific Hashtags 

Hashtags in Instagram are like groups of all posts related to a very well known word, that word should be prefixed with the # sign
For example #Toronto Hashtags is a collection of all great places, attractions and sight seeing in Toronto, Ontario in Canada

By the way, I have a friend who was expecting a relative and he did not know where to take them, I suggested for him to look for all related Toronto Hashtags to get ideas of where people hang out there

In Instagram you can have up to 30 hashtags per every post

I recommend using hashtags with different sizes, meaning there are hashtags with millions of posts, if you use all your hashtags with the millions posts type chances are your post will be buried quickly and not seen by others

Best advice is to use a mix of hashtags with hundreds of posts along with few hashtags with thousands and little of hashtags with millions of posts
Nice tip is to always keep your frequently used hashtags in a notepad on your laptop or your mobile phone

If you are not sure about which hashtags to select, I suggest going to a similar accounts in your niche with big audience and look for their hashtags, copy part or all of them

Another tip is to use your hashtags in the comment after you post and not in the caption and that’s because after you start receiving few comments your hashtags will be hidden and it will only show up when someone clicks on “view all comments”

I did not test this because I use an automated social media tool like SocialPilot to do the Instagram posting for a week or two ahead

• Increase your posting habits

You will not believe me if I tell you that I noticed a significant increase in followers by 500% only after I started to post 6 times per day instead of only 1 post before, I used to get around 2 followers per day with my small starting account (around 300 followers at the time of writing this post) and after I started to post 6 times, I noticed a significant increase of around 10+ followers per day

This is a very good start for a new account with small number of followers, I am planning to increase it to 8 posts per day and test the impact of this change, by the way you cannot post manually and that’s why it mentioned above that it is nearly impossible to work without using Social automation tool like SocialPilot one which is my favorite one I currently use

Of course, I know what you think now, you say how I am going to come up with 6 posts of my own per day, let me tell you that I plan few posts of mine using a mobile app called Word Swag with the free version you can do a lot of things and another app called Snapseed which I think is owned by Google, both apps are available for iphone and Android

The idea here is simple, use WordSwag and Snapseed to pick images and add with either one of both of these 2 apps a famous quotes (Inspirational, encouraging or wisdom one) as a text layer to your image (each post takes around maximum of 2 minutes if you have a bunch of quotes ready)

Also another tool which you can use for 14 days trial period, actually I am using it and I am thinking to upgrade my account, it is called IconoSquare as after you sign up for the free 14 days trial (no credit card required) you will start receiving a daily report of your Instagram activity, I am really amazed of the quality of this report as it really analyzed my account as if they know what I am thinking when dealing with my Instagram account

• Engagement

That’s why they call it social media which is to go and socialize with people
Start by yourself and comment on other’s posts and hit the like button on whatever you feel appealing to you, stay away from posting negative comments, if you don’t like a post, don’t comment

Do you best to write real comments, don’t comment with something like “Nice Post” and “I like it”

• Paid Shoutouts

Now this is the only paid method, it is very simple as you pay someone with big account to publish your post on his/her account, it is called Paid Shoutouts, of course the top site for paid Shoutouts is called ShoutCart 

To recap, I discussed 5 of the best ways to get free Instagram Followers

• Follow you target audience (Free) : One of the best method, you simply follow competitors’ accounts, you have a chance that they will follow you back, work on unfollowing who did not follow you back
• S4S or as known as Share For Shares (Free) : Find similar accounts like yours on Instagram and make arrangement for both of you to advertise each other’s accounts
• Use Niche Specific Hashtags (Free) : You have up to 30 hashtags to use on every post, why don’t you leverage this wildfire feature, every post you publish with hashtags will also be shown under these hashtags (highest spread of users to view your post)
• Increase your posting habit (Free) : Yes can be free but very highly recommended to use a Social automation tool like  SocialPilot or to invest in something like IconoSquare
• Engagement (Free) : Go and socialize with other Instagram accounts, put some effort on writing comments
• Paid Shoutouts (Paid) : Leverage the use of big accounts to display your post on their accounts, well known service like ShoutCart 

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