Instagram fame hasn’t even been a thing for very long, but already there are millions of people out there who want to have thousands of followers and maybe a few sponsorship deals, too.
Social capital is a big deal here in the 2020s and there are lots of different benefits to being smart about your social media presence in general, whether it’s on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter.
But for now, we’d like to give you some tips for how to get famous on Instagram, and don’t worry, these aren’t going to be super-technical tips on how to dominate feeds and optimize your post times.
All of these tips are easy to understand and easy to put into practice. Most of them focus on branding and how you treat your audience, which includes both followers and people who are finding your profile for the very first time.
These also aren’t hard-and-fast rules. There might be times when you make a decision about your profile solely based on your intuition and wanting to be authentic with your fans.
However, these tips really can help you stand out from all the other profiles on IG that hoping to get famous as fast as possible.
Whether you want to or not, your Instagram presence will have its own brand. Branding isn’t just for people with huge social media teams or for companies trying to push their new product.
On social media especially, every profile has its own brand. Technically, you could let that brand emerge from whatever content you’re going to post, but that won’t be a very focused or appealing brand to most people.
While each person is complex, the best brands are simple and straightforward. Having a solid brand means that someone could take a look at your profile for five seconds and know right away what it’s all about.
Bad social media brands, on the other hand, just confuse viewers. There’s no clear focus or specialty, and that can quickly lead to someone clicking away, which is the opposite of what you want when you’re chasing IG fame.
But if you know from the start that branding is important, you can make specific decisions about what you want that brand to be.
Do you want to focus on makeup? Maybe music? Maybe you want to share travel pics from all around the world.
No matter what you want to do with your Instagram page, sticking to a plan can be extremely helpful when you’re trying to rack up followers.
Once you have a pretty good idea of what your page isn’t going to focus on, then you can start to work on the process of finding your followers, and no, we don’t mean finding the followers you already have.
There’s a concept in public relations called a ‘target audience.’ Basically, this is the group of people that a PR client needs to appeal to the most. It’s the audience they can’t afford to lose.
In the case of growing your Instagram profile, there are ways to look for and find the people who will make up your target audience in the near future.
You can do this by asking yourself some key questions, based on the branding you’re trying to build.
What kind of person is likely to be interested in your content? What kinds of tags do they pay attention to? Who are some other influencers that they already follow?
If you can settle on answers to these questions, then you can start to be more strategic with your posts.
If your page is all about music, then instead of giving new posts whatever tags you can think of in the moment, you can use trending tags that are music-related, or popular music tags in general that get a lot of attention.
This can be a very good way to expand your audience, all without changing your actual content at all.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Snapchat was the only major social media app to let users post what are now called stories, which are basically just collections of video snippets or still images that someone posts throughout the day.
Ever since Instagram added this feature, it has only expanded the ways that users, and especially influencers, interact with their followers.
Stories just tend to feel a lot more personal and accessible than regular IG posts. They tend to show what the user is up to right at that moment, and since it allows for video, influencers can give fans useful updates that will expire over the next day.
Using stories to your advantage can do a lot to get your followers engaged in what you’re doing and make them excited for stories, encouraging them to come back and visit your page once a day.
The more frequently your followers visit your page, the stronger the connection they’ll feel with your content, and this can build a sense of loyalty.
Live streams on Instagram are very similar to stories, but they have an even stronger sense of encouragement for followers to engage with the content.
Live streaming has a special appeal because viewers don’t know exactly what to expect. These streams can also have an intimate feel, since it’s not that far off from doing a video call with your followers.
That feeling of conversation and authenticity is always going to be the big draw with live streaming, which means that you don’t necessarily even need to plan fun activities.
Just interact with your fans in any way you feel comfortable and strengthen your bond with them.
Even with all these tips in mind, there’s one big rule you should try to stick to: just be yourself.
It may sound a bit cliche, but it will also help you come across as genuine and heartfelt. No matter what you’re doing on Instagram, do it with sincerity. People will take notice and feel closer to you as a result.
