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How to Get Your First 10,000 Instagram Followers

Welcome back to my blog. In today's blog, I'm super excited because we have a special guest. Stevie of Stevie Says Social is here to talk about ‘How to Get your first 10,000 Engaged Instagram Followers’. I don’t know about you, but I would love to get 10,000 followers because then you get all of these extra features like, you know, this swipe up thing.

You can only get that once you have 10,000 followers, so that is why she is here today and she is a total social media expert and she has a fantastic podcast. I'll leave a link to her podcast down below. I'm a huge fan and you could learn so much about upping your social media game on there.

Stevie and I actually became friends on Instagram and then took our friendship offline and met for the first time in Bali, and we've been able to catch up a bunch of times since then. So I'm super excited to introduce her today. And here she is with all the tips.

Hey guys, my name is Stevie from Stevie Says Social. Today I'm going to talk to you about ‘How to Get your first 10,000 Engaged Instagram Followers.’ This is a question that I'm asked all the time and it's understandable. A few years ago you could start posting on social media and you would start to get traction straight away. The glory days are over unfortunately. I have not been growing my account during those days and I have done the hard yards. So, what I want to share with you are some of the tactics that are working now, for not only growing a following, but growing an engaged following.

Now, one thing that I want to caveat before I get started is that:

FOLLOWERS AREN’T EVERYTHING, right?

If you don't have followers that are the right followers, who are actually engaging with your content, then your content won't be seen. Sorry. The test that I want you to use is with every follower, Is this person somebody that is going to help my business? Are they going to do business with me? Are they a referral source? Am I attracting the right people? This is so, so important.

Chasing followers for followers sake is completely irrelevant and it's not something that you should be doing. Now that that is out of the way let's get into My Top 5 Tips for Getting your First 10,000 Engaged Instagram Followers. So my first, and what actually works for me in the early days is:

1. Strategically Socializing

What I mean by that is working out who your ideal audience is, and then making a list of similar, but noncompeting businesses, with the same target audience. So, if you're a local hairdresser, make a list of all the local beauty salons in your area. What you can then do is you can go through and genuinely engage with their followers.

Don't do this with competitors' accounts. Do it with similar, but noncompeting businesses, and make sure that the key here is that you genuinely engage:

So follow the businesses and the accounts that you're interested in.
Genuinely engage comments like, you know - do all of that good stuff.
Make sure that you're not just following and unfollowing, because it's really spammy.

This is a great way to grow in the early days. And as I said, it is the way that I got to my first few thousand Instagram followers.

Now the second thing that you can do in terms of growing an engaged Instagram account is to:

2. Promote Your Instagram Account Off Instagram

Groundbreaking, right? It's really simple, but it's something that people often forget to do. So, a few ways that you can do this. Number one, promote it on your website. So use your footer, and you can actually add an Instagram kind of slider in there if you want to.

You can see it on my website, Steviesayssocial. I've used the snap widget essentially for Wordpress in order to do that for my site.

Now another way that you can promote on your website is using the MiloTree app. Now, essentially, what that does is it gives you a pop up that comes up for new visitors that invites them to like your Instagram page.

I also encourage you to add, on your email signature, a call to action to invite people to like you on Instagram. So you can literally just put together a graphic - and I do this on my emails - linking back to your Instagram account. Or you can use something like Wise Stamp, which will actually put all of the links to your social media handles in there for you. Also make sure that you're cross pollinating your Instagram account on your other social media handles.

So the third tip for getting your first 10,000 engaged Instagram followers is to:

3. Collaborate

So, actually work with other similar, but noncompeting businesses, with a similar target audience and collaborate with each other. Make Instagram friends - actually go out and proactively find these businesses on Instagram. Instagram is actually a really good B2B platform for doing that, and then work together to cross pollinate your audiences.

So what do I mean by that? One way that you can do this is the Instagram takeover. So you takeover each other's accounts and introduce yourselves to their audience. This is a great way of adding value if you do it the right way. You might take over their stories, for example, for a day with some tips and tricks, and it's a great way of getting in front of their audience by adding value and getting them to pay attention to you and hopefully come back and follow you as well.

Another great way to do this is with an Instagram Live. So if you do a joint Instagram live with another business, another Instagram account, the live will actually show up in the field of both your account and the other businesses accounts. So it can be a really great way to cross pollinate your audiences.

Now, the fourth tip for growing an engaged Instagram audience, so getting your next 1,000, your next 10,000, whatever it is:

4. Quality Over Quantity

So you need to make sure that everything that you post is quality. The golden rule here is not always to be salesy, right?

Add value.
Create connection with your audience.
Show a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of what you do.

If you can keep the quality of your content up, you're going to get engagement, which is going to mean that your posts are seen by more people, which means that you will grow naturally. It's not as important anymore to have the quantity, to be posting several times a day, if you can't keep the quality up. And my last tip is to:

5. Optimize Your Instagram Account

A lot of people don't know this, but the name section of your Instagram account doesn't actually need to be the name of your business. You can get a little bit creative with it. So this is the bold section at the top of your Instagram account. Now, this is actually searchable, so make sure that you add keywords into this section to give your account an extra chance of being seen by the right people.

For example, I have Lift Your Social Media Game as my name, and I still have Steviesayssocial as my username. Having ‘social media’ in there is a good opportunity for people to come across me, because it's a searchable term.

They are my top five tips for getting to your first 10,000 engaged Instagram followers. Remember guys, it is a marathon, not a sprint. It is so important that you're attracting the right people and that is key. If you're doing that, you keep your engagement up. Engagement is the lifeblood of Instagram these days, and all of the followers in the world will not matter if you don't have it.

Louise: All right, so that was awesome. Thank you so much Stevie for coming and sharing those strategies with us. If you liked this video, let us know by giving it a thumbs up. Leave us a comment below, and definitely don’t forget to hit Subscribe. If you are watching this in real time, Stevie is hosting a super exciting event next week. It's a social media bootcamp, so I'll leave a link for that in the description below - definitely go and sign up.

STEVIE SAYS SOCIAL ACADEMY

I know she will be delivering tons of value next week and you can get a head start on getting your 10,000 followers. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon with another blog.