How to 10x Your Instagram Reach & Followers (Expert Insights)

Building a strong Instagram presence can feel like an uphill battle. Despite your best efforts, gaining traction and engaging your audience often seems elusive. The truth is, without a strategic approach, success on Instagram remains hard to achieve.

With over 15 years of experience as a social media marketer and agency owner, I’ve grown my Instagram page to 170K followers and moved the needle for multiple clients. I understand what it takes to create content that not only reaches thousands but also converts them into your followers.

In this guide, I will share my proven strategies for growing your Instagram followers. From profile optimization and viral content strategies to performance measurement and embracing AI tools, I’ve got you covered.

Join me to learn how to grow big on Instagram and transform your page into a thriving business.

How To Increase Instagram Reach and Followers in 6-Steps

Growing my Instagram following and achieving millions of Reel views took some time, experimentation, and learning from my successes and failures. Throughout this journey, I honed strategies that can help you achieve similar results.

I have created a 6-step framework to help you transform your Instagram presence.

Step 1: Optimize Your Instagram Profile

Your profile is the first thing users see when they visit your brand. If you want to use Instagram as a marketing tool, you need an optimized profile to leave a lasting impression. An optimized Instagram profile helps you increase discoverability, build trust among your audience, and drive clicks on your bio links.

So what should an optimized profile look like? Whenever I review any client’s profile, I look at these 6 checkpoints:

• Profile picture: Your profile picture is often the first visual that users notice when they come across your profile. A consistent and recognizable profile picture lets you establish your brand identity. Analyze your picture. Are you using a professional photo or a logo? Do you have branded colors or elements in your photo? Is it easily identifiable across Instagram? If not, start making those changes to stand out.
• Username: Include relevant keywords in your username to improve discoverability. For example, my username is “SocialMarketingQueen”, which includes relevant industry and niche-related keywords such as “Social” and “Marketing.”
• Page name: A relevant, clear, and memorable page name makes it easier for the audience to find your profile, ultimately leading to follower growth. Ensure your page name reflects your brand. Keep it simple, easy to remember, and consistent across other social media profiles for uniformity. Include relevant keywords for better searchability. For example, I have used my actual name, “Katelyn Rhoades,” and the business type, “Social Media Agency,” to make it easier for my clients to discover me.
• Profile bio: Your bio should clearly showcase who you are, what you do, and what services you offer. Use the 150-character limit wisely.
• Link in bio: Leverage the 5-link limit in your Instagram bio by adding your website and important landing page links to direct traffic to the intended destinations.
• Story Highlights: In the story highlights, showcase your most important content and categorize it for easy navigation.

Here is a bonus: I collaborated with SocialPilot to create this easy to get started Instagram bio template. Use it to get a headstart.

Remember, the aim here is to create a compelling, professional, and engaging Instagram profile that attracts the right audience and boosts your reach.

Moving on to the next step.

Step 2: Build Your Content Strategy

A strong content strategy is the cornerstone of a successful Instagram page. In these times when attention is scarce, and competition is fierce, a strategic approach is required to make your content stand out and get visibility.

A well-defined content strategy can help you ensure your branding and messaging are uniform across your Instagram profile, allowing you to speak directly to your audience. It improves your engagement rate and establishes you as an expert in the niche.

There are 4 elements in a successful Instagram content strategy. These include:

Strategizing content pillars

You might be wondering, what exactly are “content pillars’? No worries, I have got you covered.

Content pillars are the key themes or topics that consistently guide and structure your content strategy, ensuring cohesive and engaging messaging. I use content pillars to divide my content into different themes, such as behind-the-scenes, educational content, UGC, and free resources.

This helps me maintain consistency and coherence, increasing brand authority and improving audience engagement.

Here are some sample content pillars you can steal and use for your business or client projects:

1. Product/Service Showcase: You demonstrate and show off your offerings, such as your product or service, in action.
2. Behind the Scenes: Show your audience the human side of your brand through behind-the-scenes content. It helps you build trust and connect on a deeper level with your audience. You can share glimpses of your team, workspace, or production process to make your audience feel a part of your broad team.
3. Customer Testimonials: Create content that highlights customer satisfaction and shares your customers’ success stories.
4. Educational Content: Create content that provides valuable information to your audience, such as how-tos, tips, and tricks related to your niche.
5. Community Engagement: Engage with your audience by encouraging participation and interaction. Host Q&A sessions and giveaways, and share UGC to create a sense of community and loyalty among your audience.

By planning and strategizing the content ahead of your schedule, you can improve efficiency and effectiveness, do better audience targeting, create personalized content, and do data-driven optimizations.

Brand Dissection and Inspiration

Let’s take a real brand example to understand this point better.

For this example, I am using Enfluence Marketing Studio’s Instagram profile. Enfluence is a boutique social media agency with close to 3,500 followers.

So, let’s jump in!

As we look closer at their profile and what they are posting, we can immediately see that their branding is on the spot. They consistently use their brand colors and fonts across their posts, and their grid is cohesive and properly reflects their tone of voice.

Here is my analysis of their profile:

1. Educational Content: Their main pillar focuses on teaching the how-tos, tips, and tricks of social media marketing using Reels and carousels.
2. Trending Audio: They have a dedicated content pillar for sharing trending audio and making content around it. They use trending audio in their Reels to increase their reach and leverage the trend. You can take inspiration from them and start using trending audio in your Reels, Stories, and Feed posts.
3. Testimonial/Case Study: Enfluence emphasizes sharing testimonials and case studies to demonstrate industry expertise.
4. Consistent Posting: They are consistent with their posting schedule, posting anywhere between 3 to 5 times a week.

Overall, Enfluence focuses on inspiring, educating, and empowering its audience with captivating visual content. Their diverse content pillars, combined with a consistent posting schedule, help them gain new followers regularly.

But what good is it all when you don’t have any content ideas?

Finding Your Content Ideas

If you struggle to come up with fresh content ideas, here are some platforms and apps that I suggest to businesses or creators to generate content ideas:

• Pinterest: It is a goldmine for inspiration. You can search for keywords related to your industry and explore pins, boards, and trends to collect content ideas.
• Instagram Explore: The Explore page on Instagram is personalized based on the user’s interests and behaviors. You can browse the “Explore tab” to discover popular posts, trending hashtags, and relatable content.
• BuzzSumo: This tool lets users analyze which content performs the best for any topic. By entering relevant keywords, you can identify trending topics, popular content formats, and the number of shares they are getting shared.
• Quora: People use Quora to ask and answer questions on several topics and industries. Small businesses can use it to find topics, commonly asked questions, pain points, and areas where they can create valuable and insightful content.
• ChatGPT: You can leverage ChatGPT to brainstorm content ideas by providing relevant prompts or questions related to your industry. ChatGPT can help generate creative content ideas that are super personalized.

We all want to our posts to go viral. Let’s explore tips to make your content go viral.

Leverage Viral Content Strategy

As the name suggests, a viral content strategy involves creating and promoting content that has the potential to go viral quickly across social media and garner significant attention and engagement.

Here are some key elements and considerations for crafting a viral content strategy:

• Emotional Appeal: Viral content is designed to evoke strong emotions such as joy, surprise, or humor. By creatively creating content and harnessing these emotions, you can make content that resonates with your audience and is likely to get shared.
• Uniqueness and Originality: Viral content stands out due to its fresh and unique perspectives. Create original content, unlike any other post your audience has seen before.
• Visual Impact: We have heard this for years, but it still holds true. Visuals tend to perform better in driving reach and virality. Create visually compelling content that captures the audience’s attention and effectively communicates your message.
• Relevance and Timeliness: Last but not least, viral content often taps into current events that are fresh in the minds of your audience and reflects their interest and concerns.

Tip To make the content of Social Media Queen go viral, I focus on timing, transitions, utilizing trending audio, and adding value to the content. Personally, I think that an average 15-second video with keywords properly spread across it has really worked well.

Spying and Learning From Competition

Don’t overlook your competitors. They can be a great source of inspiration and help you understand what type of content the Instagram algorithm favors.

Start by looking at your competitor’s content and what they are posting. Is it Reels, carousels, or story content? I want you to focus on their top-performing content and see if you can find any pattern there. Is there any subject they keep talking about that is performing well? Analyze that.

Use your analysis to identify content gaps your competition has not explored yet and what you could try out. Consider topics, formats, or the approach of the content.

Don’t just copy their content outright. Instead, take inspiration from your competitors’ content ideas, strategies, etc.

Step 3: Make Instagram Posting Rituals

Once you devise your content strategy, you should prepare a content calendar, explore the best times to post on Instagram and learn how to use hashtags to expand your reach.

Let’s break down how I go about creating my posting ritual.

Developing a Content Calendar

A content calendar involves planning and organizing your social media posts in advance, specifying the publishing dates, times, and types of content such as Reels, Carousels, and stories.

It serves as a roadmap to guide your social media efforts, ensuring consistency, coherence, and efficiency in your content strategy.

Here is an example of a real-life content calendar that I use and share with my clients:

As you can see from the calendar, we note down important things such as:

• Format Type: Reel, Carousel, single-image posts, or Stories
• The Idea Behind it: What is the goal of the post
• Post Caption: The caption for the post

This calendar is for a Monday – Friday posting schedule, but your posting schedule will differ based on your and your team’s capacity. I personally recommend posting at least five times per week for aggressive growth.

And to help you create a content calendar, you can use SocialPilot. I personally use it to:

• Cut Down on Content Creation Time: The tool lets me generate engaging content ideas and captions for my posts and create hashtags using a built-in AI assistant.
• Boost Productivity through Collaboration: With SocialPilot, I can seamlessly collaborate with my team and work together on content drafts, saving time and reducing redundancy.
• Bulk Scheduling: With bulk scheduling, I can strategize content (up to 500 posts) for weeks or months ahead, freeing up time for quality content creation and strategic planning.

Post at the Best Time

Timing is everything on social media. You increase your chances of reaching the right audience when you post on Instagram at the best time. Knowing when your audience is most active can significantly boost the success rate of your content.

The best time to post on Instagram is when your target audience is most active and engaged. Posting during these times can increase the chances of your content being seen, shared, and engaged.

Here are some general suggestions:

• On Weekdays, post mid-morning (9-11 am) and mid-afternoon (1-3 pm) when people take long breaks.
• On Weekends, post late mornings (10-12 am) or early evenings (5-7 pm) during leisure hours.

You need to find your very own best time to get good engagement, and if you struggle to do so, use this free tool.

Step 4: Grow Organic and Authentic

Authenticity is the foundation for meaningful connections with your audience and driving organic growth on social media. These days, consumers crave genuine and relatable content they can rely on and resonate with on a deeper level.

Authenticity means being genuine, transparent, and true to your brand. It’s about sharing your brand’s unique voice, values, and experiences. There are several benefits of using authenticity in your social media marketing strategy:

• It builds trust and credibility
• Drives your engagement and connections
• Differentiates your brand
• Encourages user-generated content

Here are some tips for staying authentic on Instagram:

• Share behind the scenes: Show your life or business’s real and unfiltered side
• Be transparent and honest: Share your successes, failures, and challenges
• Engage authentically: Respond genuinely to the comments and engage in conversations

To stay authentic, I focus on being real and relatable. Communicating directly with my followers regularly is a big part of my growth and has helped me to strengthen my brand image.

Now that we know how to create authentic and engaging content, we must understand how well your Instagram efforts are paying off.

Step 5: Measure Your Performance

The next step is to understand how effective your Instagram marketing efforts are in achieving your business goals. With several social media metrics to track, it becomes hard to identify which ones to focus on and which ones to leave.

You need to set your KPIs and accordingly track metrics.

We will now understand how to uncover the key metrics for Instagram content and create marketing reports that you can share with your team members or clients.

Here are the different types of metrics you will be considering:

• Reach: Total unique users who have seen your content.
• Impressions: Total number of times your content is displayed.
• Engagement Rate: Interaction level relative to impressions or reach.
• Likes: Number of times users tap the “like” button.
• Comments: Number of user-generated responses.
• Shares: Number of times users share your content.
• Saves: Number of times users save your content for future reference.

As you dig deep, every content format on Instagram has their specific metrics. Let’s take a look at what metrics you need to consider for different content formats:

• Feed Posts: Focus on reach, impressions, engagement rate, and click-through rate.
• Instagram Stories: Track views, exits, taps forward/backward, and completion rate.
• Reels: Monitor views, likes, comments, shares, audience retention, and completion rate.
• Instagram Live: Track views and comments to gauge engagement.

Create a Comprehensive Report

To collect all the data points and create a comprehensive report for multiple client accounts, I use the analytics capabilities of SocialPilot.  Once you connect your Instagram account with this tool, it starts pulling out data for all the Instagram accounts you are managing under a single page.

You can also create customized and tailored reports with automated scheduling so your stakeholders receive them regularly.

The best thing about it? The tool supports all the other platforms as well, making it easier for me to overview the performance of all my clients across multiple platforms at once.

Step 6: Use AI for Scale and Attention

As a social media manager, I have witnessed social media evolve rapidly. Leveraging AI-driven tools has become necessary for me to stay ahead of the curve and maximize my results.

If not already, it’s time you start using AI to optimize your content.

You can use AI tools to generate content ideas, automate content schedules, find and post at the best times, target audiences, and monitor content performance in real time.

Here are my personal favorite AI tools, which I use to stay ahead of the curve and create content at scale:

• ChatGPT: This AI-powered tool helps creators like me generate engaging content ideas, write catchy captions, summarize long content into short and easy-to-digest content pieces, and more. It’s a versatile tool for brainstorming and content creation.
• JarvisAI: Also known as Jasper, this AI tool excels in creating high-quality content at scale. It’s perfect for writing blog posts, social media captions, and detailed reports. JarvisAI can help tailor content to specific audiences, enhancing relevance and engagement.
• InShot: A user-friendly video editing app, InShot uses AI to streamline video production. It’s ideal for creating visually appealing Reels and Stories, offering features like automated color grading and audio enhancement.
• SocialPilot: Apart from the social media management functionality, SocialPilot also has a built-in AI Assistant. It works as my sidekick to come up with engaging captions right inside the tool and schedule them quickly, instead of switching to a separate content generation tool.

There you have it all.

To truly master these strategies and maximize your Instagram presence’s potential, there’s no better way than to dive deeper into our comprehensive masterclass.

Wrapping Up

Growing your Instagram followers requires a strategic approach, creativity, and smart use of AI tools. It’s not going to be an overnight thing, it was not for me; so be consistent.

By creating high-value content, engaging with your audience, and using data to back your decisions, you can increase your Instagram presence.

Here’s to your success on Instagram!