If you’re trying to grow your Instagram following, you can run a series of affordable Instagram ads, and then buy real Instagram likes to help you gain traction on the network. You can also use these five proven tactics to get more likes on your ads, which can boost their performance without paying extra money.
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Do Some #Hashtag Research
It’s so tempting to use whatever hashtags come to mind, but that’s not the best way to go about it. You can, but aren’t obligated to use, up to 30 hashtags on each post. You want to use ones that are popular, so people will find your post, but not so popular that it will disappear from the hashtag feed quickly. If you use a hashtag with 10 million posts, it’s estimated your post will only show in the feed for about three minutes – so that’s a waste of valuable space.
Some hashtags that would make sense for your content could be banned because they’re full of spam. You want to make sure your hashtag isn’t associated with content you don’t want to be associated with your brand. Type some hashtags on Instagram and see what they suggest, then take a look at the kind of content that’s there before you decide which ones to use for other users to discover you.
Research shows nine hashtags tends to have the highest engagement. It also seems longer hashtags perform better, too.
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Run Ads When Your Audience is Most Active on Instagram
Instagram allows you to schedule your ads based on when you want them to appear, but it’s only available if you use the lifetime budgeting feature. This is a wonderful way to ensure you’re advertising to people at the right time.
Use your analytics data to determine when you get the most engagement, and if you don’t have that data to work from you can use research from SproutSocial as the basis until you get enough time with your account under your belt to learn the specifics of your audience.
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Build a Targeted Audience for Your Ads
Since Instagram Ads are managed through the Facebook Ads platform, you have access to a lot of targeting options – based on income, location, gender, interests, and other demographics.
The key is to get your audience targeted so you know the people who like your ad or decide to follow you are actually interested in what you have to offer, but not so highly targeted that you don’t get a lot of exposure, or end up paying an astronomical amount of money for each click or like. You want something that the Ad platform registers in the green section, so it’s not too broad or too specific.
You can play with the targeting options and run variants of the ads, and then see which one your audience responds to the best, so you can decide to spend more of your money on the ad that performs the best.
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Use Tools to make Your Ads More Visually Appealing
The built-in filters Instagram has available will enhance your photos, of course, but you can use other outside tools to do even more work on your photos. You can use VSCO to allow you to give your photos double exposure.
Or, you can use tools like Over, Typorama, and Wordswag to add engaging text over your photos. You can also use Enlight to get access to a full suite of creative editing options.
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Join an Instagram Pod
An Instagram pod is a group of about 10 to 15 people who band together and share tips and tricks to promote each other’s content. You submit your ad post to the pod, and everyone will go like it for you. Then, whenever another group member adds a post to the pod group, you do the same.
You can also use this approach to get comments on your posts, too. Some may even be willing to re-gram your posts, too. Usually, pods are groups of people in the same niche, though you are not in direct competition with one another.
The pods generally communicate using Instagram direct messages, and every time a group member publishes a new post, they share it via a direct message so that all the other group members can like it and comment, which encourages others to engage with the post as well. It also helps to know when your pod members are most active, so you can make sure to post your content when you know they are online to boost it for you almost immediately.
You can join more than one pod, but if you expect to use it to promote your own content without returning the favor, you will be asked to leave because you’re not holding up your end of the bargain.
Joining a pod like this is not necessarily easy because they are invitation only. Networking is critical to getting an invitation to one or more pods. But, you can use Instagram-themed groups on Facebook, such as The Gram Gang, or Instagram Marketing Mastermind, to discover pods that have openings available.
By taking the time to do your hashtag research ahead of time for all your posts, not just the ones you want to use in your ads, using free tools to make your ad photos more visually appealing, choosing to run your ads at the right times – times when you know your audience is active – adjusting the ad targeting options, and finding and joining Instagram pods, you can maximize the likes on your Instagram Ads.
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