Love Beer & Love Instagram? TEN Ways to Grow Your Instagram Followers

If you’re like me and you’re reading this, then I know you love beer.  And while I spend a considerable amount of my time writing about beer, I also spend quite a bit of my time taking photos.  Whether they are beer photos, baking photos or even travel photos, I love to share them on social media.

Facebook is fun and Twitter is timely, but my go-to sharing platform for photos is Instagram.  I enjoy the creativity of Instagram photos and the immediate results you can get not only when you edit a photo, but from the feedback you receive on Instagram.  If you’re like me, then you want as many people to witness your creativity (see your photo) as possible, and the only way to do that is to increase your Instagram followers.

So here are a TEN ways to grow your Instagram followers:

1. Take a good photo-  If your photo content isn’t interesting and your photos aren’t very good, then you’re likely not generating many new followers.  Ask yourself what am I doing that would make someone want to follow me and think about that when you are taking and choose photos.  Choose your subjects carefully and think about the camera placement and arrangement of the photo.  Be Unique!
2. Learn About Your Camera— Most of you are using your cell phone camera and I’ll be most of you don’t know much about your camera settings.  Do a little googling or better yet, play around with your camera settings.  I was surprised at just how sophisticated many cell phone cameras are.  Of course you can just use the standard settings, but dig deeper and you’ll find all sorts of cool settings and effects built right in.
3. Be Funny— No one wants to read a caption that says “this is my cat.”  Think about what you photo is saying and give your photos a voice.  People love captions when they are funny and they are more likely to follow you when they are looking forward to your humor in the next photo you post.  “Here kitty kitty kitty…”
4. Edit Your Photos– After a few photos, it’s time to step away from the pre-canned Instagram filters and do your own thing.  Instead of choosing that X-Pro II Filter once again, click on “Edit” at the bottom of the screen and be creative.  Play around with Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and all of the great photo settings on your own.  A more interesting and unique photo will gain you more followers than another Lo-Fi Filter pic.
5. Share and Link Your Social Media Accounts— Each time I post to Instagram, I also share my post to Twitter.  And here’s a little secret, you can also setup your Twitter account to automatically share your posts to Facebook.  In the end, my posts then hits three times the audience each time I post a photo.  I’m sure there is some overlap of followers, and do be careful to not be overwhelming the same people with the same photo on three platforms, but if used carefully it can grow your followers.
6. Choose Your Hashtags Carefully— I’ll be the first to say that some people overdo the #hashtag thing in their Instagram posts, BUT I’ll also admit that choosing the proper hashtags can expose your photo to a whole new audience.  You see people do follow #hashtags, and while they may not be following you, they may be exposed to you via a #hashtag.  Assuming you followed at least a few of my suggestions above, you may add a new follower just because of a #hashtag.  For beer posts I like to use #beer #beernews #samplingbeer #beerporn #craftbeer or even the brewery name as a #hashtag or @ reference.  Do a little research also and seek out what #hashtags are the most popular.  Believe me it works!
7. Engage With Others–– Look to see who is liking or commenting on your posts.  Check out their photos and/or follow them.  Reply to or Like comments on your posts.  Talk to people.  I also like to look at very successful Instagram accounts to see what they are doing.  No need to reinvent the wheel when you can learn from and engage others.
8. Stay Active— My followers like to see what I’m doing and they like to see a lot of posts…and while I would never recommend having an overwhelming amount of posts, I would recommend that you stay active.  To grown followers, I recommend at least one post a day, and better yet two.  Again don’t get hyper and post 10 photos a day, but do stay active.  No one wants to follow an account that only posts once a month.
9. Vary Your Photos– No matter how much you love your cat or how much you love beer, no one really really wants to see all beer photos or all cat photos.  Check my Instagram feed and lately you’ll find a lot of travel photos.  Dig back and you’ll find beer and lots of other things.  Mix it up!  It’s OK to have a core focus, but keep your photos interesting and varied.
10. Engage an Instagram Growth Service–– There are lots of ways to grow followers, but sometimes getting help is best.  As a way to test the theory, I have engaged Social Network Elite to grow my Instagram followers.’

Now granted this is not a free service, but I thought it would make a great real world experiment.  Social Network Elite promises to generate real followers, not fakes and not bots.  They target specific hashtags in your “niche” to help you grow followers, and they claim to have a proven methodology to grow your audience.

I’ve done a quick screen cap of my Instagram page (above) and as of 7 Aug 2018, you can see I have 1514 Followers.  I WILL update this post as time progresses to see how effective my trial period is with Social Network Elite.  In the name of full disclosure, I would not agree to give up my Instagram login credentials which are required for some levels of their service.  Instead I chose a lesser service with a lower likelihood of increasing followers.  Either way I will update you so stay tuned.

Please check out Social Network Elite and DO bookmark this page to see how my followers grow.

7 Aug 2018:  1514 Follower
4 Sept 2018:  1519 Followers
27 Sep 2018: 1526 Followers

As the trial period ends, the additional followers added is actually BELOW the average rate at which I typically gain followers on Instagram.  In the end, the oddly-named accounts that they use to favorite my posts actually put many of my actual followers and friends off a bit.  I’m certainly not sure it caused a loss of followers or caused fewer followers to join me, but it certainly did not add followers in any significant way.  Granted I did not choose the method they recommend where they engage my followers using my Instagram login ID, however I’d be even more concerned that this method may put off my followers even more significantly, especially since they all noticed the favorited user names.  Your mileage may vary and it is pretty difficult to assess effectiveness with just a few months trial but this is my experience.