5 Ways To Build a Niche Community on Instagram

If you want to build a community on Instagram and promote products and services to your followers, niche marketing is the way to go. Think about it this way: If you offer generic products and services, you will have an uphill battle against thousands of competitors with the same idea.

Getting more than 2 billion active users’ attention on the platform means promoting something they didn’t know they wanted until you showed up. If you get this right, you’ve taken the first step towards building a niche community of loyal followers who stay excited about your endeavors.

The next step is deciding what type of audience you want to target.

Who Do You Want To Build a Community For?

Niche communities function best when the creator and the followers are passionate about the same things. For example, if you love finding and exploring roads less traveled locally or globally, you’d want to create a community of like-minded people. If you’re an artist who's enthusiastic about teaching others how to paint, draw, or sculpt, you’d ideally want to draw an artistic group of followers.

When you’ve decided what you want your community to look like, the next part may be a little tricky: creating content that speaks to the hearts of your followers. In the same way that your brand connects with a specific audience, so should your content. This means putting together content and images that only your audience will appreciate.

Your content should also solve real problems. For instance, if you have community members who experience the same troubles while traveling, you could help them brainstorm a solution. Should you see a pattern of your followers all asking the same question about art or drawing, you could create a series of how-to Instagram videos to provide an answer.

All your efforts should add to the same goal: building and growing a niche community on Instagram.

1. Use Keywords and Hashtags to Draw The Right Followers

Whether you’re writing and sharing blogs or posting tutorials and videos, your ideal audience can’t find you unless you make your brand visible on Instagram. Say you want aspiring artists to find your paint-by-numbers course. You would have to do intensive research on what they would be searching for.

For example, you could use keywords in captions such as 'paint-by-numbers for beginners’ or ‘painting tutorial for beginner painters.’ If you use specific paints, you could incorporate that as well. For instance, ‘acrylic painting tutorials for beginners’ or ‘affordable acrylic painting courses.’

Looking at these examples, you can begin to see how easy you can make it for your audience to discover your content.

Also, Instagram exists to help communities thrive. All its features can help content creators establish their own growing audiences. For this reason, you should make the most of all these features, especially hashtags.

Search for hashtags related to your niche. Use them in your content and follow other accounts that use them. Create branded hashtags for each of your products or services or an overall company hashtag to make your brand even more visible on Instagram.

If you choose to include trending hashtags in your content strategy, just be sure not to use generic ones. All your hashtags should play into your goal to create a niche brand and community.

2. Find Influencers In Your Niche

The right influencer can help your brand grow by leaps and bounds. Influencers help guide online users to brands they trust and buy from. Before entrusting your brand to an influencer, ensure their values align with your goals. If you have the same vision for your niche, their audience can join yours and vice versa. This will help increase the number of people you reach on Instagram.

3. Treat Your Community Like Family

If you want people to love and identify with your niche on Instagram, you can’t treat them like strangers. Building a community means creating an online family. Interact with them the way you would with your own family. Ask how they’re doing or getting along with their new projects. Feature their successes on your feed. Tell them you’re proud of their achievements. Brands that uplift their followers are the ones that amplify their Instagram reach the most.

4. Make it Fun to Be Part of Your Community

Everyone loves a challenge or an exciting event. Your niche community is likely no different. Spoil your followers by hosting free events or challenges that end in giveaways and prizes. You could post a picture of something you painted and offer a prize for the best replica created by your followers. Or you could host a free painting course and give away a prize to the person who best implements your advice and techniques.

The Instagram world is your oyster. You could even host live sessions on the platform to discuss your niche offering. Doing this will show your audience just how much expertise you possess and how you can help them achieve their own goals within that niche.

5. The Testimonials Will Come. Use Them Wisely

When you’ve established your community and actively create content your followers look forward to, the testimonials will start rolling in. This is especially true if you throw a challenge in there now and then. And because these personal reviews of your business are related to your niche, it will attract more people to your brand.

If you turn your positive testimonials into case studies, you can use them to engage with an even wider audience. A case study can highlight how your niche brand helped inspire one or more of your followers to start their own online venture. It can also spotlight how your expertise helped solve problems your followers experience. Ongoing testimonials are one of the best ways to grow your niche community and brand over time.

Start Building Your Instagram Community

Put your Instagram community at the center of everything you plan for your Instagram content, and you’ll soon reap incredible benefits. It may not happen overnight, but with some patience and effort on your part, you’ll never look back.