Boost Instagram Identity: Growth Hacks for Irresistible Appeal

There’s a popular notion that Instagram is more about how you want others to perceive you and less about who you really are. This throws more attention to how a brand or regular user should position their Insta identity.

For one, a brand's identity is how its business and services feel and look online. Because of the visually stimulating nature of Instagram, it’s easy to fake a solid visual identity, but it’s not as easy to maintain such.

If you’re after business and influence longevity, you would need a stable and real Instagram identity. 

The ideal is to achieve this by growing into it; your identity on Instagram isn’t supposed to be stagnant even while you’re focused on a particular niche.

Instead of pushing out what your brand should look like, you make your identity real, improving your business and its outlook to get to the level you want it to be.

Now that we have established that a brand should grow into the perfect identity, you should know that the growth rate is influenced by different factors. We've seen how brands like Uber popped out of thin air to become one of the biggest brands in the world.

Here are some growth hacking techniques to achieve that perfect Instagram identity at a relatively quick pace.
 

1. Play the number and quality game

Some schools of thought believe that quantity possesses more weight than quality as far as growth is concerned on Instagram. Some others support the reverse narrative, but the fact is that both quantity and quality are significant.

The ratio of their importance isn’t essential at this point, but the objective is to be optimal in both aspects. E.g., Dropbox once gave out 32 GB to users when they invite friends to the platform.

While this may seem like focusing on quantity, the provision of 32GB is some form of value, which depicts quality. Users intrigued by the 32GB free space are the right customers for a file hosting outfit like Dropbox.

So don’t just use any means to raise the numbers. Instead, go for effective and spam-free methods to attract the right kind of customers. The free space that Dropbox provides would cost them a lot, but getting quantity and quality comes at a price.

In the same vein, putting together creative and appealing content on Instagram might cost you time, research, and a lot of planning.

• One easy hack to achieve the numbers and quality is searching for a popular hashtag in your niche. Check out the top posts and the accounts responsible for them.
   

• Go ahead and follow their followers; since your brand and theirs are in the same niche, they'll likely have an interest in your brand too.

2. Engage in symbiotic partnership with influencers

Since Instagram is a social network that thrives on interactions, raising your 10k followers to 150k might require rubbing shoulders with the influencers dominating your niche.It's like marketing your brand on a bigger stage, so the influencer should be one that influences the right kind of users—i.e., potential buyers who you'd want as customers.

If you have a low budget, you can go for micro-influencers, mainly because they're usually more rigorous with partnerships and personalized promotions.

Also, the audience of significant influencers can become very lackluster, especially when they know that the influencers are being paid for the post.

3. Tone down your promotions

While a product-centric approach on Instagram can be effective, you don't want to push it too far. There's a fragile line between optimally promoting your products and irritating your audience with an overdose of promotional posts. You can try the 80/20 rule—posting non-promotional content 80% of the time, with only 20% of your feed being filled with marketing materials.

One growth hack you can follow is being brand-centric and focusing on creating brand awareness rather than being overly salesy. Obviously, you don't have to sell all the time.

Sometimes just stick to building your brand identity and making your presence irresistible. That way, you take your brand position a notch higher in the market and influence sales organically.
 

4. Make your profile and content more visible through Instagram SEO 

A fundamental growth hack, if you ask me. Tons of brands see Instagram as a big market, but there's more to the platform as it can open your business to several other benefits of online marketing.

For one, Google uses social media indexing to make an Instagram profile or content pop up from a Google search. But to achieve this, you have to do the following:

• Include relevant keywords in your bio, profile name, and content 

• Use geotagging options when necessary 

• Promote links to your content and products/services on Instagram

5. Create unique hashtags

The use of hashtags is evidently one of the most critical growth hacks on social media. With a compelling and branded hashtag, you get to reach wider audiences.

What's more, if it gets trendy enough, the hashtag will stick in the audience's mind for a very long time. These hashtags remain permanent on social media. The key part of the equation, though, is promoting the hashtag.

In creating a branded hashtag, you might want to key in on user-generated content and interactive bits like contests. That way, random users are responsible for most of the content, and they have an incentive to engage in the hashtag. With a viral hashtag associated with your brand, your Instagram presence is on its way to the skies.

You can determine how well the hashtag is faring with just a simple search on Google.

 

How do you measure this growth?

Most Instagram profiles measure their growth singularly by their number of followers.

Still, when big brands are searching for online personalities to partner with, they go beyond the number of followers.

Here are some other factors that they look out for:

• Google rankings 

• Number of Google searches for your name 

• The rate of use for your branded hashtags 

• Average engagement level per post