How I Gained 100 Instagram Followers in a Week

Three weeks ago, I started a little social media experiment. I wanted to see how much I could get more followers on Instagram following using one simple trick. Would you believe that since my experiment started, I’ve gained over 300 followers on Instagram?! All it took was using hashtags, but possibly not in the manner that you’re thinking!

How I Gained 100 Instagram Followers in a Week

Screenshot from iconosquare.com - How I Gained 100 Instagram Followers in a Week

Why grow your Instagram following?

If you didn’t already know, you can actually make money on Instagram! I’ve been making money on Instagram for a while now using Izea. Recently though, I discovered an app called Popular Pays that offers TONS of opportunities to get paid by Instagramming! The only problem is that I don’t have enough followers for most of these opportunities.

I knew that if I was going to grow my following on Instagram, I wanted legit followers. There is pretty much zero point in paying for fake followers, because you’re not going to get any interaction from them. I’ve participated in loop giveaways before, and while most of these followers are real people, many automatically unfollow you as soon as the giveaway is over. #useless

How to grow your Instagram following

Increasing my amount of Instagram followers was as simple as being social. Being social on social media. What a concept, huh?! After seeing this suggestion in a blogging Facebook group, I had to give it a try!

For the last three weeks, I’ve chosen a set of hashtags, then gone through the feed for those tags and “liked” as many posts as possible. In turn, many of those Instagram users have come back and followed me on their own free will.

How I Gained 100 Instagram Followers in a Week

When it came to choosing which hashtags to like, I gravitated more towards the ones that appealed to me personally. A few of them include: #momlife, #girlmom, and #militarywife. I stayed away from tags like #momblog or #lifestyleblog, because the sole purpose of those tags seems to be self promotion, and I don’t expect to see actions returned on those.

Along with interacting with certain hashtags, I’ve gotten much better about using them on my own posts (the trick for instantly adding them to my posts has been helpful). Since I’ve started consistently placing hashtags in the comments of my Instagram posts, the “likes” on my photos have skyrocketed!

I couldn’t tell you if it’s been the hashtags on my own photos or interacting with other Instagram users that has brought me the most followers, but either way, the hashtags are working for me! So far, my experiment has seemed to be a success, and that’s even considering that I haven’t been posting much lately!

Do you have any secrets for improving Instagram engagement?