Increasing your social media following can be crucial in expanding your business and gaining exposure. However, having a huge following doesn’t necessarily mean your work is the ‘best’ or that you will be instantly booked up. It is key to have a localised following, which means your followers are potential clients, by having a large following but from across the country or even internationally can be slightly pointless as you are not gaining any additional work. But, if it is simply exposure you are after, then the geographical location of your followers doesn’t really matter, as long as your posts are getting liked, shared and saved that is key.
We have broken down our best tips to help increase your instagram following, which can actually be done quite simply.
Regular posting and constancy:
Ensure that you are posting regularly and consistently, by posting regularly you are keeping your followers engaged and keep yourself popping up on your followers feeds. If you only post once a month, your engagement will naturally be quite lower as you are not showing up on your followers feeds as often. With each post you should be tagging the products you have used, and also the brands. This will mean the brands you have tagged will be able to see your content, so if you are starting to post more often then these brands may start to recognise your Instagram handle and could lead to you being shared by the same brands you are using, giving you even more exposure!! Here at Lash Dolls U.K. we look through our tagged photos everyday and look out for amazing sets of lashes which have been created using our products, we love to see it! However, make sure you stay consistent. There is no point posting 5 times every day for 1 month, then not again for 6 months. So keep posting at a rate you feel like you could continue, try posting once a day, or even twice a week, and the more content you build up, then the more you are able to post.
Quality of content:
The quality of your images and overall feed is extremely important in gaining a larger following. As you want people to be engaged and excited by what you do, so much so that they will be following you and reacting to your page. It is key to produce clear, high quality images that match your feed and flow cohesively with one another. You can download Instagram planners to help you arrange your content, these apps allow you to upload your photos and rearrange them to see what they would look like on your feed before committing to uploading. Please see our blog article ‘How to take a good lash pic’ for help on how to produce the best quality, and successful images.
Hashtags:
Some people love hashtags, others hate them! But the truth is, when starting out they can be key to getting new eyes on your work. People can now follow hashtags on Instagram so for example if you are including the hash-tag #russianlashes either in your caption or in the comments (either works fine) then anyone wanting to searching that particular hashtag may end up seeing your work. Following on from this it is important to tag your location on your images, you should tag your city / or salon location and also hashtag it e.g. #sheffieldsalon so any new visitors to the city, or someone who is unaware on where to go – may search this hashtag and find your work! The more hashtags, the more opportunity for exposure.
Interaction!
Once you have uploaded your images, keeping in touch with your followers is key!! If you get comments, then reply!!! The more interactive you are with your followers, the more personal your page will be. Creating instagram stories can be great for this, you can track your content interaction levels through Instagram insights if you set your page up as a business account. This is a great way to monitor what you are doing, and what may or may not work for you and your followers. This also links back to your regular posting, as the more instagram stories you most – the more likely you are to be pushed to the front of the ‘line’, meaning more of your followers will see your stories first.
You should also be interacting with other lash artists, beauty pages and brands. It is so important and valuable to support others, support and positivity can go a long way. Commenting on other peoples photos, can then lead to more people visiting your page, and then ideally, following you too.
That’s all! By following these simple steps we believe will help you gradually build up your Instagram followers and also retain the followers you have, but remember a successful Instagram page doesn’t just rely on its followers.