The bigger and more involved your community is, the more your reach on Instagram grows. Engaged communities are more likely to follow you, proactively seek out your account, and share your content with other people. Plus, a highly-engaged community makes social media more fulfilling for you, too.
Learn how to build a community on Instagram with these seven strategies.
What kinds of people do you want to be involved in your community? Before starting any other building efforts, identify your target audience. This will depend on what type of content you create and what types of people you want to interact with.
If you like photographing food, you may want to target other foodies. If your content is more about other lifestyle factors, you may want to target people in your same age demographic with similar interests. Analyse your passions and existing content strategy, then select an audience accordingly.
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As much as people might like you, they are unlikely to stick around on Instagram if you don’t post consistent, valuable content. Valuable content has high-quality production. High-resolution images, well-lit videos, and other technically well-designed content elements are pleasing to look at.
Valuable content also serves the viewer. Are you offering them insight or meaning? Maybe you link helpful products in your makeup tutorial so that viewers can recreate the look. In other cases, you might offer encouraging words, a funny joke, or inspiration for their goals. You don’t have to solve big problems for your audience—little nuggets of value add up over time.
When building a community on Instagram, your brand should align with your audience’s desires. This creates the perfect ecosystem for a relationship.
On Instagram, hashtags are a great way to reach new people. However, you want to use hashtags strategically for the best results. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, though most users use far fewer than that. You’ll have to experiment to see what gets your account the most traction.
One popular strategy is to use two to five key hashtags in the post itself and supporting hashtags in a comment. If you post a comment with hashtags immediately after a piece of content goes live, it will serve a similar function to the hashtags on the post itself, allowing users to find your content.
As you try strategies, you should rely on hashtags that align closely with your brand and community. Don’t spam your posts with irrelevant hashtags just because they are trending. That may occasionally get your post more unique views, but it won’t help you build a community on Instagram.
In a community, engagement is a two-way street. When you provide clear opportunities, followers are more likely to engage. You can include a call to action in your posts, inviting users to share their own opinions or experience about what you’ve shared. You might also experiment with stickers on Stories to ask questions or offer polls.
Another way to foster engagement is to spend time in the comments section. You can like comments, reply to them, or call them out in live videos (more on that in a minute). You don’t have to reply to every comment you get or connect individually with every follower—you just have to make them feel connected to your brand and each other.
When building a community, real-time engagement strengthens bonds like nothing else. You can more easily have a conversation with your followers during a live video.
On Instagram, this comes with a host of benefits because:
Over 100 million people watch Instagram live content every day.
Instagram live continues to grow in viewership.
Users are 10 times more likely to comment on a live video than on other posts.
Harness all this power for your community by using the live feature to connect. You can encourage users to turn on notifications so they’ll get pinged whenever you go live or you can set a live schedule so your whole community knows when to expect them.
As with any social media strategy, you must remain nimble to see results. Check your analytics and check in with your community to see what’s working. If you see opportunities for improvement, take them!
Communities—just like people—change over time, so continue adapting as needed. You can always integrate more community-building opportunities that bring people together, such as cross-community collaborations with other creators or community-focused initiatives.
Here’s our recipe for success when it comes to how to build a community on Instagram: Identify your audience, create valuable content, and use strategic methods to grow your reach.
One more method you can rely on? Superviral. With us, you can buy likes, comments, and followers as you develop your community.