Ever wondered why some Instagram accounts have the ‘swipe up to link’ option in their stories, while yours doesn’t?

This is because this feature, along with some others, is enabled only after you have gained 10.000 followers on your Instagram account. Crossing this milestone helps your IG account to get even more reach and unlocks special features & benefits. If you want to add the “swipe up” link to your stories and direct traffic to your website from Instagram, getting more than 10K followers is essential. Naturally, everybody wants more social following, but what can be done to get more followers? There’s no magic wand trick: you have to be constant with the quality of your output,  and you’ll need some time to get there. But you can follow some tried and tested techniques to get the best out of social media algorithms and increase Instagram followers. Here’s our top ten, that we decided to share with everybody who wants to gain followers on Instagram.

Follow these tips to get to 10K, and who knows, maybe even 10M!

1. A GOOD PROFILE

Statistics show that two-thirds of the profile visits are from non-followers, and contrary to a famous saying, on social media books are judged by their covers. Make sure your Bio is well written and informative, with a website or a clickable link. We find highlights to be useful in scenarios when a user first visits our profile. The more detailed and organized your profile looks, the more are the chances of getting followed. With attention spans decreasing every day, no one likes ambiguity or an unsolved mystery!

2. KEEP VISUAL STYLE

Colours Matter
Branding your social media content is as important as the brand itself. Following a defined colour palette creates visual uniformity in the feed, gives it a personality, and allows your content to be recognized. Use colours that are brand-specific. Keeping our brand colours, black and white, as a constant, we introduce an accent colour for each project. With great colours, comes great responsibility. So choose wisely.

What’s Your ‘Image’
Along with colour harmony, consistency in imagery is equally important. Establish a guideline for the mood of the imagery that best represents your brand. You can see this applied in the posts for our typefaces. See for example our Erotique posts, where we set specific image styles for each of our projects and use clean mockups to help visualize the typefaces in use.

Streamlined content will have a greater impact than a hap-hazard-looking feed. Own your point of view, establish a personality and the people will follow.

3. ENGAGE FOLLOWERS

Let’s Play Tag
To increase engagement, encourage your followers to share your product / service / work on their feed or stories, which will help in reaching out to new audiences, increasing your chances of being followed by people with similar interests. Our Quarantype initiative of free typefaces during the Covid-19 lockdown, gained a lot of popularity, as many designers from all over the world, actively shared their creations tagging Zetafonts. This made the initiative extremely successful.
In the words of Marcel Proust “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” In this case, quite literally.

Pop the Question or Tag Along
Ops, we meant to ask ‘a’ question or tag a friend. Asking a question that prompts the user to comment or tag a friend, as we did in our guess-the-typeface post, increases the engagement level. More comments and interaction, boost Instagram’s algorithm and helps to get more reach. A higher number of comments means more opportunity for your profile to get discovered and followed. To release our new Sunshine typeface, we created a “likefunding”: the typeface would have released free for use, if we got enough tags in the comments section. Eventually, the post successfully received 276 comments!

4. PLAN YOUR POSTS

It is advisable to have a pre-planned set of posts and stories, not only in terms of posting at the right time, but also strategically placing content on posts in sets of 3/6/9, creating a coherent grid. We keep posting one at a time on days that have maximum engagement levels. Plan Instagram stories in a manner that creates a continuous narration, and encourages the user to engage with its flow. For example, with Coppa Stadio we hosted the first Italian poster design cup through our stories: something that required extensive pre-planning. The stories were rolled out on a weekly basis, creating anticipation amongst our followers.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were successful Instagram accounts!

5. CREAT A CALL TO ACTION

Announcements with a clear call to action from time to time, are always a good way to peak curiosity and encourage the users to engage with your story or post. We create call to actions by releasing all our new typefaces with time-limited introductory offers. These are often quickly shared by followers, which helps us reach their respective social communities. Our Domotika Pro and Coco Sharp type releases, are good examples of a call to action, and we effectively grabbed the attention of existing & new audiences. It is a great way to generate more traffic to the profile.

6. CREATE CAROUSELS

We often create carousel posts to enable our followers to know more about a typeface in a single post. Carousel posts have higher engagement levels than single image posts. Additionally, they reappear on the feed with the consecutive images, if the user missed swiping the first time, giving you another chance to capture their interest. Create high-quality, compelling imagery and content: as they say, more the merrier! Never forget to post related and relevant content in the carousels, to create continuity and retain interest. Have a look at our posts about Cocogoose Pro, Eastman and Amazing Slab and how we used the carousel feature in different ways.

7. MAKE INFORMATIVE CONTENT

Social media is evolving and self-learning has become the new ‘selfie‘. Instagram serves as a quick and convenient tool for learning, while also being entertaining! The best topics are the ones that have various levels of information that can be divided over a few stories or carousel posts. Our 2020 type trends series are a great example of easy and useful informative content. It not only informs our followers about what to watch out for but also highlights important details about type design in an effective and summarised manner. Create content that compels the users to share it within the IG community.

8. USE ANIMATION

We consistently use videos and animations to bring dynamism to our content. Users are more likely to find a moving visual more engaging than a static, content-heavy post. Animated content grabs attention quickly and encourages the user to stop and spend more time on it. We strategically intersperse animations within each project, for example, Coppa Stadio, Codec Pro, and Type Trends. The more users spend time on your posts or stories, the better it is for Instagram’s algorithm. In short, keep it moving!

9. BE RELEVANT 

It is important to stay up to date with issues and topics that are being spoken about, finding ways to relate them to your brand and to your followers. This puts across your point of view, starts a conversation and helps reach out to more users that share similar values. Doing so encourages shares, re-shares and features. which by now you all know is the ultimate key to Instagram happiness! This can be seen in our initiative ‘Type for Change’ that highlighted various social issues and was featured across various platforms. The world of social media moves fast, and it is essential to stay relevant with the times. So get real, be heard and be seen.

10. MAKE FREEBIES

Everyone loves freebies! Create digital assets your followers would enjoy, and then, (surprise!) give them out for free. Post digital artworks on your stories that people can screenshot and use for free. Encourage the users to share and tag you when they use these assets. Last Christmas, we felt like playing ‘Insta-Santa’, so we designed free Christmas & New Year wallpapers for the phone, that our followers could use. Needless to say, it was a merry Christmas indeed.

And lastly, give us a like, shoutout or follow us on our handle @zetafonts and watch out for some amazing content and even more amazing typefaces!

See you on Instagram!

this blog post is typeset in
Domotika font family
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