Whether you logged onto Instagram in 2010 and never logged off, or you’re launching a new brand presence in 2024, creating a strategy for organic growth is key to success. Even brands with unlimited resources need to understand how the algorithm works to give their content the best chance at resonating with their target audience — and building that audience into a community that’s deeply connected with their brand presence and mission.
Here’s how you can grow your audience on Instagram without paying for the privilege. All it takes is consistency, patience, and tapping into the actionable organic Instagram growth tips and innovative tactics outlined below.
Understanding the Instagram Algorithm in 2024
Organic growth depends on understanding the mysterious Instagram algorithm as much as possible and crafting a strategy around it capable of adapting to its shifts over time. The basis of any strategy should always be creating authentic content that your audience finds valuable.
From there, understanding which factors drive content visibility sets your content up for success.
Engagement is still the reigning factor
The algorithm prioritizes content with a high engagement rate: likes, comments, shares, and saves. Early engagement is key to wider distribution; the bigger your audience (or the more dedicated they are to being Extremely Online), the higher the chance that enough of them are active to engage with your content soon after you post it. Understanding the times of day your audience is most active increases your chances of success, too.
The quality of the engagement from your audience is also more important than the quantity; fewer followers who comment on your content thoughtfully, save it, and share it with their own networks means more than 10,000 strings of emojis in the comment section.
Content relevance
If you’re a travel brand suddenly posting about car mufflers, your audience will likely be confused. The algorithm prioritizes content in user feeds that aligns with their interests; they follow accounts based on their interests, and the almighty algorithm serves them recommended content based on previous interactions.
Experiment with different types of content and play with trends, but always keep it relevant to your audience and true to your brand.
Timeliness
Timeliness doesn’t mean chasing every trend and taking on every challenge to “go viral.” It does mean that topical, relevant content has a better chance of performing well. Posting consistently when your audience is most active also gives you a greater chance of success.
Other key factors
The Instagram algorithm is complex, with multiple factors influencing how it ranks content. Engagement, relevance, and timeliness are arguably the most important, but they overlap with other key factors:
- Real relationships: The more your followers interact with your account and content, the higher in their feed it will be served, which is why community-building is key.
- Time spent viewing: Related to engagement, the amount of time a user spends viewing content influences what they’re served in the future; create content that not only catches attention but holds it.
- Diverse content types: While it can feel like social keeps “pivoting to video,” post a variety of content to see what resonates most with your unique audience.
- Search and Explore page: Optimize your content for discoverability to help grow your audience; experiment with targeted hashtags, collaborations, and more.
It can be tempting to buy fake Instagram followers or join a random engagement pod where everyone commits to following and engaging with one another’s content, but the algorithm favors genuine, quality engagement over quantity. For long-term growth that doesn’t get wiped out in a bot clean-up (a huge risk with buying followers), take the time to build an engaged community around your Instagram presence.
Covering the Basics
Even if you’ve been on Instagram long enough to remember when everyone posted grainy, heavily filtered photos of their lunch, it doesn’t hurt to brush up on the basics. A longer tenure on the platform might also mean your brand is overdue for a refresh.
Don’t skimp on the basics; you want new followers to find your profile and quickly understand what it’s all about.
Optimize your profile
If it’s been a while since you looked at your brand presence as a whole, it’s time to evaluate it. Does your bio match the current iteration of your brand mission and values? When was the last time you updated your profile picture?
Check that your entire profile has a cohesive visual brand and aesthetic that’s clear at a glance. When your followers are scrolling their feed they should be able to tell right away that a post is from you.
Be sure you’re also setting up or refreshing deeper dives into your presence, like the Instagram Story Highlights feature.
Be sure you’re using all of Instagram’s available features
Speaking of features, if you have a business or creator account be sure you’re tapping into all of the available features like contact information and expanded Insights.
If you have some budget to spend, you can promote the posts that are performing well organically to help give your audience growth another targeted boost.
Content Creation Best Practices
Understanding the algorithm and ensuring you have the basics in place gives you the foundation needed to create content with the best chance of finding its audience and growing your following organically.
Don’t depend on motivation alone to keep your content queue flowing; you need a thoughtful, organized strategy to set yourself up for success.
Developing a content calendar
Start by putting together a content calendar. Use the free version of a scheduling tool, a paper calendar, or whatever combination works best for you and your resources. Your calendar should cover:
- Posting cadence, or how often you’re going to post: Base this on your growth goals but consistency is more important than an aggressive schedule that burns you out after a few weeks.
- Content types: Start with a mix of photo feed posts, carousels, Reels, and Stories.
- Copy: Draft your captions ahead of time and research to decide on your hashtag strategy (more on this in another section).
- Schedule time for interaction: Take the time to respond to comments, thank followers for shares, and interact with the content on your feed (especially your mutuals).
After a few months of posting, you should have enough baseline data to make performance-based decisions. Then you can add more details to your strategy, like notes on individual post performance, A/B testing outcomes, and ideas for future content experiments like Live video, collaborations, and brand partnership pitches.
Use trends and challenges to spark ideas for your content, but don’t try to incorporate what doesn’t make sense for your brand.
Hashtag strategy for 2024
Hashtags may not drive traffic like they once did, but that doesn’t mean they’re dead. Experiment with hashtags on your content to see how they help with performance, reaching your target audience, and building community with your fans and followers.
The most important advice for using hashtags hasn’t changed in the history of social media: ALWAYS check a hashtag before using it. You don’t want to find out later that a seemingly innocuous phrase got hijacked by an unsavory group of Internet trolls, and now the content you worked hard to create is inadvertently associated with them.
Use a mix of different types of hashtags on your content and see which help boost performance and connection with your audience:
- Branded: Hashtags you create and use to track your content and any UGC your fans and followers might create (#RunnersWorld, for example).
- Campaign: Use these for specific campaigns, especially for UGC contests and community-building exercises with your fans and followers (#SummerSale2024).
- Community: If your brand — personal or professional — is related to a specific online community, tap into these hashtags (#runnerscommunity).
- Niche-specific: Drill down into relevant subgroups of any community you’re a part of (#trailrunners).
- Location-based: If your brand has a physical store you want people to check out or you’re hosting or attending an IRL event, use location-based hashtags to help promote it (#ATXlife).
- Trending: If there’s a hashtag associated with a specific trend or challenge that’s relevant to your brand, be sure to include it (remember the #IceBucketChallenge?).
While Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags in a post, cramming your content with hashtags looks spammy. Test 5-10 targeted hashtags (some creators recommend 3-5), and see if they help boost your performance and reach your target audience. Include them in your caption or the first comment for best results.
Mastering Instagram Reels
Like all other content, Reels should be relevant and valuable to your audience. Beyond that, you want to experiment creatively with what makes sense for your brand while working with general best practices.
Reels should:
- Incorporate trends and challenges with your twist on them, never forcing the content; using trending audio is one of the best ways to do this (creating original audio for others to use is even better).
- Remix content that has performed well on other platforms.
- Feature a mix of educational content (tutorials, how-tos), behind-the-scenes glimpses of your brand (like the ever-popular “get ready with me” video genre), collaborations, partnerships, and UGC.
Reels 15-30 seconds long get the most engagement, with the first 3-5 seconds establishing the hook. Use the full 90 seconds available for more in-depth educational videos.
Strategies to Increase Engagement
To build an engaged community of fans and followers, it’s necessary to put in the work — consistently. That means setting aside dedicated time (as outlined in your content calendar) to respond to comments and DMs.
The good news is you can set up smart automation to help with this, achieving a balance between what needs a human touch and what can be outsourced to the good and helpful robots among us.
You also need to take the time to like, comment, and share content outside of your own: your fans and followers (especially if they tag you in a post or use one of your branded or campaign hashtags), fellow brands and content creators, and any other brand or influencer you’d like to work with one day. Take the time to engage thoughtfully, leaving comments that are more than just a string of emojis and sharing content to your Stories.
When you work with other brands and influencers, use collaborative posts on Instagram to boost your reach to their audience. Similar brands and creators’ audiences should overlap with your target audience, making this an easy way to grow your audience organically.
Interactive content
Add interactive content to your content calendar mix; try out live video sessions, respond to the comments viewers leave during the session, and reshare it when it ends to drive interest in future sessions. You can use live video to host Q&A or AMA (ask me anything) sessions and either take questions live or have fans and followers send them in ahead of time using the question sticker on Stories or in the comments of a dedicated post.
Stories have other interactive content options: polls, questions, quizzes, and more. You can use Stories to repost content your fans and followers have tagged you in, any UGC from contests or campaigns, or any content you enjoy and simply want to boost. If you make that a regular part of your content strategy, others are likely to reciprocate.
Analyzing and Adjusting Your Strategy
Strategy isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it situation. Once you’ve created a strategy and put it into practice for a few months, you should review your Instagram Insights to see what’s performing well and what’s falling flat. That allows you to make data-backed decisions on which content to create more of in the future, what you should phase out, and what else you might want to experiment with.
Being able to point to clear content performance also makes it more likely to land the brand deals and collaborations of your dreams. Focus on the following metrics:
- Engagement rate: Of your total audience reach, how many took an action (like, comment, share, etc.)?
- Reach/impressions: Reach and impressions are less important than engagement, but huge spikes can tell you if something is breaking into new audiences or if you posted something your target audience reacted very negatively toward. Think of these metrics as the “canary in the coal mine.”
- Follower growth: Slow and steady growth over time means your audience is more likely to stick around long-term; don’t chase “viral” audience growth as a strategy.
- Story completion rate: If your audience is watching your Stories through to the end (or tapping back to rewatch), that’s a great indication of engagement with your content.
Adjust your strategy based on these insights over time. You might start to see some seasonality in engagement levels that you can plan for in the future, timing your own breaks and vacations around them. (Burnout is real, besties, everyone needs to touch grass sometimes.)
Always leave room to experiment, getting creative with your brand personality and doing some A/B testing with timing, captions, formats, and more. That should make up a smaller portion of your strategy. The core should always be centered on consistency and patience, the “boring” stuff.
Posting regularly so your audience knows when they should expect to hear from you, presenting a consistent brand presence and voice, and setting realistic growth expectations will set you up for long-term success.
Final Thoughts
Cultivating organic growth on Instagram is a long game, but you can set yourself up for success with a smart strategy using these organic Instagram growth tips. (Hint: None of them are “going viral.”)
The real “secret” to success is commitment and consistency over time, with adjustments to your strategy based on insights like engagement and engaging regularly with your audience to build a real community.
