Increasing Instagram followers is a fantastic way to strengthen your brand identity, nurture an online community, and deliver tangible results for your business.
And one of the most efficient ways to boost your Instagram follower count?
Facebook advertising.
Strategic Facebook ads can help you to grow your Instagram audience effectively without resorting to shady tactics like paid followers and bots.
And once you begin to develop your Instagram following, you’ll rapidly see benefits in every area, from organic engagement to product sales and website traffic.
We’re about to explain how you can launch high-performing Facebook ads to increase your Instagram followers and accelerate your brand growth.
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Why Should You Increase Your Instagram Following?
Increasing your Instagram follower count doesn’t just make your brand look popular – it also delivers genuine and impactful benefits for your business.
For example, a sizable and active Instagram following instantly adds credibility to your brand on social media.
Your Instagram following can act as a highly effective piece of social proof for potential customers. If a prospect notices that you have a significant Instagram audience, they’re more likely to view your brand as trustworthy and established in your industry.
This effect also multiplies over time. The more genuine followers you attract, the more likely new customers are to engage with your Instagram profile.
A Larger Instagram Following Also Lends Itself to Strategic Targeting Opportunities
You can utilize Custom Audiences to target engaged users with both Facebook and Instagram ads based on Instagram/Facebook page visits, clicks, saved posts, and more.
Users that follow your Instagram account are more likely to view your content and engage with your organic posts, so boosting your follower numbers also helps to expand these retargeting audiences. Since these users are already familiar with your products and services, they can consistently deliver high-value clicks and conversions.
The Key Benefits of Increasing Real Instagram Followers
So how will increasing your Instagram follower count benefit your brand and help you to achieve your business goals?
Let’s explore some of the key benefits of recruiting real Instagram followers and growing your audience on the social media platform.
(There’s a big emphasis on the word ‘real’ here – more on that in the next section.)
Facilitate Direct Audience Communication
The ability to communicate with your audience may sound like an obvious benefit, but it’s also one of the most valuable for growing businesses.
Don’t underestimate the importance of building an active and engaged Instagram following.
On a basic level, speaking to a large Instagram audience is very practical for brands. You can deliver important business updates, promote new products and services, and request valuable feedback – all by simply uploading posts to your Instagram business profile.
However, direct audience communication is also key for strengthening your brand identity and increasing Instagram followers.
You can establish a clear brand tone of voice that users can recognize across multiple channels and nurture long-term loyalty from existing customers. This is crucial for increasing brand familiarity and keeping audiences interested in your business.
Increase Online Sales and Website Traffic
Once you begin building your Instagram following, you’ll also likely notice an increase in online sales and web traffic across your landing pages.
That’s because every new follower represents a new sales opportunity.
As Instagram audiences become more familiar with your products and services, they’re more likely to engage with your communications, click on your posts, and complete new purchases.
If a user has shown enough interest in your brand to follow your Instagram page, they’re clearly keen to learn more about your offering. However, increased sales and website traffic aren’t guaranteed as your Instagram audience grows.
You’ll need to upload relevant and engaging content to hook new customers, from sales-led product promotions to entertaining videos and infographics.
There are millions and millions of different business profiles to follow on Instagram, so you’ll need to consistently prove your value to followers to keep them interested.
Once a user hits that ‘follow’ button, it’s up to you to convert curiosity into action!
Identify Audience Trends To Fuel Marketing Performance
Growing your Instagram following is also a brilliant way to collect audience insights about your product offering, social content, and brand messages.
The more Instagram followers you attract, the more insights you’ll be able to harvest.
For example, you can utilize a growing Instagram audience to test out different types of organic content. You might notice that short-form videos are driving higher levels of engagement than static images, or that a certain type of headline is performing well.
The larger your follower count is, the more robust and reliable these insights will be.
Keep an eye on any trends that emerge relating to your content – is there a specific time of day that achieves the highest engagement? How are users responding to native-style videos as opposed to polished product ads?
These insights can also be used to enhance the effectiveness of your paid ads.
If you notice that a particular topic or content format is delivering strong engagement organically, then you can often scale up performance by applying these learnings to your paid ads.
Why You Should Avoid Buying Followers on Instagram
We’ve just explained how increasing Instagram follower numbers can benefit your brand in several ways.
So how can you start to ramp up your follower count and unlock these business perks?
Well, you have a few different options here. You can try to build reach and attract new followers through engaging organic content, or you can use paid ads to access new audiences and grow your social media audience.
However, some businesses try to skip the queue and fast-track their follower growth by purchasing new Instagram followers. These ‘paid’ followers are often fake accounts and bots and offer zero value beyond a number on the screen.
Taking shortcuts and buying Instagram followers is never an advisable strategy.
Let’s explain why you should avoid buying followers on Instagram and why more above-board tactics are infinitely better in the long run.
You Can Damage Your Brand Reputation
Instagram users are savvy and can quickly spot when a brand has inflated its audience numbers through paid followers.
How, you ask? For one thing, there’s often a significant gap between follower numbers and post engagements when a business pays for its followers.
If your profile has thousands of followers but only achieves a handful of engagements on each post, users are immediately going to be suspicious. Plus, even if your fake followers are engaging with posts, the comments and responses are usually robotic and extremely obvious.
Users will ask why you’ve felt the need to pay for increasing Instagram followers and will also question the quality of your products and services. Trust is a huge component of social media marketing, and if you make a poor first impression, the damage to your credibility can be irreparable.
You Won’t Be Able To Trust Audience Data
We’ve already explained how a sizable Instagram following can provide your brand with valuable audience insights.
Unsurprisingly, this only works if your followers are real, genuine humans that are authentically engaging with your posts and communications.
If your profile is packed with paid followers, it’s going to be immensely difficult to understand what type of content is resonating with your audience. Metrics like clicks, likes, and views aren’t particularly informative if they’re coming from bots.
Be mindful of Instagram marketing rules. Paying for Instagram followers isn’t just a serious risk to your brand reputation, it can also prevent you from unlocking important audience insights, which has a knock-on effect on your organic and paid marketing.
If you’re trying to increase Instagram followers, make sure that you’re avoiding paid followers and following legitimate methods.
These tactics may be more time-consuming, but the results they can generate will always compensate for the effort required.
How To Run Facebook Ad Campaigns to Gain Followers
By setting up tactical Facebook ad campaigns that are designed to boost Instagram followers, you can rapidly build an audience of quality prospects and potential customers.
This process isn’t necessarily the most straightforward, and it does require some Facebook advertising ingenuity – but if you’re trying to increase your quantity of Instagram followers without sacrificing quality, it’s a fantastic option.
It’s time to explain how you can run Facebook ads that attract engaged and active Instagram users.
1. Create a New Campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager
To get started, click the ‘Create’ button in the Facebook Ads Manager to begin setting up a new ad campaign.
Enter a memorable name for your campaign and select ‘Auction’ as your buying type.
You’ll also need to choose ‘Traffic’ as your campaign objective since this isn’t the type of campaign that’s based on specific conversion events. The aim of this campaign is to drive high-quality traffic to your Instagram profile to encourage new followers, so you won’t need to focus on conversion tracking here.
When it comes to setting your campaign budget, you can always begin with a smaller amount to test initial performance.
This is a fairly unique type of Facebook ads campaign, so if you want to kick things off with a modest daily budget, that’s absolutely fine.
Input a name for your new ad set, and then save it from proceeding.
2. Build an Instagram-focused Custom Audience
Once you’ve created your new ad set, it’s time to build your target audience.
Since this isn’t your stereotypical Facebook ads campaign, you’ll need to be strategic with your audience targeting and think carefully about your objective.
Although you can experiment with different audience segments over time, we’d recommend starting with a 1% Lookalike audience for increasing Instagram followers based on individuals that already engage with your Instagram profile.
These are likely to be your hottest prospects and the most eligible to become new followers.
Click ‘Create Audience’ and then hit ‘Custom Audience’ to get started. Select ‘Instagram Business Profile’ as your data source, and then set your audience as ‘Everyone who engaged with your business’ in the last 365 days.
(It’s better to keep your audience as broad as possible here because you’ll be using these existing engaged users as a base for a Lookalike segment.)
3. Generate a New Lookalike Audience
Once you’ve created this Custom Audience, click ‘Create a Lookalike audience’ on the next screen.
From here, you can tweak the geographic location of your Lookalikes if necessary, but always make sure that you leave the default ‘1% audience’ option in place.
Once you’re happy, finalize the Lookalike audience and wait for the segment to populate.
After your Lookalike audience has finished populating, you’ll be able to run this segment in your Facebook ad set. Voila – you now have a brand new audience of potential followers based on real users who already interact with your Instagram profile.
Since Facebook doesn’t currently offer a specific ‘Follower’ objective, this is a clever workaround that maximizes your chances of increasing your Instagram audience.
Finish up by selecting your desired ad placements. The best-performing formats will differ for every business, so keep an eye on performance to identify the right tactics.
4. Craft and Publish Your Facebook/Instagram Ads
It’s now time to create or upload the ads for your campaign.
There are a couple of important elements to review here. Check that your Instagram account is connected to your ad campaign, and make sure that your website URL takes users directly to your Instagram profile.
Feel free to get creative with your assets, but always make sure that you’re giving users a compelling reason to visit and follow your Instagram profile.
If there’s a clear value exchange in place for your audience, they’re far more likely to click your ads and hit that all-important ‘follow’ button.
With intelligent audience targeting, engaging creative assets, and a persuasive call to action, you’ll be in a great position to drive follower growth on Instagram.
Dedicated account managers can help brands to unlock the full potential of Facebook and Instagram ads, increasing conversions while reducing marketing costs.
Optimizing Your Facebook Ads and Tracking Performance
Now that you know how to launch Facebook ads to increase Instagram followers, let’s take a look at how you can measure performance and implement data-driven optimizations.
Although you can’t track any specific conversions with this type of ad campaign, you can still monitor progress from the Facebook Ads Manager.
Keep tabs on how many Instagram followers you have before and after the campaign launches, and divide your ad costs by the incremental followers to determine your overall Cost Per Follower. You can then use this as a benchmark for future campaigns.
You can also calculate roughly how many clicks it takes to drive a new Instagram follow and use this to figure out an approximate conversion rate. This can help you to budget effectively based on an average Cost Per Click.
How Can I Optimize My ‘Instagram Follower’ Ads?
As always, A/B testing is a sure fire way to improve ad performance, but you’ll need to take a slightly different approach for this type of campaign.
While you might normally run multiple ads simultaneously when A/B testing on Facebook, you’ll need to run a single ad at a time when you’re trying to increase Instagram followers.
Since you’ll be correlating Facebook ad spend with increasing Instagram followers (rather than tracking specific conversions) it’s important to run ads in isolation so that you can make more informed assumptions about performance.
Whether you’re trialing a new creative asset or Facebook placement, make sure that you’re running your tests for the same amount of time and keeping a close eye on your Instagram follower count. You may need to run multiple tests to generate reliable results, but once you identify a tactic that lowers your Cost Per Follow, you can begin to scale up your budget.
If you’re looking to reap the benefits of increased Instagram followers, then Facebook advertising is a proven method for success.
Just remember – although it can take some time to build up your Instagram following with legitimate methods, the quality of genuine users always outweighs the quantity of paid followers.
A small number of real individuals is significantly more valuable than an inflated number of bots. Stick to the best practices outlined in this guide, and you’ll see your follower count surging in no time!
