This powerful tool for audience, brand and content marketing will help you grow your business.

Recent discussions have focused on how Instagram could help boost business marketing. Instagram isn’t just for sharing pictures of family and friends, food or holidays. As seen here.

Instagram has grown to be a very powerful tool in building brands and audiences, as well as content marketing. More than 200 million users are active each month, sharing more than 60 million pictures and receiving 1.6 billion “likes” per day.

Attention: There are a lot of people promising to boost your Instagram numbers by thousands. The majority of the time, they use automated bots that create fake accounts in order to increase your followers.

Such followers are worthless. Some of them can even pose a danger, as they may want to steal photos or your password.

Imperva, a data security company, says that 28.9% bots on Instagram are bad bots.

Being true to your brand is key to attracting Instagram followers.

Three tips for gaining real Instagram fans:

1. Hashtags to Tell Stories

While it’s great that you can use your company name as a #hashtag, there are other things to consider.

You should use the hashtags you choose to describe the content of your image if you wish to increase the number of followers. It’s important to engage people in a dialogue when you post about things such as:

*

* Promotions

* Contests

* Product launches

Tostitos, a popular brand in this category, is an excellent example. Use the hashtag #GetTogetherAlready when you share pictures of your meet-ups.

Use relevant hashtags to be seen in Instagram search results and gain followers.

2. Get Creative

As Instagram is all photos, many people only think about captions as an afterthought.

You should not neglect your image caption. Use words that are engaging, inspiring and entertaining to encourage your fans to share and engage with you.

Here are some tips to get more Instagram followers with your posts.

* Use questions in your caption. You should write your question in the first paragraph of the post to ensure that it’s the one people will see.

Your post should be personal. Your post can be a tale about you, your products or how they helped another person.

Ask others to be tagged. * Ask people to tag others.

Instagram is one of the best places to see a good example. Check out @NatGeo.

It is their goal to create stunning Instagram Stories that are accompanied by informative captions. This allows them to inform the users about the suffering of animals all over the world.

Be authentic in your Instagram posts if you want to attract followers. Avoid using questions or telling an untrue story in your posts.

3. Take Local

Knowing your neighbours is a great way to grow your Instagram audience!

Click on Places on the Search Page to see what events are happening in your area.

Typing in a location will show geotagged postings for the selected area. After that, go to relevant posts with geotags – but not ones from competitors – leave a message or an emoticon and then follow them if they are interesting. Hopefully this is the beginning of organic interaction.

Enter your city and “entrepreneurs”. For instance, if life coaching is what you do, then you can enter that. Some local entrepreneurs are looking for a more balanced work/life or need help with their career and life goals.

If people check into your location via Instagram, you can comment on their photos to ensure they are aware of it. You can then follow the posters.

You can use these tips to increase your Instagram follower count the natural way. There are no bots involved, and there are no shortcuts. Instead, you should engage and convert them to followers.

Susan Friesen has been a social media advisor for over ten years. Susan Friesen was the founding partner of eVision Media – a digital and web marketing agency that won awards. She assists entrepreneurs struggling with the lack of skills, support and knowledge needed to develop their online businesses.