Instagram is one of the most widely used social networks today. The social network was created several years ago, but that hasn't stopped its development, as it continues to grow more and more every day.
One of the newest concepts in the world of online marketing today is growth hacking. It uses techniques that go beyond traditional marketing, taking advantage of new strategies to get more traffic from users. This concept is not very well established in Spain, but in other countries such as the United States it has become a discipline that is in high demand and is being talked about more and more.
Many companies that are still in their development stages emerge from nothing and experience abysmal growth, not because of a stroke of luck (although we can never rule it out), but because these companies have incorporated new growth techniques into their strategy, such as the figure of the growth hacker.
Next, we will look at this case, but applying it to the Instagram social network. How can I grow on Instagram thanks to growth hacking? First of all, let's define what this concept is.
what is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is a set of techniques and tools that are used with the aim of generating rapid growth in revenue, users and impacts for a company, all with the minimum possible expenditure of resources.
This concept has been developed thanks to the emergence of the startup concept. These companies usually start with few financial resources, so they do not have enough budget to apply traditional marketing strategies in their business models. They are companies that seek rapid growth in order to attract potential investors. The managers of these startups have had to create new techniques with few resources to increase their users.
Growth hacking is a new way of creating and finding ways to increase the number of users of our company using as few resources as possible. With this concept comes another very important figure, that of the growth hacker.
The growth hacker brings a new way of looking at the market, based on ingenuity and creativity to grow with few resources. They are in charge of redefining products and their distribution to reach the maximum number of people possible. They could be called specialists in start-ups.
Their main function is to analyse a product, redefine its characteristics with the aim of generating growth and then distribute that product through channels and actions that seek to reach a large number of potential customers using very little budget.
This figure is becoming very important in the world of digital marketing. Small technology companies do not have many resources to carry out marketing campaigns, so they need an expert in the growth of the company using as few resources as possible.
Therefore, we highlight three key words to define this concept:
- Economical - growth hacking is a fairly inexpensive technique, which does not require a large amount of capital to go ahead with your campaigns.
- Creative: It is a technique that takes advantage of minimal resources to carry out creative and ingenious ideas.
- Growth hacker: This is the figure in charge of managing and redefining the products or services that are going to be offered on the different communication channels.
Growth Hacking applied to Instagram
- Profiles within your market niche
The first fundamental objective to take advantage of growth hacking must be to increase our followers on Instagram. Firstly, we must carry out an analysis of our market niche. We must carry out an exhaustive search of Instagram profiles that follow brands or influencers with the same theme or sector as us.
We select the theme of our brand within a hashtag and enter it in the Instagram search engine. Then, if we select the hashtag with the highest number of publications, we will see the most relevant posts in the first search results. From there, we select the profiles that have uploaded those posts and search among their lists of followers for the users we will follow next.
Chances are that they will follow us back, as our content is similar to the content offered by the other brands followed by that user.
We can get leads in just two steps, a targeted search and a follow back.
- Interact with your followers and competitors
Once we have followed all our potential followers, it's time for interaction.
We repeat the same process as before, but this time instead of searching through those lists of followers, we must interact with the different profiles we have found, either of brands similar to ours or of potential followers.
We can do this by leaving comments, liking some of their posts or even sending a direct message to our potential followers.
This way we can give visibility to our brand, as our comments or likes will also appear to the followers of our competitors or influencers with whom our brand shares the same subject matter.
- Upload content regularly
The quality of the contents is vital to offer information to our followers. However, in this case, quantity is also an essential tool. It is very important that we upload contents and publications regularly.
By uploading publications or content frequently, we are more likely to reach potential customers. And not only that, but it is also an essential technique to avoid losing the followers we already have. We must show an active account with quality content.
- Pay attention to the uploading schedule
In order for our publications to reach a greater number of people, we must schedule them and upload them at a time when we know they will reach a large number of people.
In Instagram, we have already observed in other analyses that the best time to upload posts is on school days, evenings and nights, and on weekends, Sunday afternoons.
- Use relevant hashtags
This is one of the most important tools for gaining visibility on Instagram. If you make good use of hashtags when you upload your posts, the visibility of your brand can increase considerably.
We must be very selective when uploading hashtags. We must select hashtags that do not have a lot of competition and also that are not very specific. The intermediate point is to select hashtags that are known but that do not have much competition on the network.
Growth hacking can be applied to the growth strategy of any social network. It includes functionalities that in many cases we can overlook, but that are essential to grow our brand. Take advantage of the practices that we have left in this post to completely redefine your digital strategy on Instagram.
