Before publishing your photos, it is essential to take care of retouching them for better colours and a more professional look. The ideal is image editing software such as Photoshop, but only some have the budget or the skills to use it well.
Here is a selection of the five best apps for retouching a photo before posting it on Instagram :
PicsArt: Enhance and retouch your photos for Instagram.
Befunky: Edit your Instagram photos at your convenience.
Fotor: More than 63 filters for all your Instagram photos.
Adobe Photoshop (Express for Android): The must-have for retouching.
Canva: The essential graphics application for the community manager.
Organize a competition
The competition tip is as old as social networks, but it still works to grow a community quickly. The idea is to help your community gain something. The condition to participate is to follow you, like it and comment on the competition post.
To increase virtualization, you can promote the competition on your blog or your other social networks by clearly indicating the URL of the Instagram post. If you have a little budget, you can do a little advertising to prime the pump click here.
OK, we said free tips, and this one still requires a little investment between the lot and the pub, but it remains an excellent way to gain a large number of subscribers quickly. The more attractive the prize put into play, the more subscribers you will gain!
Partner with other influencers
The next step is to identify influencers who resemble you and contact them to form a win-win partnership. Above all, don’t see them as competitors but rather as a way of helping each other to go higher together!
The idea is to visit influencers who have at least as many followers as you. Everyone shares a photo of the other, inviting their community to follow them. Forming partnerships with other influencers generally works very well if it is well-targeted!
Stay on top of trends.
To gain followers on Instagram, you have to manage to always stay on trend. Instagram is a dynamic and constantly evolving platform. So, if you want to have more followers on this network, you must follow the trend. Update your app regularly. Use trendy emojis or hashtags. Update your profile and develop new ideas every day to stay on top.
Take free training on Instagram.
Especially since with a few searches on YouTube, you will find many free tutorial videos which give you lots of tips for gaining subscribers. If you are motivated and follow the advice of the best, you will undoubtedly be able to succeed on Instagram!
Maintain consistency
Here again, this is not always an easy point to respect… but for subscribers (or members of the network who discover you) to find their way, your account should exude a certain coherence, whether in the content that you post, in your interactions with your subscribers, in your publication frequency.
Today, there are tools to preview your Instagram feed and have a coherent and harmonious feed. Don’t hesitate to use it!
As with a blog, there is not necessarily an ideal publication frequency, but many studies suggest posting several times a week to increase engagement. Some agencies specializing in Instagram influence, such as Octoly, also require the “publication of a minimum of five photos per week”.
Post at the right time
Instagram no longer displays photos chronologically but highlights posts based on what you are likely to like. Despite everything, timing remains vital because the engagement you receive upon publication plays a significant role in the visibility that the social network will give to your photo (same observation on Facebook in my case!).
Try to identify when your community is present: instead, in the evening after dinner, in the morning before leaving for work, during the lunch break, or during regular office hours. It can vary from one community to another, which is why I always remain sceptical when a study announces “ideal publication times”.
To find out, you can use the Creator Studio, a free tool offered for Facebook and Instagram, which displays the times when your Instagram subscribers are active in table form.
Gaining Instagram subscribers: these unanswered questions
I’m not one of those who want to calculate the probability that each photo posted will be liked. I love photos that give pride of place to colour. There is no question of changing what is part of my style to have 598% more likes because fashion is all about pastel shades and ultra-luminous backgrounds.
I post (too much) sparingly… but I try to offer quality. Moreover, one of my photos was selected by the Mashable site in a selection called “12 beautifully eerie photos shot in the dark”. Another was highlighted on the account of the city of Paris…
However, I realize that more is needed. That we should get more involved. There are always challenges to overcome: posting in English or French or both? When we post travel photos, the “universal” side of the subject often leads us to want to post in two languages… and at the same time, we necessarily favour one (if only because it appears first in the caption ). This undoubtedly plays on the interaction!
The algorithm changes that occurred on Instagram shortly before the summer of 2017 profoundly affected my pleasure in posting on this network, to which I was so attached. A dramatic drop in visibility – for equal investment – and disgust that is setting in little by little, the same disgust that I feel for Facebook.
The impression is that these people think a little too often in terms of reach, likes and algorithms … and not enough in letting the user make their own choices about what they see (or not)—the era of artificial intelligence, which sometimes lacks just a little intelligence.