We asked ourselves when we started our Instagram account: how do we organically grow and reach more people?
- Follow for follow? Nah that method doesn’t work and doesn’t look great for your business.
- Liking and engaging with content? Yeah, a bit better, especially for building up that first thousand followers.
To reach a wider audience we thought getting on the explore page is the real deal. And it was! But we didn’t know at all how to get there and everyone says something different.
Hashtags are good to reach people through them but won’t help to get on the explore page is what we noticed by now. Some posts without even a hashtag will reach 10k people over explore!
So how do you get there?
Getting on Instagrams explore page is all about posting good content often. REALLY often. It wasn’t until we started posting two times a day that we saw our posts reach the explore page.
It’s all about posting good content often. REALLY often.
Other factors matter too:
- how many people like or comment your post in the first minutes?
- Do they save your post? If yes, the post will be pushed out to more people.
- If they engage too, Instagram thinks it’s a good post and rank it higher.
If that happens often enough and many of your followers engage with your content and you post daily, you will get pushed onto the explore page.
Instagram knows your content by who follows you and who you follow as well as keywords in the captions and who engages with your post. They will show your post to similar people on explore. Which is why you should think about who you follow and who follows you.
That opens up another point: Removing followers. That part is essential! Remove fake or bot followers and your chances for hitting explore are way, WAY higher. We’ll explain why in our detailed algorithm guide.
Remove fake or bot followers and your chances for hitting explore are way, WAY higher.
So all in all, for most people it is hard to get there sadly, because who has time and content to post two times a day?If you have enough content laying around, make a content calendar, write all the captions and select photos beforehand during the off season. That’s how we try to do it. You can plan weeks ahead with facebooks creator studio and let everything run automatically so you don’t have to worry about posting every day. Takes some time upfront but saves ALOT later.
It takes a solid two months or more of constant posting (without a day off) to see the effects and growth. So even you know how it’s theoretically done, it’s still hard af unfortunately. And while you’re at it posting, you still need to engage with your audience. Who got time for that? That’s like 2-3 hours a day… Better sit down a week and plan the whole year ahead then 😅
But if you are like me and have a bunch of time because of the situation rn, do it! 🔥
Before you go… one last thing: Instagram can be suuuuper random! So don’t ever get frustrated! YOU GOT THIS! Sometimes we encounter a week where our posts reach 5k impressions on average. then, a week later we get posts with 100k impressions. Often times better images perform poorly against not so good ones.
We hate to break it to you but: Nowadays, if you want to grow, the Insta game is quantity over quality. If it’s random then more posts = more chances. Instagram rewards frequent posters. Post as much as you can and every now and then, something goes crazy. That’s just how it is at the moment even tho almost nobody likes that.
Instagram LOVES Reels. No matter what you think about it, if you don’t use them, you get left behind.
If you want to see the highest growth possible, use reels. record a bunch and post 2-3 a week. There is no better way right now. Reels are featured on the explore page 20x as often as posts. We know, it can be cringy, but if you get more business doing this, that shouldn’t be a concern. Show yourself or some BTS, we promise this is the fastest path to growth.
