Building a community on Instagram is no small task. It takes time & effort but once achieved, it does you wonders. Here’s how to build a strong community on Instagram.
Instagram is a wonderful social network, you know how much we love it! But if it is about being objective, this platform offers us a diversity of formats, tools, and possibilities. But the most important thing and what we should focus on as one of the main topics is to build a community on Instagram. Because it is useless to have a feed full of content if we do not have someone to support our work.
A correctly established community not only ensures a high Instagram engagement it also gives us the possibility of converting those followers into future clients, fans, and ambassadors of our brand.
How to build a community on Instagram from scratch?
When we started, many times we focused on creating valuable content, using the right Instagram hashtags, and taking great care in the publications we make. And that’s very good! That's great, but content alone doesn't build a community.
We have to carry out another series of actions so that Instagrammers fall in love with our brand and prefer it over our competition.
Design the right Instagram community
Yes, we design the community we want to create. The first thing we must do is segment our target audience, we address marketers, advertisers, students, vendors, etc., and we have our community segmented after analysis and study. After that, it’s much easier to create a community on Instagram.
Segmenting will get us to the right people, but a community is not just another number of followers on Instagram. It is someone who shares the values of our brand and feels identified with us. You will be able to grow your community on Instagram.
So how do you build an ideal Instagram community for yourself?
- Be authentic always.
- Don't forget to manage your account based on your brand values.
- Be respectful at all times.
- Maintain your tone and communication style.
- Do not copy what your competitors do just because you want to steal their community.
Each community is unique to a brand, you can convince your followers and customers by offering them higher quality. But the people who identify with them are not going to go with you.
Generates conversation and rapprochement
Your community will be like your group of friends on Instagram, if your friends want to create a conversation with you, but you ignore them, what happens? They begin to push you aside. The same works in social networks and in a more drastic way.
You can make good friends if you keep in touch with them. Create content that educates and motivates them to comment, from "What great content!" to questions, opinions and debates.
Some advice:
- Make your calls to action invite comments and if you want to be more creative, don't just put "comment", use phrases like "what do you think of this content? Tell me how you would expand it”.
- Respond to all comments, including asking your followers questions when they comment.
- If they ask good questions, invite them to your DM to extend their chat.
Show them your worth
Your community will always expect something from you, show them what you are capable of contributing to their growth. Here comes the content, which must be of great value, not only when building your community but also to maintain it.
Do not stay in the post, always contribute something more. Provide tools, templates, guides, and links to your blog articles, if you have a podcast or YouTube, everything that makes your content robust will make users engage with you as much as you with them.
Creating a community from 0 is an agreement of two. If you don't commit to them, show them that you want to help, that you have a lot to offer, they won't create that bond with you either.
How to maintain your Instagram community?
You have already created a community and gone from having only a number of followers to people committed to your brand and the values and content it shares.
Now how do I get them to stay there?
- Offer a content grid: in this way your community will be on the lookout waiting for your new post. And as a benefit for you, you have an order and it is easier to create content.
- Listen to your audience: in your stories always ask questions about what content they want or what topics they would like you to talk about. Social listening is a good way of tracking community engagement and responding to it on time. You can try this with free tools or opt for premium products if your budget allows.
- Be constant: when you think you already have a good community, don't let your guard down; keep contributing good content and making an effort. New people will always be coming to your profile.
- Keep Introducing Yourself – As we mentioned earlier, new followers are always coming to join your community. Introduce yourself from time to time and tell them what you offer.
Tips to build a strong Instagram Community
Find the right followers
Many people want followers, the more followers the better because they think that this way they will be able to influence more people and sell. MISTAKE.
You will see it better with an example: a bricklayer makes an Instagram and gets a lot of followers. He is happy, he feels that he will finally be able to make his dream come true, start a construction company and build houses right and left. But do you think this.
will work if your audience has an average age of 23?
Well, it will be a no. Unfortunately, at that age, you still cannot afford to buy a house, so your plans won’t go accordingly.
If you upload the right content you will get the right followers. If you want followers with a medium-high purchasing power and you publish in a very informal way, without taking care of your content, or the details of the aesthetics and speaking with very common words... You are not calling the people you want. Then you can not complain if you do not sell, your content is key to attracting the followers you want.
Interact
Social networks are created to interact and relate. If you only connect to Instagram to publish your content, you are making a mistake. You must plan X time per week to interact with your followers, give likes, comments, and answer DM's.
"Yes, but I don't have time", okay, if you don't have time, Instagram is an investment, and that's how you should see it. If you can't reply to all the comments or DM's like, that doesn't cost you more than two minutes.
If you are starting, this is very important, and many people neglect it.
Value Content
Give something for them to follow you and above all for them to stay. And that is valuable content, this involves spending hours on Instagram. Invest hours in thinking and designing said content. But these hours are rewarded in more followers, and especially in followers that interest us.
Again, if you share valuable content that does not lead you to your potential customers, then badly. For example for valuable content, you are a jewelry brand, but with a low standard price, your potential customer is young people because you sell modern jewelry.
Outfits that combine with your jewelry, young people wearing them with style, intense phrases from teenagers, memes, gifs from movies or series from teenagers…
Everything focused on teenagers, you must become one to be able to generate content that they like. Perhaps you think that intense phrases or memes have nothing to do with jewelry. You are wrong.
You must offer everything that interests them to follow you and try to connect it with your jewelry. You have a good example in the stories of Goiko's account, I advise you to follow her.
Consistency
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Charuca's account. There are always people who succeed before others, why? Perhaps their Instagram marketing strateg is petty, perhaps they invest in advertising or they have sold their soul to the devil. But having ten million followers does not mean that they have a community.
A community needs time so that they know your content, you, and your products or services. Yes, you can have a lot of followers in a relatively short period of time, but that will not be an Instagram community.
You need months and even years. Impatience is nobody's friend. You must be constant and upload content periodically. For that, you can use an Instagram scheduler app like Planly to schedule ahead your content.
It lets you auto publish your Instagram posts, videos, stories, carousels, first comment, and feed to the story from a single dashboard. No manual interaction is needed once you schedule the posts.
Do not give up after two days because that way you will never get a community
Choose your values and stick to them
This part is very important. If what you want is to sell, don't play the influencer for God's sake. Do not upload content that has nothing to do with your business. You can sometimes upload a story, a photograph, something that has nothing to do with your business but is part of your strategy.
Final words
In conclusion, we can say that building a valuable community on Instagram is a combination of time, effort, perseverance, and the ability to provide our followers with what they want to see.
