5 tips for boosting your Instagram influence

Instagram

Who’s actually an influencer? Someone with thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers? Or someone’s who’s capable of influencing the purchasing decisions of hundreds of consumers?

In the opinion of most brands, the true influencer is someone in the latter category.

As crucial as the metric – number of followers – is, brands are starting to look beyond it when it comes to hiring influencers.

Don’t believe me? Check out these influencer marketing examples and case studies, and you’ll see instances of brands choosing random influencers over recognized and world-famous celebrities.

In order to monetize Instagram as an influencer, you need much more than just a “five-or-six-figure” follower count on your profile. You need “true influence,” because that’s what will translate to sales for any brand you’re working with.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to boost your Instagram influence.

Helpful Hint: In case you need some tools to help better your influencer game, you can check out this list of influencer marketing tools!

You can also check out the Instagram verification badge.

Bring amazing offers to your audience

A great way to boost one’s influence in any realm of life is to offer people something they can hardly find elsewhere. In the context of Instagram, this could be money, breaking news, coupon codes/discounts, bonus offers, informative tips and guides, and what have you.

On Instagram, people are easily caught up in the pool of amazing content they find in their feeds. But if they know there’s someone somewhere who’s always ditching out rare content (or offers), they won’t want to pass the chance to regularly check such a person out.

Make users feel important

Everybody wants to be the center of focus on Instagram. Unfortunately, this can be hard if you’re not an influencer. Luckily for users, there’s a chance to get the attention they so crave through user-generated content (UGC).

As an influencer, you can regularly give your audience the opportunity to be in the spotlight by encouraging them to share UGC relating to a subject or product of interest.

The idea here is to give them the opportunity to gain exposure – something many people crave badly on the platform.

In return, not only will your follower count increase, but people will be more interested in your content because they know it could be their ticket to be in the spotlight tomorrow.

Engage with users directly

Another strategy you can use to influence people on Instagram is to strike a conversation with them. Already, people know you’re an influencer (someone with an enviable reputation on the platform). As such, everyone expects you to be less interested in the content of normal users (people that are not so popular). Stun them and engage with your audience’s post directly once in a while.

“If you’re in the fashion niche, for example, find style-related hashtags and be genuine in your comments on them. Say ‘Cute shoes’ or ask, ‘Where did you get that gown?’

Just those few words are enough to make most normal users gushing: OMG, influencer X commented on my post.

Still, in the mood of the excitement, you can engage the user and tell them things like, “Against next time, you can hit me up so I can show you a nicer shoe brand to rock with that dress.”

Stylishly, you’ve just promoted a shoe brand to that user, and you can trust that they’ll take your words seriously because you’re their highly-respected fashion Instagram influencer.

Shout out to influencers

If you have a post you think relates to a specific brand name or big social media influencer, you can mention them in the post or tag them.

The idea here is to give brands or fellow influencers a worthy mention in your post.

They’ll see it as a nice gesture and will most definitely want to return the favor.

By talking about you highly in their own posts, some of their audience will, no doubt, be interested in finding out about you.

Connect with people’s emotions

When you connect with people’s emotions, they’re more likely to do things for you without you needing to ask them.

As an influencer looking to become more influential on Instagram, you can realize your dream by connecting directly with the emotions of your audience.

How? You wonder!

For example, if your audiences are a bunch of people who like to complain about the prices of items being too high on some platforms, you can start tailoring your posts to feature content announcing coupon codes, bonus offers, discount code, etc. Something that appeals best to their emotional soft spot