Instagram is a social network – and that means you need to maintain all the networks you form on the platform.
It can be an amazing way of building connections with your followers, but you also need a solid plan of maintaining these relationships. Otherwise, you risk letting them go and losing the progress you have made.
Instagram has a good advantage because it allows you to have interactions with people who do not follow you necessarily, just like Twitter, as long as their account is not a private one. That means you can find your advocates, customers and social media influencerson the platform. However, Instagram bears a difference to twitter, because it is not easy to manage followers.
Twitter will provide you an opportunity to make lists of your followers and sort them out easier, but there is no alternative format in Instagram. The element that sets Instagram apart though is the algorithm, which orders your feed and places the accounts you interact with the most at the top of the page. This makes it important to interact with the right people for you to manage your followers easier.
Read on to find out some ways you can manage your followers on the platform, as well as some tools you can utilize.
Implement the big unfollow sometime
When you start off on any social media platform, you probably start off following dozens of accounts, as well as following anyone that followed you. With time though, you realize that many of these accounts that are now irrelevant to you, and you realize you need to let go of some of them.
Similar to any other account you may have on social media, it is important to have a purging period sometimes. The time you take will ultimately depend on the number of people you are unfollowing, but it can be a tiresome process, so it is important to set some guidelines before you start.
First, determine the kind of content you want to see on the timeline, and then set to examine these accounts. Set the kind of content you want to see, and the qualities you want the accounts to have. Once you set these in place, it will be easier to select the people you want to follow and the ones you can remove.
Start to interact with influencers
If you are a business and seeking to expand your audience, it is important to reach a wide audience as much as possible – and influencers can help you achieve that. However, you need to also build a relationship with them.
If you are not sure on who you need to work with, do not worry – that is what hashtags and geotags are for. When you search specific hashtags and geotags, you may notice certain accounts popping up in the feed. Check these accounts out, and also check the kinds of comments they are getting (so that you ensure you are working with a genuine influencer, and avoiding those that use suspicious methods). Geotags will help you locate influencers who live or operate near where you live.
In addition, you can also use certain services to help you connect with influencers. These include Agorapulse, which sorts out Instagram content and hashtags that people within a geographic area post. It will also help you in managing your follower count on the platform, and removes the agony of doing daily searches of how your content is performing.
Another service called Whalar is another good one when it comes to determining whether an influencer is genuine or not. The introduction of the algorithm has led to the problem of fake followers, and many influencers using new services for auto followers Instagram. When you are working with an influencer that is not genuine, it will lead to problems when trying to prove your own validity on the platform, especially when these bots get shut down by the site.
The service allows you to compare the statistics behind different accounts you are interested in. these measurements include the follower ratio, the average likes they get for each post, the engagement rates (very important in determining their genuineness), and the average number of comments on every post.
One thing to note with all these accounts – it also helps to examine the audience that follows them, and se if they fit your profile of an ideal customer.
Once you clean up, keep in touch with the people that matter to you
So you went through the time consuming stage of cleaning up your follower count, and you also began to find the right people to engage with. That is the next step to take – making sure you engage with the most important people to you.
It feels nice to scroll through the feed and comment on worthwhile posts as well as liking them, but there are also people you will also want to keep communication channels open with.
The rule is engaging with your market more often means you will have a greater influence when it comes to getting new customers and sticking with your loyal ones. If you are wondering how to do this, there are certain applications that can help in making your management skills easier.
These include Instagram Save, which is a new feature that the site introduced recently. Its concept is similar to Facebook due to the ‘save contacts/posts’ feature. In addition,you can also use third party services such as Agorapulse that helps in managing multiple groups of people on a regular basis and making lists you would like to sort your followers in.
You can also filter your users through the number of likes they have given your posts in total, or the comments they have given, and then add them to lists.
Final thoughts
If you are living with a cluttered feed, it can very irritating to try and sort it out. However, you need not despair over it; there are still methods you can use to make sure your experiences with followers are as smooth as possible.
