20-Second Summary
How to get Instagram followers? Is this question on your mind these days?
This is the question on the mind of every new person joining the platform, either to become an influencer or to grow their business on the platform.
The answer to this question is not really simple, because you may need to follow a specific procedure for a specific time period to get along with the algorithm of Instagram to grow your Instagram Followers.
This blog post will act as a practical guide and teach you how to get more Instagram followers, grow your audience organically, and retain real Instagram followers that convert into loyal customers.
Why Are Instagram Followers Important?
Instagram followers are not just a number to flex how many people follow you on Instagram.
Today, the platform has become a way of business, where brands and even influencers and celebrities are using their followers as a means to sell something to get some profits in return.
- A business uses an Instagram account to sell its products to potential followers from its target audience, who need its products.
- Influencers now also get monetized and earn based on the funds from their followers, or by selling their merchandise or the products from the brands they are collaborating with. They also use the platform to generate hype around their upcoming projects or videos on other social media channels like YouTube vlogs, through this platform.
- Celebrities also acquire all the benefits like those of the influencers, along with the benefit of promoting their movie projects through Instagram for free, reaching a huge audience in the form of followers using their posts, lives, and stories.
- Authors can sell their books by promoting them to the right followers.
- Fitness influencers can introduce their fitness programs and earn through Instagram monetization, or by selling their fitness courses through the platform’s post and story promotions.
Although we have mentioned a few, there are so many ways different professions are now leveraging Instagram to target their audience in the form of followers to build a client base that will stick with them, and act on their call to action in their upcoming projects and products, and be a source of income and promotion for them.
Instagram followers help you build your credibility, help your content reach the explore page, and boost your account’s visibility on Instagram. So, organic Instagram followers
matters a lot for any Instagram Account with a purpose to grow and earn an income.
Two Best Ways To Get Instagram Followers
- Never ever try to look forward to a free tool that promises to give you real followers for doing a few steps for free.
- Also, never go and buy an Instagram account from a person who promises you the huge following on their account is real and organic.
There are just two genuine ways of getting targeted Instagram followers:
Paid Advertising Campaigns
Free Organic Growth for Instagram Followers
These two methods to increase Instagram followers will be deeply explained in detail below.
Why Quality Real Instagram Followers Matter
This is the major question that you should be asking, rather than just asking how to get Instagram Followers in 2025.
While there are so many shortcuts and hacks to getting free Instagram followers, using some apps to generate followers or buying an account from someone, these will not be the followers that have grown with you and your brand.
- The followers that are fake or come from some random app for a few clicks will not be loyal to you and your brand, and they will unfollow you shortly, because they might also be following you merely to get a follow back.
- Similarly, the account that you have bought with already thousands of followers may belong to a fashion niche, but they might not connect with your brand, and may stop following you.
- Another big threat is that the person who is selling the account with thousands of followers might have gained those through some black-hat strategies, and soon after selling you, they disappear, but your account gets penalized, hence wasting all the money you spent on buying the account.
Paid Strategies For Instagram Followers Growth
No, these are not the paid strategies that mean buy followers. But these are the strategies that get you closer to the genuine target audience of yours, and they choose to follow you based on their interest in your account, and hence stay long-term and provide benefits to your business.
Instagram Ads Targeting
When it comes to getting Instagram followers fast, paid advertisements using Meta’s Ad Manager are the way to go.
- These advertisements help you to reach your desired audience based on their demographics, their interests, and behaviours that align with your brand.
- You can target the audience that matches the interests and niche of your Instagram profile.
- These Ad campaigns encourage people to visit your profile and follow it too.
By using this approach, you can increase Instagram followers fast, and these will be from your people who will genuinely engage with your account and content.
Micro‑influencer Partnerships
This is yet another paid way to get followers from your niche community.
- Micro-influencers are the creators on Instagram who are in their growing phase, and they tend to be more connected to their followers as they engage within their niche community to get more engagement from their following, unlike the big influencers who are already established and do not need to interact a lot.
- You can pay them and do a paid collaboration with them to get access to their followers in order to help them reach your content and learn about your Instagram profile to grow your Instagram followers organically.
- Since you will be getting introduced to these people through the established micro-influencers they trust, this will also build your credibility with them, instigating following from their side.
Organic Growth: Step-by-Step Free Ways
If you want to not spend anything on gaining Instagram followers and wish to get free Instagram followers, then going for the organic growth for following is the only way for you.
This is not going to be a fast way to get the followers, but despite being a slow growth, these organic followers’ growth tactics will help you to get the followers that stay with you long-term and turn into potential and repeat buyers, and help you to make them loyal to you and your brand.
For Organic growth and getting free organic Instagram followers, there are certain steps that you need to undertake on your profile, which have been thoroughly explained below:
Optimized Profile and Bio
Your profile is the first thing that your followers will see. Hence, it must be worth watching for them to follow you, so give your best first impression.
- Use a clear picture as your profile picture.
- Create a searchable user name, and if you can, try to integrate a keyword related to your business, too, like HarryLifeCoach and SaraWallArtist. This helps with Instagram SEO for the profile.
- Write a compelling Bio, clearly explaining your work with a call to action for others to follow you instantly.
- You must know your niche and the target audience before setting up your profile. This makes sure you are clear with your goal and work, and will only get the targeted Instagram followers.
Content Pillars
Before launching your Instagram profile, create at least 9 to 10 content pillars. These can be a mix of reels, carousels, and posts.
- Make sure your images and videos are of high quality.
- You are creating a hook in the first three seconds of your video, so that people who find it in the explore page, click, watch the whole video, and follow you for more content.
- The best thing to do will be to create your cover images for your reels and videos, and add a hook via text over this image. Do this for all the content pillars. This way, people visiting your page can see the value you offer in each video, even if they are skimming, increasing the chances of them following you.
- The best part will be to schedule all your content pillars, you can add music, captions, and cover images to them, and keep them in draft with scheduled time, or keep all the things ready including the caption, cover image, and edited videos, pictures to post, so it will be easier for you to share the content soon after launching the page.
- Remember that your content will speak for you in the explore page and increase Instagram followers based on your content, Instagram caption SEO, and hooks.
Hashtag & SEO strategy
Instagram now gives more value to the SEO of your content over the hashtags. There were times when you could get viral only by using viral hashtags, but it is not the case today.
- Even though hashtags do not play a key role in going viral or getting followers, they help you categorize your content on Instagram for the specific topic or niche that your target followers are also following.
- By using the niche-specific hashtags, you can categorize yourself. This helps the Instagram algorithm to understand you, too, and your niche. Using the keywords in your hashtags is also a part of SEO, which can help the right people visit your profile and follow you.
- The next important thing is the Instagram SEO through the captions. Ensure your captions have the keywords related to the brand and niche industry so that people searching for the products or services that you are selling can easily find you and follow you.
- Along with your profile and Bio optimization, keyword optimization within the hashtags and captions is an important SEO factor that can get you organic Instagram followers.
Consistency, Timing, and Analytics.
These are important factors to get more Instagram followers. Below, we have explained how you can use these to attract more followers to your Instagram profile.
- Consistency means you need to post three to four times at least once a week, especially if you are a new account. Instagram prefers the active accounts and pushes them forward to more people to help increase followers and get more engagement.
- We recommend keeping the consistency in a way that if you are posting on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, you keep posting on the same days each week, signaling the algorithm to push your content to your following and explore pages on the same days.
- Time matters a lot. In the beginning, you might not be able to see early on when your followers are online, so we recommend searching for niche-specific times of active followers for your location using Google and tools, and experiment with posting at those times.
- The times when you get the most engagement are the right time for you. After a couple of weeks, Instagram analytics will start showing you the time when most of your followers and people interested in your niche are online, making it easier for you to reach more people and grow Instagram followers.
- Once you have grown a little following, and it has been a few weeks of posting, we recommend making use of the Instagram Analytics for understanding your audience, their behaviors, and the content that resonates with them. This way, you optimize your content strategy around them, improving your content posting schedule, attracting and engaging more followers.
Engagement Tactics
Engaging your Instagram community is really important, because the more you engage within the comments sections, or engage with the content of your followers, and use polls, lives, and questions within your stories to get feedback, you create a community by building a communication and trust with your followers and the non-followers coming across your Instagram page, leading to more organic Instagram followers.
Cross-Promotion and Collaborations
These two can be effective ways of getting free Instagram followers.
- By cross-promoting your content on other social media platforms, you can reach out to the followers who might not have found your profile themselves.
- You can also do free collaborations with the people in your niche by providing them with the option to appear on your page, too. This way, you can reach a new audience through them and increase your followers on Instagram organically.
Doing this might take you a few weeks to a few months to get followers and engagement, but consider this step-by-step organic approach as the most healthy Instagram followers hack by The Digital Advice.
Because following other hacks like using some free app or website to get followers with clicks is not a legal way to grow your Instagram following, and they will not help you in the long term, and also will be attracting the people who may not even be interested in your niche and never buy from you, and will eventually unfollow.
Top Tools & Apps For Followers Analytics
If you are interested in knowing how to get Instagram followers using the Instagram Followers apps or tools, then we do have some recommendations for you. These apps will help you to analyze, track, and amplify your growth on the platform.
The top three recommendations from us will be:
Later
You can use Later for posting scheduling and researching for hashtags to help you with SEO. It does not directly help you to increase your followers, but helps you to be more consistent in posting your content and finding right keywords for hashtags to reach the right audience, indirectly helping to grow the followers.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite can help you with cross-platform analytics. It also enables you to become more efficient with the help of scheduling your content, helping you to find optimal posting times using the analytics, and facilitating user engagement by quick responses, which indirectly attracts the real and organic Instagram followers.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps you with in-depth performance tracking. You get to know what’s working, improve your engagement to get the real Instagram followers. By better understanding your audience behavior through analytics, you can cater to their needs and increase your following from the same target niche.
Advanced Tips & Smart Hacks
Now that we have learnt about all the paid and organic ways of getting free Instagram followers, let us have a look at some extra smart Instagram followers hack and tips, which are not violating any of the community guidelines, and are going to be the white-hat practices for gaining followers.
- Try to keep your reels under 90 seconds. Even reels as short as 9 to 15 seconds can get viral more easily.
- Use the viral or trending audios in your reels to reach more people.
- Focus on creating content on the current topics of your niche that are trending among your audience.
- Optimize the call-to-action placements in your captions to reach more audience through the explore page.
- Try using the prompts, like “Tag your friend who loves the same product!” etc.
- Test your CTAs and different types of content to see what works best and then stick to it.
Do not use any black-hat strategies like fake giveaways or giveaways that end up being canceled or choosing your own fake accounts. This will impact your growth and people will not be able to trust your page and you may lose followers than you gain.
Final Remarks
Growing an Instagram following might be a slow process when done organically without spending any money on outsourced digital marketers and trying it on your own, but if you follow the advice given by us in this blog, you should rest assured that the process might seem a little slow, but with right efforts, you do not only get the free Instagram followers, but these are among the followers who are interested in your page and brand, they will engage, retain and become your loyal customers too.
But, if you lack some patience and want to get an initial boost, then you may spend a small amount on the Instagram Ads for your page promotion. You can get Instagram followers fast using this approach, and then, after getting an initial small following, you can go for organic methods and grow more for free.
If you are interested in knowing more about Instagram SEO, then do not forget to read this blog on Instagram Hashtags.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to get Instagram followers without paying?
You can get free Instagram followers by optimizing your profile with your niche keywords, using Instagram SEO, like using the keywords within your captions, and hashtags to get maximum reach to the target audience using the explore page, or you can also cross-post on different platforms and collaborate with other people in your niche to get more followers.
Are Instagram followers apps safe?
Yes, the Instagram followers apps like Later, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite are good, as they help you become more efficient in managing and scheduling your posts. Some of these also help to engage with the people interested in knowing more about you, which indirectly helps to attract more people to your page.
We will never recommend apps that claim to get free followers for just signing up, watching some ads, or giving follows for follows, etc.
What is the best way to get real Instagram followers fast?
Boosting your posts using Instagram Ads can be a good way of getting legit followers fast. This might cost you a good amount of money, hence we recommend using it initially for a boost along with the organic approach.
Do Instagram followers and likes affect the algorithm?
The Instagram likes can impact the algorithm greatly as they signal your content is worthy, hence it needs to be pushed to more people by Instagram. Followers, on the other hand, do not impact directly, because if your followers are not engaging with your content, then it might not give positive signals to the algorithm about your account.
But an active following that is engaging with your content regularly will help to grow your account a lot.
Are there legal risks with using an Instagram followers hack?
If the Instagram followers hack is from the people selling you accounts with a specific following or selling followers, those are actually a legal risk, and you should totally avoid them.
But using the healthy hacks like using trending reels in your content, using viral hooks, or engagement prompts is not a legal risk, and you can use them to grow followers and engagement on Instagram.
