Photoshop Elements (Windows and MacOs) 2022 free full version Download

Photoshop Elements 2018

For Windows	For macOS
Download 64-bit (2.6 GB) Languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish	Download (2.6 GB) Languages: English, French, German, and Japanese

Photoshop Elements 15

For Windows	For macOS
Download 64-bit (1.8 GB) Languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish	Download (1.8 GB) Languages: English, French, German, and Japanese

Photoshop Elements 14

For Windows	For macOS
Download 32-bit (1.3 GB) Download 64-bit (1.4 GB) Languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish	Download (1.4 GB) Languages: English, French, German, and Japanese

How To Get 1,000 New Instagram Followers in One Month (JUNE 2018 Update)

Instagram is soaring in popularity.

The platform boasted 800 million users in September 2017, up more than 30% percent from one year earlier.

If you’re just getting started with social media ads, Instagram can be a great place to begin

Whatever stage your business is at, making sure your Instagram strategy is up to date will help ensure enormous reach!

If you want to quickly build or amplify a loyal following, we’ve outlined specific tactics to help you achieve 1,000 new Instagram followers in just one month.

These strategies will quickly deliver. While many approaches exist for gradually building a community that sticks, these ideas will ensure sustainable results — in a fraction of the time.

This post expands on our 2016 post on the topic (which you can find at the bottom of the article).

These ideas are still relevant, but up top, we’ve provided the latest tips!

1. Be a Problem-Solver for Your Viewers

While nearly all brands conduct some form of audience research that underpins their social media strategy, few brands have succeeded in really adding value with their Instagram content.

To deliver something meaningful, ask yourself:

• Are you targeting the right segment of users?
• What types of questions is this audience thinking about?
• How can you help solve your audience’s issues in your ads?

If you’re just getting started and trying to figure out who to target with your Instagram ads, users who have engaged with your business before are an excellent place to begin. Since they are already curious about your products and services, existing users are likely to follow you on Instagram for the latest updates and rollouts!

Tips for beginners: If you have user emails or telephone numbers, you can create custom audiences with this data. You can get even more specific and build custom audiences for your ads based on users’ app activity or even Facebook video views. Targeting these highly active users will go a long way toward efficiently gaining new followers!

Creating custom audiences will help get your ads in front of the right people, but to make sure they become followers, you need to take it a step further and use the data to develop practical ads that will answer followers’ questions.

How do you know what their questions are?

You have lots of tools at your fingertips. For example, BuzzSumo’s question analyzer will return the most popular questions asked on forums, e-commerce sites, and Quora about the topic of your choice. For example, if you’re marketing a new pair of wireless headphones, here’s what people wanted to know about the product:

[Source]

You can use this data to develop more-targeted ads. Help your users, and they will convert to followers! Other tools for this are Google Keyword and Social Mention.

When a brand succeeds at user research, the result is a more nuanced ad:

The sleepwear brand Lunya demonstrates how deliberate the company has been in understanding the lifestyle choices of their target audience. They’ve realized that this group is looking for loungewear that serves a range of purposes — from athletics to fashion to travel. The research clearly underpins the brand’s decision to highlight its products from several angles, opening viewers’ eyes to the products’ versatility.

It’s critical to understand who you are trying to reach at a granular level to capture their attention and convert them from a viewer to a follower.

2. Try a Cinemagraph

With the majority of Instagram advertisers focusing on either images or videos in a single frame, you have an opportunity to stand out from the crowd if you combine the two!

Cinemagraphs are still photographs that incorporate slight motion that plays in a brief, repeating loop:

This movement has been called “Harry Potter-like.” It definitely adds a bit of magical allure to your ads and keeps the viewer on your post longer as they try to figure out what’s going on! You can publish cinemagraphs as animated GIFs or in other video formats.

If you have footage that you want to spruce up — or make regular photographs really pop in a viewer’s feed — the cinemagraph is an under-the-radar technique that can add that extra edge.

Particularly if you want to be subtle about your promotion, a cinemagraph can draw attention to your content without forcing your product on the viewer. Here, an entrepreneur is able to showcase a Kronaby watch in a less flashy way, evoking a sense of calm and repose in nature instead — the opposite of what many viewers might expect from a technology ad.

This contradiction makes the piece more appealing.

In just two days, this cinemagraph had 23,109 views, showing how magnetic the format can be for drawing attention! The more attention, the more potential to add followers!

3. Create Distinct Story Ads for Maximum Reach

To rapidly build Instagram followers, use the Story ads format. Agencies report 2-3X more engagement with Instagram Stories than with regular content. Greater engagement leads to more (and more loyal) followers as they spend more time appreciating and understanding the nuances of your brand.

Instagram Stories have more than 250 million daily active users, representing close to 50% of the entire platform’s DAUs. What’s more, DAU growth has increased 150% from October 2016 to June 2017.

[Source]

With such explosive popularity, the Stories feature is obviously key to quickly reaching an enormous segment of Instagram users and increasing your chances of quickly adding new followers.

But so many marketers have caught on to Stories. And Stories disappear after just 24 hours, so you have the added challenge of delivering business-critical information right up front in a captivating manner. How do you stand out from the crowd?

One hack is to start using Stories’ new Type Mode, which few marketers are employing. Type mode allows you to create Stories without video footage or traditional images. Instead, you can employ funky styles and fonts to narrate just your thoughts!

Type mode is great for evoking a particular persona for your brand. For example, if you want to be lighthearted, you can use the Neon font; or if you want to appeal to a more intellectual audience, you can work in Typewriter. In addition to these, two other fonts are available: Modern and Strong. It’s up to you how you want to display yourself to your audience!

Instagram Stories are a fantastic way to quickly build and impress your following; if you can get creative with your words within this format, you’ll gain an extra edge over those focused just on the visuals.

4. Be Smart About Timing

To reach and sustain a loyal following in a short time, it’s absolutely critical to A/B test your ads. Being smart about which variables you test can have an enormous effect on how efficiently your campaigns achieve your goals (at the lowest cost possible).

In addition to focusing on optimizing your text and images, since Instagram just rolled out a new scheduling feature, try using the timing of your posts as a variable. Now, you can use third-party scheduling apps like Hootsuite to post directly to the app, which makes the process even more efficient.

Knowing when your Instagram viewers are most active on the platform will help engage them at the right moments to turn them into followers.

While the best time to publish your Instagram posts will depend on your specific business, below are a few guidelines based on recent test results:

• If you’re targeting an international audience, ideal posting times are around 2 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST, which is when the most Instagram users will be online.
• On the flip side: 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. EST are the two worst times to post for engagement.
• If you’re focusing on a local audience, post before work (between 7-9 a.m. in your time zone) or after (beginning as early as 5 p.m.).

Within these time periods, there is enormous potential for ever-better targeting. For example, if you’re homing in on new parents, the early morning could be a gold mine; for college students, your best hours could be from 10 p.m.-2 a.m.

Testing to determine your brand’s sweet spot will go a long way toward helping you reach your goal of 1,000 more Instagram followers.

Don’t Forget: Stay Up to Date with Instagram!

Before you embark on adding 1,000 more followers, take a quick look at the latest Instagram updates to be sure you are on the cutting edge of this powerful product. You wouldn’t want to miss important changes that could affect your campaign.

A few highlights from the past couple of months include:

• The ability to add clickable links to other profiles in your bio
• The exciting rollout of Focus portrait mode, which will make sure the subject is crystal clear while the background is slightly blurred (excellent for small businesses without a big budget for professional photo edits)
• New replay privacy controls for direct messages to keep user data safer

With many strategies out there for boosting your Instagram following, you want to do this well and fast!

So start with keen audience research, get creative with Cinemagraphs and Instagram Stories, and continue to test for key variables to be sure that you hit your target of 1,000 more Instagram followers in one month!

---

 How To Get Your First 1,000 Instagram Followers

Almost every guide to growing an Instagram following contains the same generic advice. Share user-generated content. They tell you to ask people to tag their friends directly—put a call-to-action in there! They tell you to host contests and give freebies away. These techniques only really work if you already have a ton of followers.

Growing a new Instagram account is kind of like getting seed funding for your startup. 

With 0 dollars in the bank (or 0 followers), there’s not much you can do. You don’t have a real audience. You don’t know if your product is solving any real problems. But with a little cash infusion, you can start testing out different hypotheses, talking to your users, and learning about what you should be doing.

Your first 1,000 followers are like that first bit of capital you use to get started, and they’re the most critical followers you will ever get.

But they’re hard to get—really hard. Here’s how to do it.

Can’t knock the hustle

Organic user acquisition on a network like Instagram is simple in theory—people see your content, find your profile, and hit “Follow.” There are basically only a few ways this can happen:

• They can see someone they follow share your content, then tap through to your profile
• They can see your content while browsing various hashtags and then tap through to your profile
• They can see that you followed or liked them—and then tap through to your profile

The first is ideal—when people share your content, you end up in the feed of everyone that follows them. That’s a potent shot of social proof for your brand.

But if you have 0 followers, no one is going to re-post your content. So we’ll focus on using the second and third strategies: posting to specific hashtags and following and liking other users.

Prime the pump

Hashtags are very democratic in a sense. If I post a picture of a cat to #caturdays right now, and you immediately go browse through the #caturdays hashtag, you would see my photo. If you thought it was a particularly great cat, you might like it. If you thought you might want to see more of this type of content, you might even tap through to my profile and follow me.

But if I only had 1 follower and a handful of random cat pictures, you might decide not to. You might decide to go look for a #cat-themed Instagram account with 2 million followers and high production standards. Because you’re worth it.

While Instagram is “democratic,” it’s also a free market, a clout-based economy where your value and desirability (in other words, your ability to get more followers) is tracked, at least in part, by how many followers you have.

You need to post great content, get it out on the right channels and put in some elbow grease to put it in front of people. It’s like kickstarting an engine—sometimes you have to prime the motor a bit before it’ll go.

It’s a three-step process.

1. Create content.
2. Get it out through the right channels.
3. Prime the pump.

Rinse and repeat.

1. Sow your seeds

Before you can start earnestly working on user acquisition you need to get some content on your profile and start working on a pipeline of future content.

The key here is to think of a niche or type of content that you will be able to continue producing at a good clip—you should be posting at least one picture per day minimum in the early stages.

If you’re into or your business deals with fields like food, fashion, modeling, astronomy, architecture, art, design, or racing fast cars, then you should have no problem generating visual content. Instagram is practically tailor-made for showing off the cool-looking stuff that people are doing.

That doesn’t mean that you’re out-of-luck if you’ve got a more “boring” business. From putting a spotlight on your users to posting “behind-the-scenes” pics, there are tons of ways to bring out your company’s personality on Instagram. Here, for instance, is a member of the AdRoll team playing with an adorable monkey:

There are a few crucial Instagram best practices to keep in mind when you’re posting content:

• Make the images high-quality: Both iPhones and Android phones have very high-resolution screens these days. Post crappy, downscaled images and you’re not going to get follows—Instagram is primarily a visual medium, so no one wants to stare at images that are even slightly blurry or pixelated.
• Inspire, motivate, awe, and make ’em laugh: The content that gets likes, shares, and comments usually does one of these things. According to Noah Kagan’s study, only 1% of shared content made people feel “sad.” So go with positive vibes.
• Cultivate a style: The quality of your individual pictures is important, but so is the overall aesthetic that you present on your feed. Check out the example from Instagram user @canarygrey below:

When people tap “Follow,” they’re doing it from your feed, so you need to make sure your feed itself represents your brand or business. Canarygrey does this by taking spare, minimalist shots, including lots of whitespace and grays. Building a cohesive aesthetic doesn’t mean you need to be a designer, though.

Check out National Geographic‘s more subtle method of creating visual interest in their feed. They can’t have a single style to dominate because they’re wide-ranging and extremely diverse pretty much by definition. They’re all over the world, taking pictures of landscapes, animals, and people everywhere. So rather than go for a single color scheme or design, they embrace their diversity, mixing all different kinds of photos together to keep the content feeling fresh and unique.

Landscape with a person. Close-up of an animal. Close-up of person. Group photo. Safari. Close-up of an animal. Rhinoceros. If the @canarygrey style of one artistic vision doesn’t make sense for your brand, then think about yourself as a nature documentarian in the style of Nat Geo. No one wants to look at landscape after landscape after landscape. Switch it up to keep people engaged.

Resources

Content

• Unsplash: free (“do whatever you want”) high-resolution stock photography
• Pexels: more free stock photos
• Death to Stock Photos: paid stock photo site, examples of their work available on their Instagram

Tools

• Pablo: from Buffer, a nifty tool for laying text on top of photos and creating images for social media
• Canva: the classic web-based design tool, easy to use and capable of some pretty nice-looking designs

2. Target your hashtags

You need to be posting your content to Instagram hashtags if you want to start getting organic traffic. It’s insane how many accounts don’t, considering anyone can pop up in a widely-trafficked feed just by using that hashtag. You don’t even need to put it in the original description of your post—you can add it afterward as a comment. Even old content can be “refreshed” in this way.

Always check a hashtag’s feed before you start posting using that hashtag, though. You want to see:

• Whether or not the content in that hashtag is actually relevant for the kind of content that you post
• How you can stand out in the feed
• How popular the feed is—if you post something, will it stay above the fold for a few hours or a few milliseconds?

Dehaze is a very simple web-based tool that you can use to generate a list of relevant keywords given your niche and geographical location. Searching “drone” and “San Francisco” gave me this list:

#roamtheplanet #peoplescreatives #earthawesome #dronepic #dehazeco #fromwhereidrone #droneheroes #aerialphotography #dronestagram #dronegear #visualoflife #artofvisuals #openmyworld #exklusive_shot #agameoftones #folkgood #openmyworld #beautifuldestinations#california #igerssf #streetsofsf #wildbayare #visitcalifornia #onlyinsf #howsfseessf

That’s 25 hashtags. Instagram allows 30 hashtags on any given post, and there have been studies to suggest that the more hashtags the better. Check out this graphic from Buffer: according to one study, posts with hashtags got relatively more engagement the more hashtags they used. But posts with 11+ hashtags got the most engagement by far.

(Source: Buffer)

But when you start to add a ton of hashtags to each post you run a risk. It’s not the risk of appearing self-promotional (although that does exist), it’s the risk that you’re simply wasting your time by targeting keywords that aren’t going to help you grow.

Keep your hashtag strategy focused

Targeting a highly popular hashtag is a good way to get a piece of content in front of a lot of people, but if it doesn’t make sense with the rest of your content, you’re going to get an influx of bad followers (if any).

Your follower count will rise, you’ll feel happy about this, and you’ll even start targeting more of your content to hit that popular hashtag. Then, on a weekend night, around 1 or 2 in the morning, all those followers’ auto-unliking bots will unfollow you to bump their own follower/followed ratios up. And by then your whole content strategy will have been sidetracked because you were tempted into a larger niche by some temporary success.

More hashtags means more engagement, but keep your scope narrow at the beginning and pay close attention to how different hashtags affect the reception of your content. Don’t just stick thirty hashtags in every single post. Start with a few, change them around, and see what hashtags work best for bringing in users who stick around.

3. Start networking

Central to growing an Instagram account from scratch is doing cold outreach. You need to engage with people in your community if you want them to even know who you are, and you’ll have to engage with a lot of people to start getting traction. It’s like running for office—you’re going to be kissing babies and shaking hands.

When you go to someone’s Instagram profile, like a bunch of their pictures, leave some adoring comments, and follow them, the odds get pretty good that they will follow you back. It’s basic reciprocity—I’m more inclined to do something nice for you (like follow you, and therefore boost your follower count) if you have done something nice for me (like comment on my photos, validating me socially).

A word of warning

There are many automated services out there that will find other Instagram accounts, follow them, like a bunch of their pictures, and then unfollow them for you. And no, you should not use these.

Every service of that nature out there—and there are lots—runs off the same similar premise. You put in information about the hashtags you tend to target, or the account whose followers you want to target, and then give them your Instagram username and password. Their software hijacks your account and starts following and liking users at a rate that only a Kardashian could match—1,000-2,000 “likes” a day and 600 “follows,” for an idea of just how fast.

Even setting aside the inevitable “raptures” that Instagram performs on such accounts and the sheer likelihood of a ban given that you’re performing actions at superhuman speed from IP addresses around the world, automating the process of getting followers just doesn’t make sense.

These followers aren’t natural resources to be harvested. They’re people. To return to the startup analogy, the first “customers” (users) of your “product” (profile) shouldn’t just be a random group of people you found on the street. Startups that succeed build products that solve problems for a specific group of people.

If I’m posting pictures of cats one day, trucks the next, motivational entrepreneurship quotes whenever I feel like it and #fitspo pics when I hit the gym, I’m highly unlikely to find someone who is really into all of that. And no one wants to muddy their feed with someone who only posts something interesting 1 out of every 6 times. They might follow you purely out of reciprocity, but that’s not the kind of follow-back that will last.

To get good results from your following-liking-commenting outreach on Instagram, you need to both have a niche and target that niche.

Pick your targets

All you need for this process is 20 minutes a day. Go ahead, schedule it in your calendar. Here’s how it works:

1. Find a place where your potential followers hang out
2. Tap on the profile of someone who you think would follow you
3. If their feed confirms your feeling, engage with them with a like, comment, share or follow

Repeating this process over and over is virtually the only way to kickstart growth on an organic Instagram account you’re building from scratch. Don’t be skeezy—don’t comment the same thing on a million different pictures (they can tell) and don’t just carpet bomb people with likes. That may get you noticed, and it may even get you some pity follows, but it’s not going to get you engaged followers.

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re “networking”:

• Go horizontal, not vertical: In real life, it’s always best to make friends with people who are on your level. Junior copywriters don’t go around trying to schmooze with CEOs at conferences—they find other copywriters. Do the same on Instagram. Don’t bother liking and commenting on the pictures of people who already have thousands of followers. Not only will they pay less attention to you, they have no real incentive to follow someone with a fraction of their follower count. Engage with people who have the same amount of clout as you—or less, which brings us to…
• Find champions: These are people (generally with less followers than you) that comment, share, and like your content like mad. If found and nurtured, these 10x fans are an incredible asset to have as you grow. The only way to identify a reliable source of champions is to test your content and hashtag strategy carefully, monitoring where your fair-weather followers come from and where you have real friends.
• Persistence is key: Don’t just like someone’s last three pictures, follow them, and then ignore them forever. It’s very transparent, and the Instagram unfollow tools out there today are sophisticated. Users can unfollow accounts that pull this kind of thing. If someone follows you back and likes, comments and shares your content on a regular basis, give it back to them occasionally. Reciprocity is the basis of all good relationships.

Growing slow

Look around and you will definitely find products and services that promise you much faster growth than 1,000 followers in a month.

You will see, as you look around Instagram, popular accounts that have clearly been built by robots. Accounts with 500,000 followers but only 10 likes on each post.

Don’t get distracted by all the vanity out there around social media.

Growing an Instagram account by hand and from scratch, developing a community of people who are actually engaged (not just commenting “nice :)” on every picture for exposure) and learning more about your niche is far more valuable, in the long-run, for your development as an entrepreneur or marketer or product-builder.

25 Ways to Get More Instagram Followers

There are now 800 million monthly users on Instagram, with 500 million on the platform every day. It won’t be long until it rivals the user base of Facebook, its parent company.

It’s no wonder that brands are flocking to the platform to take advantage of this booming popularity. However, many brands take a while to find their footing on Instagram. It can be fairly difficult to gain followers at a decent rate.

With that in mind, here are 25 ways that can help you grow your following faster and more effectively.

1. Automate your Instagram activity.

Maintaining an Instagram account can be taxing. It takes a lot of time to do everything that’s expected of you. To become popular on the website, you need to put some serious effort into liking posts, leaving comments and following others. You also have to post high-quality content on a consistent basis to incentivize others to do the same for you.

This is where an automation tool can come in handy. You can use tools like SocialDrift to find and interact with potential followers. It targets real users through a multitude of filters that you can customize to fit your strategy. Automation lightens the load for you, so you can focus your energy on other important things.

2. Use hashtags to get maximum exposure.

Hashtags are the connective tissue that brings users together on Instagram. Instagram’s search function is based around hashtags, which is the main way to discover content. If you aren’t using hashtags, it’s harder for people to find your account if they don’t already know your username. Don’t just slap any hashtag in your captions, though. Make sure they are relevant to your content, or your posts may be ignored or even reported as spam.

Some businesses create their own branded hashtags. Often these hashtags are attached to a specific marketing campaign. If you can get enough followers to use it, you could get it trending and pull in new followers.

3. Make a good first impression with your profile.

We all know how important first impressions are in real life, whether we’re meeting a new person or doing a job interview. A bad first impression can be disastrous: it can close doors and narrow your opportunities.

On Instagram, the first impression can make the difference between somebody stopping to check out your content and giving you a follow, or passing on you entirely.

So, how does one make a good impression? The answer is with your profile.

You profile is the very first thing that anybody sees when they visit your page. This includes your name, profile picture, and bio. You want to make sure these areas are as polished they can be.

Your name should be the one your business is most commonly known by, to avoid any confusion. Your profile picture should be aesthetically pleasing, and should scale down well, so it’s striking and coherent at a small size. Keep in mind that that the eventual picture displayed will be circular. And finally, your bio should give the viewer an idea about what your brand does and what its personality is like.

Don’t forget to include a link to your website or store as well. This is the only place you can have a clickable link.

4. Post regularly and often, and at peak hours.

If you want to raise your visibility on Instagram, you need to be more active. Accounts that post too infrequently are rarely seen and often overlooked.

You should post at least twice a day. To maximize their impact, you should also post at the most optimal times. A study by Latergramme suggests that posts made at 2 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST tend to get the most attention. However, they note that there’s some variation between days.

Do some investigation and experimentation of your own. Look at a sampling of your followers to get an idea of when they’re active. Change up your posting times to see if it results in better engagement rates.

5. Develop a unique, identifiable style.

Instagram is a social network based around visual content. It’s the primary reason that users go there. If you can’t deliver in this area, then you don’t have a shot at gaining much of a following.

To establish yourself on the platform, you should adopt a style that reflects your brand. Consider how your aesthetics convey your identity. For instance, certain color schemes give off different moods. Pastels will give you a relaxed, light feel. Vibrant, contrasting tones will make you seem energetic. Dark and muted shades will imbue your images with a serious edge.

Style and form are what ultimately resonate with viewers. People are drawn to those who have an individual flair.

6. Keep your content high quality.

Some brands make the mistake of uploading everything they have on their camera roll, regardless of quality. This isn’t recommended. Even though it fills your feed with plenty of content, it doesn’t exactly bring in followers.

Most users aren’t going to flock to look at blurry, dimly lit snapshots. Not when Instagram is filled with gorgeous, well-composed photography that’s more worthy of their time.

Hold yourself to a high standard of quality. Be selective about what you post. If you need to, spend some extra time polishing your images with editing tools. The additional effort to deliver the best will pay off in the end.

7. Demonstrate consistency.

People want to know what to expect when they invest in something. It’s why we read product reviews, or watch trailers before we go to movies. For some people, it can be an unpleasant shock to anticipate one thing and get something else entirely. That’s why many tend to play it safe with their choices.

Consistency is a virtue on Instagram. If people like what they see on your feed, they’ll follow you to get more of it.

Try to make each post flow into the next. Ensure there are recurring themes across your content. Maintain a similar tone and voice that the viewer can associate with your brand.

8. Incorporate trends and popular subjects.

Always keep an eye on what’s favored and fashionable on Instagram. Capitalizing on current trends could be your ticket to winning over followers.

There are many studies that give insight into what content audiences find compelling. Some sources say that blue is the most predominant color on Instagram. There’s also evidence that people respond more to photographs with faces than those without.

Do you have any direct competitors on Instagram? Follow them and track their activity. You might find something they’re doing right that you could learn from. Just don’t get too obsessed with copying them. You should take inspiration from all sorts of sources.

9. Put effort into your captions.

Think of captions as important supplementary material. A great caption can enhance a viewer’s experience with a post.

For one thing, you can use the captions to give your audience some context to the post. You can give them information about how it was made or your intent behind creating it.

Another approach is writing something amusing to make your viewer laugh. The majority of viral content on the internet is humorous.

10. Liven things up with emojis.

You shouldn’t underestimate the power of emojis. It’s easy to dismiss them as silly little cartoons, but they serve a purpose.

One of the hardest things to get across in text is tone and emotion. Emojis make this much simpler. You can communicate a lot in a single character.

A smiley face can indicate that you are being friendly, while a tongue sticking out shows that you are being silly. An “okay” sign shows that you understand what somebody meant. Throwing in a cocktail glass implies fun and partying ahead.

Well over half of Instagram users utilize emojis, and posts with emojis get 47.7% more interaction than those without them. Not only are they common; they’re also beneficial for companies that are seeking to engage their audience.

11. Tell stories with your posts.

There’s nothing that captivates an audience like a good story. It’s our primary source of entertainment. We read books, watch movies, and binge television shows because we all love stories.

Stories can come in many forms, large and small. A photograph or video can tell a story. An ongoing narrative can happen across a sequence of posts. That’s why Instagram is a perfect platform for storytelling.

Let’s say your business gives talented women the chance to succeed. An image of a woman demonstrating her talents can tell an inspirational story in itself. You can further expand it with a caption that gives some background information about her life and struggles.

12. Target a niche audience.

When you want to amass a sizable audience, your natural instinct is to try to appeal to as many people as possible. Yet it rarely works out that way.

The problem is that people have vastly different tastes and preferences. In order to appease everybody, you have to make your content blander, and run the risk of appealing to no one at all.

Meanwhile, specificity in marketing tends to provoke a deeper response. It makes readers feel you are speaking directly to them and their experiences. That’s why niche audiences tend to be more passionate and dedicated to certain brands.

13. Ask questions and solicit input.

Most people on social media enjoy attention. It’s why so many join networks like Instagram in the first place. They want to be recognized and heard by others.

A surefire way to gain followers is to notice others and let them speak their minds. You can do this by asking questions and requesting their opinions in the captions of your post.

Who knows, you might even get some valuable and innovative ideas in the process.

14. Make a call to action.

Sometimes you can get things done by telling your audience what to do. A smartly placed call to action can help you extend your reach by using your followers to boost your content.

To illustrate this, let’s say you create a post with a relatable picture. You could tell your followers to “tag a friend that this reminds you of!” That will lead to more users discovering your account.

15. Showcase user-generated content.

User-generated content has proven to be one of the greatest assets to social media marketing. It’s basically free content made by fans and loyal customers of the brand.

Brands will often feature this content on their Instagram feed. It motivates other people to make their own content so they can get the same spotlight.

Don’t forget to ask for permission first, though. Also, you should definitely give the user credit in the captions of your post.

16. Form partnerships with influencers.

Recently, influencers have had a significant impact on social marketing. These are prominent members of internet communities, whose endorsements and opinions hold weight with their followers.

Influencers are trusted because they are viewed as honest and genuine. Many of them are outspoken and don’t pull punches with their stances, so gaining their approval can give a brand the stamp of authenticity.

The best partnerships arise when there is cohesion between the brand and the influencer. When an influencer genuinely appreciates a brand, it works out well for both parties.

Communication is also important when establishing a relationship. Make sure that both of you understand what the other side wants before solidifying a deal. Trust and respect are vital here.

There are many different ways in which you can work with an influencer. For one, you can ask them to review products or feature them in their Instagram posts. You can also invite them to take over your account for a short amount of time.

17. Attract local users with geotagging.

Geotagging photos is a fun and straightforward process. All you have to do is hit “Add Location” before sharing your post, and then search for and select the appropriate address.

Your post should now appear on the Instagram page for that location. Anyone who views this page should be able to see it.

18. Use Instagram Stories.

If you aren’t already using Instagram Stories, you should be. It recently hit 300 million daily users this last November. Snapchat, which pioneered the ephemeral image-sharing format, pales in comparison, with only 173 million users.

Instagram Stories are viewable to all users, not just your followers. This increases the odds of being found by random users who are browsing around.

19. Encourage followers on other platforms to join you on Instagram.

It’s safe to assume that you have other social media accounts. Why not inform the followers you have on them about your Instagram?

Ask your followers on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and elsewhere to do the same on Instagram. Some of them might not have even considered that you were on there too.

Additionally, you can link your Instagram and Facebook accounts. To do this, go into your Instagram settings and tap “Linked Accounts.” After that, tap “Facebook” and then “Ok” to confirm your choice. Now you can set it so that all of your Instagram content gets automatically posted on Facebook. You should see the option for this on the page where you write your captions before sharing.

20. Participate in #followforfollow, #s4s and #likeforlike

There are a variety of hashtags on Instagram where people trade favors with other users. Some of the most popular ones are #followforfollow, #s4s and #likeforlike. These tags are meant for exchanging follows, shoutouts and likes, respectively.

21. Run contests and giveaways.

When in doubt, have a contest or a giveaway. These are certain to lure in a horde of new followers. People love winning free things, especially if it costs them little to nothing in the end.

You should have conditions for your contest. Require them to at least like a post and follow your account before they can qualify. If the contest involves user-generated content, ask them to use a branded hashtag in the captions.

Rewards can vary. Usually it’s a free product or gift basket. With UGC contests, winning submissions are typically featured in a post. Some brands have gone even bigger and put the users’ photos on a billboard.

22. Foster an inclusive community.

Take a moment to look over the comment sections of some of your posts. Ideally, they should be positive and welcoming spaces. If they aren’t, then that’s a serious issue.

Moderate your comments thoroughly. Remove anything that’s offensive or aggressive toward other users. You want to cultivate a community that anybody could feel secure in joining.

23. Have meaningful interactions with others.

Even if you are using an automation tool, you should still take the time to hold conversations with users. This will assure them that there’s a human on the other side. Feel free to socialize, joke around and leave personalized comments on other people’s posts.

24. Promote your Instagram in real life.

Most businesses still have their own printed marketing materials. If you’ve got the room, think about squeezing your username in there somewhere. All you need to do is put the Instagram logo next to it and viewers will understand what it means. You can include it on fliers, posters, stickers, cards and whatever else you might hand out.

25. Adjust your strategy based on analytics.

If you aren’t gaining any followers, it’s probably best to step back and reflect upon your performance. An analytics tool like Owlmetrics can aid you in doing this.

Examine your biggest successes and failures. Look at the posts that resulted in the most engagement, and compare them to the ones that went overlooked. Draw conclusions from your observations, and make adjustments to your plans if necessary.