• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Social Media Examiner | Social Media Marketing

Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

  • 🔥 Free Newsletter
  • Tools
  • FindHelp
  • Events
  • Shows
    • Social Media Marketing Podcast
    • Social Media Marketing Talk Show
    • Crypto Business Podcast
    • Our YouTube Channel
  • Articles & Videos
    • Articles
      • Web 3.0
      • How To
        • Instagram Marketing
        • Facebook Ads
        • Facebook Marketing
        • YouTube Marketing
        • YouTube Ads
        • LinkedIn Marketing
        • TikTok Marketing
        • Clubhouse
      • View Points
      • Expert Interviews
      • Tools
    • Video Tutorials
      • Instagram Marketing
      • Instagram Ads
      • Facebook Marketing
      • Facebook Ads
      • LinkedIn Ads
      • TikTok
      • Clubhouse
  • Sponsor
    • Podcast Sponsorship
    • Email Sponsorship
    • Event Sponsorship
  • About
    • Society
  • Search
  • 3 Ways to Grow an Instagram Community

    by Brian Honigman / January 2, 2013

    social media toolsIs your business effectively using Instagram?

    Are you making the most of your community on Instagram?

    Forty percent of top brands have adopted Instagram as part of their marketing strategy.

    Instagram helps give your business a personal touch through visuals, so it’s important to bolster your community as best you can for continued growth and interaction from your audience.

    Here are three tips on how to strengthen your community management efforts on Instagram.

    #1: Use Tools to Manage Your Account

    Instagram’s interface, whether on mobile or web, doesn’t offer the best options for brands to effectively engage with their community. Before the launch of the web version of Instagram, many tools were developed to fill in the gaps left by the network.

    There’s Statigram, Instagrid, Webstagram, Nitrogram, Simply Measured and many other helpful tools for making the most of your Instagram community.

    Let’s focus on just two, Statigram for community and giveaway management, and Nitrogram for measurement.

    Statigram

    Statigram is most helpful to monitor your community and engage in a variety of ways. The tool allows you to view your Instagram photos and feed, track the metrics of your account, host contests and respond to comments from your audience.

    statigram comment moderator
    View and reply to all of your comments on your Instagram photos from Statigram. Each photo lists unread comments awaiting moderation.

    It lets you quickly scroll through your photos to check which comments are unread, giving you the opportunity to read, respond to or remove them right from the Statigram platform.

    Hosting contests is an important way to build your community on any platform, and doing so on Statigram can help quickly grow your relevant Instagram following.

    When you host a contest or giveaway on Statigram, you’re able to have a landing page for your promotion, promote it on Statigram and monitor its success with extensive metrics. Statigram also allows a business to announce the winner of an Instagram contest hosted on their platform.

    Having a landing page for your Instagram contest is important, mostly because it allows you to list the official rules of the promotion that your followers must adhere to.

    No Longer Just for Tech and Finance Nerds...

    Crypto

    Originally just for people who understood the jargon, Web 3.0 is now the business playground for entrepreneurs, creators, and marketers.

    Whether you’re a newbie or have already gotten your feet wet, you can learn the ins and outs of NFTs, DAOs, social tokens, and more on the newest show hosted by Michael Stelzner—the Crypto Business podcast.

    Follow the show on your favorite podcast platform to find out how to make Web 3.0 work for your business.

    FOLLOW THE SHOW
    martha stewart instagram contest
    Martha Stewart hosted her Instagram contest on Statigram to ensure the rules were clear and to ensure the initiative got the most possible visibility.

    Martha Stewart is hosting an Instagram contest on Statigram, calling for users to share their holiday decor with the hashtag #marthastwartholiday for a chance to win limited edition ornament sets. This brand promotion would have been difficult to measure and manage properly without Statigram.

    Statigram is a turnkey solution for managing your Instagram account and improving its relevancy with your audience.

    Nitrogram

    Nitrogram‘s main purpose is to effectively measure Instagram accounts—mostly the use of hashtags surrounding your business. Many tools focus on the followers of the account, but it’s always more important to dive into how your audience is engaging with your content.

    Launch Social Projects Faster and Easier

    FindHelp Marketplace

    Looking for a content creator, campaign manager, or strategist for your social channels or a special project?

    Find the right expert for even the most complicated project or campaign in just a few clicks with our new FindHelp marketplace. You'll have more time to focus on other areas of your business without sacrificing your social presence. Browse highly qualified Facebook and Instagram experts today.

    FIND HELP TODAY
    nitrogram graph
    Nitrogram's graphs are simple visual representations of the data from your account, including photos taken, likes, comments and potential impressions. All of this data is exportable to Excel.

    Measuring the hashtags related to your business is important because it allows you to see the number of people posting photos about your company from their own accounts and at what frequency.

    Your community is an important indicator of customer satisfaction and brand appeal when it comes to the uploads of their own photos, which are a different data set from the content your company uploads to Instagram itself.

    #2: Respond to Comments to Grow Your Community

    The most important thing you can do for your Instagram community is to remain active, engaged and provide value by responding to comments.

    There are 81 comments on Instagram posted every second (according to Digital Buzz), which is a lot of comments to keep up with. That’s where the tools discussed above can really come in handy to bolster your community outreach efforts.

    modcloth instagram comments
    ModCloth monitors their community on Instagram by responding to compliments and questions and chiming into conversations with valuable insights.

    Monitor your hashtags and the photos shared from your account for feedback from your audience. Respond to comments in a timely fashion, and always aim to add value to the conversation so your follower walks away feeling connected with and respected by your brand.

    When you answer questions and respond to comments, you will help build a loyal audience, and also help give your account more visibility on Instagram.

    If your photos appear on the Explore page—dedicated to the most interesting photos on Instagram—they’ll be seen by users outside of your following and thus provide a new level of visibility to your account.

    instagram explore page
    Instagram's Explore page allows for the discovery of new images on the network, giving businesses the opportunity to grow their following dramatically once they get a photo featured on this page.

    An Instagram photo makes it to the Explore page through a combination of two factors: the amount of engagement on that photo in likes and comments, and the amount of time it takes to get that engagement from when the photo was posted.

    When you actively comment on your photos to incite engaging conversations, you help increase the amount of comments on your photo. This leads to a higher likelihood your photo will make it onto the Explore page and gain more followers for your account.

    #3: Use Hashtags to Track Engagement Over Time

    Hashtags are an often-overlooked way to monitor and measure the growth of your community over time. Similar to their use on Twitter and Google+, hashtags help aggregate photos of a particular subject based on the words used in the hashtag.

    It’s important to look at the number of photos being uploaded about your brand to measure its growth over time, as well as your audience’s impression of your business.

    instagram hashtags
    Use the Explore tab to search and view all photos uploaded with a particular hashtag.

    Visit the Explore tab on Instagram and search the name of your business. From here you can see how many photos the Instagram community has uploaded about your brand. View individual photos for opportunities to leave comments and feedback.

    By occasionally liking and commenting on photos about your business, you can gain followers from users already sharing photos of your products, services and more.

    Hashtags are also helpful when you host giveaways, sweepstakes and promotions on Instagram to organize your entries and calculate the success of your promotion.

    Lastly, continue to use tools like Nitrogram to monitor the number of photos about your business on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis to help determine the growth of your community on Instagram over time.

    What do you think? Are you actively managing your community on Instagram? If so, what strategies have worked best for your business? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

    Curious about NFTs, DAOs, and Web 3.0?

    Crypto

    Follow the Crypto Business podcast to find out how NFTs, social tokens, DAOs (and so much more) will affect your business in the near future.

    Every Friday, host Michael Stelzner interviews leading industry experts about what works right now in Web 3.0 and what to expect in the future, so you can prepare your business for the shift, even if you're a total newbie.

    FOLLOW THE SHOW

    Tags: Instagram

    About the authorBrian Honigman

    Brian Honigman is the CEO of Honigman Media, a content marketing consultancy that provides strategy on content distribution and content creation. Subscribe to his newsletter to become a better marketer.
    Other posts by Brian Honigman »

    Get Social Media Examiner’s Future Articles in Your Inbox!

    Get our latest articles delivered to your email inbox and get the FREE Social Media Marketing Industry Report (39 pages, 50+ charts)!

    Industry Report Cover

    Worth Exploring:

    Facebook

    Marketing Help Explore More →

    Instagram

    Marketing Help Explore More →

    YouTube

    Marketing Help Explore More →

    Linkedin

    Marketing Help Explore More →

    Facebook Ads

    Marketing Help Explore More →

    Social Media Marketing Industry Report

    Get Free Report →

    Social Marketing Trends

    The data you've been missing!

    Need a new plan? Find out how thousands of marketers plan to change their social marketing activities in our 14th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report. This 39-page report reveals what marketers have planned for their organic social activities, video marketing, social ads, and more. Get this free report now and never miss another great article from Social Media Examiner.

    Enter your email to get
    our free report:


    Footer

    Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
    Copyright © 2022 Social Media Examiner®
    All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy.

    Helpful Links

    • About us
    • Our content via email
    • Our podcasts
    • Our YouTube channel
    • Our live show
    • Our industry report
    • Sponsorship opportunities
    • Write for us…
    • RSS
    • Accessibility