Growing your Instagram organically seems like it’s impossible. It just seems easier to buy fake followers. Or so enticing to enter loop giveaways that promise you over 10K followers but cost over $1K. However, these fast and inorganic ways will hurt you in the long run. It will hurt your engagement and demographics.  So I wanted to share with you what I have learned about the Instagram trust score and how to grow your Instagram following and engagement organically. My tips on growing your Instagram following are based online research, tutorials and a conversation with an Instagram consultant over dinner. I’m not an expert, but I just wanted to share what I have learned. This time last year,  I hadn’t even reached 1k followers, and today I’m close to 16k. Check out my Instagram profile.

My tips on growing your Instagram following will only help you after you have figured out Instagram basics like the optimal time to post, niche related hashtags, using geo-tag, tagging posts, engaging with your audience, etc.

Click here for my tips on the best apps for Instastories and how to grow your Instastories views.

The most important factor in growing organically depends on Instagram recognizing you as an authentic user. Instagram assigns you a trust score when it accepts your action as human-like and not bot-like. Instagram hates bots, so you want to avoid the bot-like behavior. You might think there is nothing you are doing that is bot-like, but that might be the case.

How to Grow Your Instagram Following with the Instagram Trust Score

1. Utilize every single Instagram functions on a daily basis: Post, Live, Boomerang, Instastories, and so on. This will show Instagram that you’re not a bot but an authentic user of Instagram. Also, Instagram is competing with Snapchat so they prefer their users to utilize Instastories. This means your post will rank higher on your followers’ feed.

2. Be Selective. Like and comment on posts selectively. Liking and commenting every post on your feed will seem bot-like. This will give you a trust higher trust score. If you like every single post that shows up on your feed for the hopes of more likes, that is bot-like behavior. If you comment on posts with only emojis or the same phrase like “wow”, “cute” and “pretty” than that is bot-like behavior. These types of behaviors will lead to shadow banning.

3. Follow for Follow. Like for Like. Comment for Comment. Remember the earlier days of Instagram, when #followforfollow was so popular. It’s still a popular concept. People are more likely to follow you back if you follow them; they’re more likely to like or comment on your post if you return the favor.

4. Follow small accounts (less than 1K). The fewer accounts your followers are following means your posts are more likely to show up on their feed, this will boost your engagement. The algorithm doesn’t really affect an account that’s only following 250 people.

5. Switch up your Hashtags. So you figured out which hashtags work best for you and research your niche’s hashtags. That’s great but now you need to switch it up. Using the same hashtag also seems bot-like. You should have a couple of lists that you switch up with every post.

Have you heard of the Instagram trust score before? Is there anything that is working well for you on Instagram? Let me know in a comment below!

Xo,

Liz