Are you starting out fresh on instagram like we are? Well never fear, we will share our tips and experience here. So beyond rhymes and design, we have been figuring out how to keep our followers genuine, that is organic and engaged beyond likes. Some of our team comes from the pre-social media era and tend to do a lot of offline activities to gain business but when the new measure of success is how many engaged followers you have, you need to spend time building these numbers. Here is our essential list to build your start ups page organically.

1. Create your instagram page. This was simple but we found out we had to switch to a business profile in order to get the metrics and ad options going. Find out how here.
2. Post elegant and awesome content that will attract followers. We went with food posts and that was a great start for us. We went from 0-50 in a few days. Not so great you say?  For an unknown business with a new service and no ads, we were chuffed. We posted visually pleasing content that reflected our brand colours and what we did. We went for 5 posts per week just to see how it went. If you need help with post design, Sign Up Here.
3. Use hashtags! After our first 50, we noticed a stall. We realized we needed to tap into more conversations. Bring on the HASHTAG! This is such an important step and we are still figuring out how to use them appropriately. Do you put it in the post? Do you leave a gap and put it in the original post? Do you Post all the numerous hashtags in a comment? OK, so we have tried them all. What works is picking a tag that is relevant to the post. We also look at the numbers associated with the tags we choose. When we post a graphic with food and tag #foodies, #yum and #delicious we have a great response. Check out why. We also tag #restaurants as we would love work with them. So consider the target audience and link the hashtags that are relevant to your feed. Still lost? Read this.
4. Increase your Instagram followers. So we have done all the no-no's and yes-yes's! One week we decided to like all the feeds of organisations that had a collective of our target audience. We also adjusted our hashtags. We found for every hundred we followed, we got a return of 20 followers. We are on a budget so we do not want to sign up for help until we exhaust ourselves. So try this out and see how it goes. Remember, we are organic growth lovers, bots can give us a false sense of popularity. If that's your thing, go for it! 
5. The Engagement Theory. We are still working on this. We decided to connect with our followers with a monthly #3ForFree giveaway, #feedcrushthursday and our blog- The Ello Bug bring you our Instagram stories, snips and tips. We want our audience to get to know us and we want to show gratitude for their attention. 
6. Consistency and going beyond Instagram. We love to create content and even though it's a part of marketing, we still need to get out there. This means connecting with our audience via Facebook, Twitter and building a relationship with Email Marketing. We find using Yelp to connect with our target audience to be quite successful (this was advise from an instagram influencer). Unite all you do with a management tool to suit your budget. This requires daily action but you can automate this using social media management tools like HootSuite, Crowd Fire and Missinglettr. We save over 5 hours a day with these services! YOU READ RIGHT! Give them a go.
7. Track your activities and results. As you can see we are trying with everything WE got before getting external help. The key to any form of marketing is track your progress or you will not know what works and what doesn't, what you should spend more time doing and what you should stop entirely. Many have thousands of followers and no sales. We have sold out twice in two months with our organic following. This is also from partnerships made off line, using other digital platforms to connect to our audience and email marketing! Make sure you have a system in place to track your results. Including knowing where traffic to your site comes from. We know the 66% of our visitors are mobile users. 60% are in North America and we get 10-20 visits on our website per day. Some may see this is tini-tiny but it means we are building momentum. Our #3ForFree giveaway is working but is not yet 100% effective but we keep at it every day. 
8. Daily activity is key! Create something that will get your audience talking about you but be consistent. Eventually they will come round. We want our visitors to be intrigued, contact us if they are lost and most importantly sign up for our subscriptions. We can do this easily by fine tuning our efforts DAILY! Follow these steps Post - Measure Engagement - Fine Tune - Post - Measure Engagement - Fine tune - etc!

We hope our system works for you but if you find it will be too much for you to bear, give it 3 months on your own and get professionals in. If you have tips for us to use and share, simply contact us and we will be happy to share!

Good Luck!

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