The Secret Tip to Growing Your Nonprofit’s Instagram

If you’ve read anything about growing your Instagram following, you already know all of the basic tricks: like a lot of photos, post regularly, post beautiful photos, add a location to your images, engage with people.

Those are great tips, and by all means do them all. They’re important.

But if you have those things covered, and you’re a nonprofit ready to grow, you need a more targeted approach, which is where this secret trick comes in:

Target the followers of your competitors. 

Or maybe more simply, target the followers of a similar organization. Does your organization combat homelessness in Boston? Find an organization combating hunger on Boston that’s on Instagram.

Click on their list of followers. And go through each of them, liking a photo on each of their profiles. Some profiles will be private, so you won’t be able to do this for everyone. You will notice those that have fewer followers than they follow are far more likely to follow you back as a result of a liked photo. But this method will produce a far higher return of follows than random liking. It will also bring you closer to your desired audience.

Here’s the reasoning: those people followers probably care about homelessness (on some level, we hope). They support that other group. Why shouldn’t they also support your organization?

In targeting the followers of other, similar organizations, you are not just finding new followers, you are finding people far more likely to support your cause.

This practice is similar to what nonprofits sometimes do in fundraising, targeting major donors of similar groups. The major difference, however, is that there is no real cost to another organization in targeting their followers. They are not likely to unfollow the group you target as a result of your efforts.

How do you grow your Instagram audience? Let us know!