After a small initial “boom”, during which you managed to conquer several followers and get a good number of likes, your Instagram profile seems to have “stopped”? You can no longer attract new users and do not know how to unlock the situation?

If you want we can try to give you a hand but, we warn you, we can not promise you miracles.To have more likes on Instagram and grow the number of followers you have to produce quality content, stand out from the crowd and create a real community around your profile.

You also need to be good at getting yourself noticed and advertising your work without falling into spam. In short, there are many variables to consider and, unfortunately or fortunately, there are no magic recipes to be successful.

The only thing you can do is put into practice some strategies and small tricks, like the ones we are about to illustrate and cross the fingers so that the counter of the like (and of the follower) returns to grow as before.

We are convinced that you will make it … put on a good buzz, busy as much as you can and you will see that the results will come. Maybe not immediately, but we bet they will come. Good luck for everything!

Beautify your photos with original filters (using other apps)

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If you want to attract the attention of the public you do not have to just take beautiful pictures, you must also customize them with the “right” filters … and those of Instagram are not always the best choice, because now they are recognizable a mile away!

To capture the interest of people try to edit your photos with applications such as VSCOCam or SnapSeed (both are available for both Android and iPhone), which allow you to have complete control over all the parameters of the images and include dozens of filters very high quality.

After customizing your photos in an original way, open Instagram and post them on your profile using the Gallery function of the application (the one to select a photo already present in the gallery of the smartphone instead of taking a new one).

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Expand your activities on social networks

If you want to have more like on Instagram you have to advertise your profile, and there is no better way to do it than to share your photos on Facebook and Twitter.

To activate the synchronization of Instagram with Facebook, open Instagram and press first on the icon of the little man placed in the lower right and then on that of gear.

Then move to the Linked Accounts menu, select Facebook from the list of available social services and access the profile on which you want to post your photos.

At the end of the operation, all the photos you publish on Facebook can also be posted on Facebook simply by selecting the social network icon from the application’s publication screen.

Instagram also supports integration with Twitter, but unfortunately placed the photos in the form of links and not in the form of actual images.

To bypass this limit you need to turn to external services, such as the excellent IFTTT (If This Then That) which allows you to automate various operations between social networks and other online services.

To be even more precise, signing up for free to IFTTT (by clicking on the Sign Up button located at the top right of the initial page of the service) and activating the script to post Instagram photos on Twitter all the photos you post on your Instagram profile will be published also on Twitter in the form of images and not links.

Everything will happen automatically, you will not even have to select the Twitter icon from the Instagram publishing screen.

Among the social services supported by Instagram, there are also Flickr, Tumblr and other well-known sites. If you use them, enable automatic sharing of content from Instagram and you will surely benefit from it in terms of popularity.

Use the right hashtags

Hashtags are the “labels” with which you can categorize photos on Instagram, and then make it easier for the public to search.

Using popular hashtags definitely helps to increase the visibility of your shots, but never lose sight of what is the main theme of the images.

If you use the hashtag “haphazardly” only to increase the views of the photos you do not get like, you get the discredit of the public who now knows very well these “tricks” and does not look favorably who puts them into practice.

That said, if you want a general overview of the most used hashtags of the moment on Instagram, do a “ride” on sites such as Websta and Iconosquare that publish statistics always updated in this regard.

The services are both free but Iconosquare requires you to authenticate with your Instagram account by clicking on the Sign in with Instagram button located at the top right.

To access the list of popular hashtags you have to select the Analytics tab at the top and then the Optimization item from the left sidebar.

Another recommendation that I make is to not use “two thousand” hashtags for each photo: four, at most five, well-selected hashtags should be more than enough.

Moreover, when you have gained some popularity, try to throw yourself some hashtags (strictly in English) and make them become trendy: originality always rewards!

Interact, note!

To emerge on Instagram you have to get noticed by as many people as possible, in the positive sense of the term naturally. You must become an integral part of the community, stimulate your audience continually and interact with other “igers”. Let’s try to do some practical examples.

• Always reply to comments – if someone comments on your photos, answer, even just for a simple “thank you”. In this way, you will also stimulate other people to participate in the conversation and you will develop a sense of community around your photos.
• Make the audience involved in what you do – ask for advice on the next subjects to be immortalized, on the filters to be used, on the shooting techniques to be adopted … in short, make your followers understand that they are important and that you take their opinion seriously.
• Create guest posts – do you think there are good photographers among your followers? Well, then ask him to make some shots to post on your Instagram profile, and maybe return the favor. In this way, on the one hand, you will increase the sense of community around your profile and on the other hand, you will get a little ‘public from the person who made the guest post.
• Request a collaboration with other igers – to emerge on Instagram, we said, you have to become an integral part of the community. This means that you have to follow the profiles that interest you, put like photos you like and interact with other users. In this regard, you could look for “igers” with interests common to yours and ask them for a collaboration, maybe an exchange of guest posts to get a mutual advertising.
• “Take advantage” of the stars of Instagram – it is useless to ask an Instagram super-star to follow you or to respond to your comments, hardly will. But you can always make yourself noticed by your audience and interact with it. Search for “stars” with interests similar to yours (eg a travel expert if your favorite subjects are landscapes, a fashion blogger if you take care of fashion and so on), interact constructively with his followers by participating in the discussions that develop under his shots and tries to get you noticed. Some followers will surely be interested in your work and will start to follow you. But we recommend you, be natural, do not “spam” your profile, otherwise, you will get the opposite result compared to like!
• Comment on the most recent photos – a technique not very “elegant”, but often effective, to attract new followers is to search for a popular hashtag on Instagram, click on the most recently published photos (eg in the last hour) and comment on them. Users who will open the photos after you will certainly notice the comment and, intrigued, could visit your profile. Also, in this case, the same recommendation as before: the comments must be natural, even a simple appreciation of the photo is fine, you do not have to “spam” your profile.
• Contest – contests are always useful for acquiring new likes and, more generally, getting noticed on Instagram. If you have a profile already “started”, you can launch a photo contest, invite your followers to take pictures related to a specific theme and share them on Instagram using a hashtag of your choice (obviously asking for a like and a sharing of your post). If you do not yet have a public to call a contest, you can participate in competitions launched by other users and get noticed by posting your photos.

Pose your photos in an intelligent way

To have more likes on Instagram you have to create a “fixture” to which your followers want to participate. This means that you have to identify the times in which your audience guarantees the greatest degree of interaction and post your photos at regular time intervals.

Our advice is to never post more than 4 photos a day and to spend at least 4-5 hours between one shot and the other but, as mentioned, it all depends on the type of audience you have.

Try to understand who likes your photos, find out what the times that guarantee the “peak” in interactions and keep the pace of publication stable.

Do not buy followers!

Connect for a moment to Google and try to find a system to buy like or follower on Instagram : you will surely find plenty of them.

At this point it is spontaneous to ask yourself a few questions: are they legal? Are they reliable? Is it really worth using them? Leaving aside for a moment the “ethical” discourse, which should however retain its importance, there are various considerations to make.

• For a purchase service of likes or followers that really works there are at least ten that hide behind scams. In the best case they collect money and they do not work, in the worst they collect also the access data to Instagram.
• Tracking your account from bots, ie fake users created specifically to increase the number of followers, could go against the terms of use of Instagram and lead to suspension or termination of the account.
• To end up in the “popular” page of Instagram you need to receive a high number of likes (just over the number of their followers) in the minutes immediately after the photo is published, so the more the followers increase and the more difficult it becomes to get “popular”. This means that by buying fake followers you will be forced to buy more and more like and you will enter a vicious circle that will take you to spend a lot of money.

In summary, we can say that buying a follower is almost always counterproductive. Buy like, although incorrect, can be useful in the commercial field (where it is now a fairly common practice) but ultimately it is always better to act in transparency and earn their own success “in the field”. It will be trivial to say but it is the truth.

If you really want to earn some likes without making efforts, try downloading one of the now many apps to exchange “like” with other users.

Their operation is quite simple: they have proposed photos of other users to do like on Instagram, you upload your own image (spending virtual coins that can be earned directly in the app or buy with real money) and other users will like on it.

Even these solutions, however, are to be evaluated carefully, there are some untrustworthy that force your hand too much on paid content and do not guarantee a high number of likes.

Before downloading, do a good search on Google and check the comments (not the stars, which could also be “forced” to get free coins) of other users on Google Play and App Store.