Up to 500 percent: That's how you increase the reach of your Instagram stories

Posted by Carson Leo on March 28th, 2018

The hardest piece of work for small instagram channel operators is the organic build of reach. The first big hurdle is the 1,000 follower brand.

In order to achieve four-digitity, many instagrammers focus on organic growth by posting images and videos on their own channel. Incidentally, relevant hashtags are liked and discussions started with images of accounts with the same target group.

This process is effective and will lead to success in the medium term, but also requires a lot of engagement from the operator of the account.

Doubtful methods for growth

Since obviously not every Instagrammer brings the necessary time budget or does not want to wait so long, often also dubious methods are used.

This includes the use of so-called "like" and follow-bots , which automatically like and comment on foreign contributions without user intervention, or even follow matching accounts - even a Zalando subsidiary had resorted to this.

Just as popular, especially among influencers, are Like and Comment groups. In these, several Instagrammer join together with the goal to increase their own range.

The system behind it is simple: every post that is shared into the group will be liked and commented on by all participants. As a result, influencers embrace the power of the masses to fool agencies and advertisers into a high commitment and to be better ranked by the Instagram algorithm .

Instagram Stories: The True Reach Boost

If you want to increase your reach on Instagram uncomplicated and fast, ideally should start immediately to put on Instagram stories. Since its launch in August 2016, Instagram has continued to evolve its format.

At the end of May 2017, the Instagram stories were supplemented by two new narrative formats: Location Stories and Hashtag Stories . Since then, users can optionally include a specific hashtag or their current location in their story.

For example, if you include the hashtag #FacebookMarketing in your story, it will most likely appear in the national or global hashtag story for that hashtag. The same applies to the location stories.

Left versus right: The reach of a post in your Instagram stories can be massively different. On the left we just posted a picture, on the right we used a location hashtag. The range of the right contribution was 500 percent higher than that of the left.

We have been experimenting  with location and hashtag stories on our Instagram account for a few weeks now. The results are clear.

Instagram stories with hashtag and location reach up to 500 percent higher reach. On average, the growth in our test series is between 200 and 300 percent.

Differences by account size

It has been shown that the location tags are again significantly more effective in terms of range growth than the hashtags used. However, these are also very nischig with us. Those who rely on more general hashtags with larger search volumes should produce significantly better results than we do.

Our conclusion is that Instagram Stories in the right configuration can be a huge reach booster. Our account currently has close to 2,600 followers and our range increase is as described above on average about 250 percent per image in the story (gramilab).

Small accounts are likely to record much higher growth rates. The bigger an account gets, the higher its organic reach. Therefore, the gain decreases with the use of location and hashtag tags with increasing size.

Nevertheless, even large accounts with 10,000 or even more followers through this method within the Instagram stories get a not to be despised range gain.