Do Instagram Stories help you get more Instagram followers? Yep. They also help you build your brand, too. 

Creators today understand that growing on Instagram is the best way to expand your audience. It’s more important than ever to capitalize on the power of Instagram Stories to provide winning content that will help you nurture your fanbase and cultivate an unstoppable brand. In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • The best way to grow on Instagram in 2023
  • The reason why Instagram Stories are so powerful
  • The secret behind Eventbrite Boost’s unbeatable Instagram Growth Playbook 

How to grow on Instagram in 2023

How do you grow your followers on Instagram? Try high-quality, delicious content. Beetroot brownies, gooey apple cinnamon rolls: this is the kind of droolworthy, vegan deliciousness that @naturalbornfeeder routinely shares to 150k Instagram followers. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that @naturalbornfeeder is run by Roz Purcell, the Irish supermodel/former Miss Universe, whose personal Instagram account has been one of the fastest growing in 2020. 

No matter what kind of event creator you are — event host or DJ, stylist or wellness influencer, typewriter poet or photographer — you know that growing followers on Instagram is the fastest way to develop your brand. 

Why? Instagram remains the most popular form of social media. 1 billion people use Instagram every month and 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day (according to Hootsuite). That means everyone from your dermatologist to your high school math teacher is on Instagram. And maybe a picture really is worth a thousand words. Instagram makes it easy for your fans to connect with you visually, through authentic, quality, easy-to-consume content. 

But knowing how powerful Instagram is doesn’t make the growing thing so easy. Just look at the internet: There are hundreds of blog posts, listicles, pictographs, and YouTube videos, promising to help you unlock the secret to going viral on Instagram. 

You don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole if you want to get in your fans’ feeds. We’ll save you the deep dive with this quick-and-dirty look at some of the most commonly touted ways to grow on Instagram:

Method Pros

Cons
Creating Good Content
  • Develops your brand’s persona
  • Time-consuming
  • Can be hard to predict or routinize 
Instagram Native Boosting Option
  • Promote with IG-approved tools (think Facebook’s “Boost Post” option)
  • Limited targeting options
  • There’s nothing a boosted post can do that an ad cannot
Content Swaps and Shoutouts 
  • Helps build Instagram pods or pockets of community
  • Relies on fledgling or inconsistent relationships
Paid Influencer Marketing
  • Improves brand recall
  • Effective at driving quality traffic
  • FTC is cracking down on undisclosed endorsements 
  • Effective for eCommerce, not necessarily creators
Comment bots
  • Seemingly instant engagement 
Follow-for-Follow Schemes
  • Gives you insight into your target audience 
  • Could yield a surge, at first
  • Quantity over quality
  • Risk of account ban
Buying Fake Followers
  • Choose to buy in bulk or subscribe to a drip
  • Engagement is not guaranteed, or even likely
  • Risk of account ban
  • Fake followers are obviously fakes

The most effective way to grow your following? Publish high-quality, authentic content consistently. Repeat. No wonder the easiest way to grow on Instagram is leveraging IG Stories to build your brand. They’ve been called “one of the most powerful selling tools to increase your reach on social media.”

Why stories?

Stories were the dominant form of content in 2020, and they’re only getting more powerful. Originally a feature of Snapchat, stories have become ubiquitous across social media sites: now, even LinkedIn has stories.   

And though they were born on Snapchat, Stories are really Instagram’s baby. Ever since Instagram introduced them, Stories have been reconfiguring how we consume social content. As Ian Bogost in The Atlantic put it back in 2018, Stories are taking over your smartphone. 

According to Bogost, stories are “a collection of images and short videos, with optional overlays and effects, that a user can add to over time, but which disappears after 24 hours. Users view a Story in sequence, either waiting out a programmed delay between images or manually advancing to the next.” 

On Instagram, Stories capture an impromptu, authentic quality, inviting your followers to participate in a moment or an experience. It’s that ephemeral, almost elusive quality that makes them inherently more engaging than feed content.

And that’s why leveraging the power of Stories is the key to growing on Instagram, especially if your target audience is Millenials and Gen Z-ers. According to 99Firms, Instagram Stories:

  • 1 in 4 Millennials and Gen Z-ers look for Stories of the products and services they want to buy.
  • 15%–25% of people swipe up on a link in branded Stories.
  • One-third of the most-viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses.

The Instagram Growth Playbook uses the power of Instagram Story ads to draw users to your profile. When it’s as simple as swiping up, why would you waste your time buying Instagram followers or bots?

How to create Instagram Stories Ads

Eventbrite Boost’s Instagram Growth Playbook is the secret to growing your following on Instagram, yielding staggering results for creators who want to maximize the power of one of the most used social media platforms in the world.

Our Instagram Growth Playbook lets any brand or business increase their following on Instagram by creating Instagram Story ads that move interested fans directly into your profile. The more fans that find your profile, the less searching you’ll have to do for a strong potential audience. 

You deserve real Instagram followers who are loyal to you and your brand. With the Instagram Growth Playbook, you can create Instagram Story ads that move interested fans directly into your profile. In the process, you’ll grow your following and get more likes, comments, views, and reshares. There’s no easier way to maximize social engagement and get your profile discovered. Plus, growing on Instagram makes for more effective advertising. Creators who used Facebook/Instagram Ads sold on average 3x more tickets per event*.

Instagram Stories best practices

Instagram Stories specs

We highly recommend creating a video formatted for Instagram Stories Ads prior to making your Instagram Growth Playbook campaign. The right Instagram Stories image size is 1080px by 1920px, with an aspect ratio of 9:16. 

The best way to start growing your followers on Instagram is to use Eventbrite Boost’s Instagram Growth Playbook. Time to go big.

 *Eventbrite data 5/1/2022 – 12/1/2022 comparing events promoted with Eventbrite Boost with any event that was not promoted with the same tool.