Hi people. I manage Instagram pages and want to give you guys the secret sauce to growing your pages. In a perfect world all we would have to do is post awesome content and we'd magically be Instagram famous. But if you're looking to fast track your growth then you should probably do some of these things.
Like it or not, these methods work.
Follow/unfollow
This is the bread and butter of growing pages. When you follow people, sometimes they reciprocate and follow you back. That's just how people are.
Because Instagram puts a limit on how many people your account can follow, eventually you have to unfollow them. If they notice, they might not like it and could unfollow you. But the people who stick around will far outpace he ones who leave.
It's a tedious process but worth it.
Liking
Same as before, when you like people's stuff they may reciprocate by liking yours. Like a mix of your own followers posts and people who don't follow you but are in your niche.
Engagement groups
There are groups on Telegram that you can join where basically everyone likes everyone else's posts. This can add up and push your post to the explore page where you'll get a ton of exposure.
Some groups are better than others. For example some of them require you to have 1k followers, others 20k 100k etc.
Powerlikes
Likes that come from bigger accounts count for more in instagrams algorithm. There are some services out there where you can pay a fee to have your account liked by large networks in the millions. This is very good if you can afford it.
Hashtags
Think of hashtags like SEO for Instagram. Your page is about cats. If you use cat hashtags then people can find your page and relevant content in the search bar.
The combination of the right hashtags plus good content (evidenced by lots of likes and comments) increase the chance of your post hitting the explore page.
Commenting
I haven't found that commenting is worth the time. Ymmv