How can we grow our Instagram profile?

Heard of Gary Vaynerchuk's $1.80 Instagram strategy? It works for us, and it will work for you too. All you have to do is identify 10 hashtags relevant to your product. Then, comment or leave your two cents ($0.02) on the top 9 performing posts in each hashtag every day. So by leaving your .02 cents, on 9 posts for 10 hashtags every day, that all adds up to $1.80. Give it a go :-)

Nice design @themesberg

This is what I did to hit the first targeted 1,000 followers organically for my side project within 1.5 month

1. Post 3 times a week
2. Engage people who applied hashtags that I would use (i.e. like, comment, share, story)
3. Only follow the relevant profile and original content
4. Use Buffer to manage and analysis my routine
5. Leverage other channels, in my case: Pinterest, Slideshare, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora

Key metrics:
a) I'm getting 3-5 downloads daily
b) 70% traffic to my website comes from Instagram

I think following others that you actually like is key!

I often see Instagram users following others just to stop following after being followed back, which is a dirty trick in my opinion.

Being honest and actually engage is important (and probably apply for any community).

In addition to keeping up with content (shoot for at least once per day while growing) , I found that actually engaging with my audience helped a lot. This means taking some time out to look through the hashtags you target and leaving helpful/genuine comments on other accounts.

Leaving "nice pic!" isn't going to help you, but taking 30 seconds to leave a relevant comment goes a long way. It's a bit slow going at first, but I found it a great way to start getting those initial followers when you're still trying to gain traction.

Post more stuff, a few photos is not enough to gain traction.

Do mulitiple images per post, make them educational, show people close ups of the themes.