By searching relevant hashtags such as “#fashion” and “#beauty,” you can find Instagram users who fit your desired consumer group. For instance, if you’re an organic foods retailer, you can search for hashtags such as “#organic,” “#health,” and even “#squats” to identify health-conscious individuals who are likely to develop interest in your products. Once you’ve located these prospects, you can nurture relationships with them. You can start off your relationship building process with influencers who have over 1,000 followers. By fostering rapports with influencers, you can become more aggressive with your Instagram outreach and most importantly, see greater returns from your social media initiatives, as a share from these individuals can allow  you to reach over thousands of users.

With the introduction of Instagram Direct, you can now send videos and images to your followers. This enables you to build close bonds with your existing followers by sending them customized content. For instance, if you’re a fashion retailer, you can send customized images of your product line to specific customers. This will enhance their brand loyalty and purchase desire as you’re targeting them with items that they actually care about.

You can grow your audience substantially by running Instagram-only contests where participants can increase their chance of winning by sharing your contest to their peers. This will enable you to augment your Instagram community cost-effectively as the only investment you’re placing is the prize, which is a relatively small sum compared to traditional advertising tactics such as newspaper ads. More importantly, you’ll be able to gain brand exposure from qualified leads as your followers’ friends are most likely similar to them in terms of brand taste, demographic, geographic, and psychographics.

Just like in other advertising campaigns such as AdWords, measuring your Instagram initiatives based on cold-hard data is imperative in building a robust Instagram community. You can measure data such as your Instagram community’s growth rate contributed by your online contest, new followers gained from your influencers, and new followers generated from hashtag-searching. These measurements allow you to examine your performance and determine how you should iterate your approaches. After all, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”