13 Proven Ways to Grow Your Painting Instagram Account in 2020

With 1 billion active users, Instagram has become one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise your painting services.

While blogging is a powerful platform to inform, engage, and convert your potential customers, it can’t survive without the support of social media channels like Instagram.

The Rise of Instagram 

Instagram user numbers have literally exploded in the past few years…

In June of 2016, Instagram hit the 500 million mark, just two years later, in June 2018, the number of registered accounts doubled again.

With more than 1 billion active users at the end of 2019, Instagram is currently the second most popular and most engaged network after Facebook!

If the number of your followers are not growing, your posts only reach a fraction of the actual followers, and you’re losing followers instead of gaining new ones…

Here are some tips to reverse that!

Here are 13 Proven Ways to Grow Your Instagram Following in 2020 for Painting Contractors

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #1: Existing Family, Friends, and Clients

Maybe you just created a profile and want to get your first 100 followers.

If you’ve already had your painting business for a few years then you most likely have a community of friends, family, and clients that know you.

An easy way to let them know you are on Instagram is to connect your Facebook and follow all of your Facebook friends, or hit the menu button in the top right corner of your profile and select “Discover People.”

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #2: Run a Contest

Another great way to get followers quickly is to run a contest on Instagram but advertise it on your Facebook and other social media platforms.

Here’s an example of a contest that will not only boost your engagement but also send new followers your way:

The contest above is great because it asks the users to tag not 1 or 2 but 3 of their friends; once those friends see it, they’ll end up each tagging 3 of their friends so it’s pretty endless!

[Related – 219 Social Media Post Ideas for Painting Contractors

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #3: Just Ask!

If you have some following on other social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you can share your Instagram profile on those and request people to follow you.

Or in order to make it more convenient for your Facebook friends, make a post asking them to comment their Instagram username, and follow them instead!

The other day I made a post on Facebook asking who has Instagram; here’s proof that simply asking really works:

Now I know you wouldn’t mention “Painting”, but you get the point right?

As a result, it received 104 comments, using this I was able to follow many of my Facebook friends, on Instagram!

Also, ask friends, family, or your painters and staff if they can share your Instagram account with their friends.

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #4: Use Your Website

I’m sure you have a painting website and/or blog; be sure to use it to draw attention to your Instagram account to receive new followers. 

[Related – Painting Contractors: Steal My 471 Blog Post Ideas]

Download a plugin on your website that allows you to display a ‘follow’ button in the footer and sidebar of your whole website and encourage readers to follow you. 

Here’s an example of the footer I have on DYB Virtual:

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #5: Follow Accounts in Your Niche.

Search for other painting accounts on Instagram.

Then follow at least 12 popular Instagram accounts in your niche and also follow 50 of their followers each.

Be sure to double check whether the 50 accounts of their followers match your target group and then interact with these accounts regularly. 

Continuously comment, like, and reply to their stories, etc…

You may also write them a direct message and introduce yourself (briefly), what you do and tell them about your new account.

You need a combination of regular interaction and direct messaging to befriend accounts with a high amount of followers.

Once you’ve built up a relationship they will have most likely followed you back by now if you’ve given them enough value through comments and engagement.

If not… just ask! After all, it’s not that hard for them to do.

This is extremely critical if you’re just starting on Instagram because if someone with a high-following, follows you -major cool points in Instagram’s eyes!!!

Remember, only follow Instagram accounts that; 

• Look “real”
• Have many followers
• Have an active Instagram feed
• And are not direct competitors in your target area

Interact with them, write something great regularly and you will quickly stand out from the crowd.

Turn on the notification feature for these accounts and leave comments and likes as soon as they publish something relatable. 

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #6: Content Strategy

How much content should you post on Instagram before you start getting a significant number of active followers?

Between 12-30 posts is a good in-between to start seeing a significant difference.

Your content should be relevant and posts should complement each other. 

A uniform look and feel is crucial; accounts that use certain color palettes and pay more attention to quality get more followers quickly.

Do NOT post landscape images, only portrait, because the more space you can take up on the app interface, the longer you have the viewer’s attention!

Here’s an example of a good portrait image:

As I mentioned, your account should have a “uniform” look and feel.

Here is an example of a clean and themed account from Paper Moon Painting:

How often should you post?

The best practice is posting to Instagram 1-3 times a day, 4-5 hours apart. 

Once you have the initial momentum, it’s easy to build on that. 

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #7: Use Hashtags –The Right Ones.

While hashtags can seem trivial and annoying at times, they are an important part of the Instagram ecosystem.

Hashtags make your account visible to thousands of users who would probably never have found it otherwise.

Use platforms like webstagram.org to find hashtags that are relevant to your industry and use them on your posts.

The maximum number of hashtags that Instagram allows is 30.

On average, most popular posts use 11 hashtags per post. 

Do your homework and try not to be “spammy” with the hashtags while at it. 

Some of the most popular hashtags in the painting industry include;

• #housepainting
• #painting
• #exteriorpainting
• #painter
• #interiorpainting
• #sherwinwilliams
• #homepainting
• #painters
• #housepainter
• #homeimprovement
• #paint
• #renovation
• #paintingcontractor
• #residentialpainting
• #housepainters
• #paintersofinstagram
• #homedecor
• #behr
• #professionalpainters
• #wallpainting 
• #paintingcompany 

ALWAYS remember to include your target city in the hashtags!

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #8: Schedule Your Instagram Posts

As a painting business owner, chances are you don’t have the time to take care of your Instagram account yourself every day.

Post planning is essential to grow your account and have enough time to focus on other aspects of your business.

Platforms like Hootsuite, Later, and my personal favorite that we use with all of our clients is “SocialBee,” make it easy to schedule posts in advance and make sure you always have fresh content being posted consistently.

With SocialBee, for instance, you can pre-plan posts for an entire year or recycle them forever!

Here’s what the easy to use scheduler looks like:

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #9: Use Instagram Stories regularly

In addition to creating posts, Instagram Stories have also become well established and are now an important part of Instagram marketing and promotions. 

You can show your Instagram followers more of your everyday business life and take them behind the scenes of your business operations so they can get to know you more.

Seth Peek of S. Peek Painting does a terrific job of posting to his story multiple times a day: @speekpainting

This additional content gives your followers an authentic insight into your everyday painting life and lets them know what the process looks like.

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #10: Use a Call-To-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) means that you prompt your followers to take a certain action.

Depending on the post, a CTA could be something like:

1. “comment below if you have a question about XYZ”
2. “visit our blog to learn more about XYZ”
3. “share this if you received any insight”
4. “do XYZ to enter the contest.”

You can use a call to action in pretty much any post –something as simple as asking an open question qualifies for a CTA. 

CTAs generally encourage engagement, participation, sharing, and increase conversion. 

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #11: Join Engagement Groups

As your Instagram account grows and you start to build relationships with other people and businesses of similar interests, consider joining or creating engagement groups. 

If you’re unable to find one, create a direct message (DM) group and invite as many people in your niche as possible.

Now, every time you post, share the post link to the group and request them to share, like, and comment on your post; then they can all do the same whenever they create a post.

Not many people are familiar with engagement groups but everyone basically helps each other out in this.

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #12: Geotags

For those who aren’t familiar, “Geotags” are a way of tagging your location.

These can be extremely helpful because if someone is searching for a certain place, your post is going to pop-up if you receive enough engagement.

This is what it looks like when a user searches for a place:

To add a geotag, first create a post, then select your location:

Instagram Growth Hacking Tip #13: Instagram Live

If you’ve made it this far, I saved the best for last.

When you sit down and think about the algorithm of any social media platform, their only purpose is to keep you on there as long as they can because the more time you spend looking at their ads, clicking on them, and even purchasing, the more money they make!

With that being said, the Instagram algorithm doesn’t show posts in chronological order as they’re posted.

If your post performs well, then Instagram shows your posts to more of your followers.

SO in order to get the most out of this, you need to sky-rocket your engagement on your posts as quickly as possible right after it’s posted.

Now that we know this, one of the best ways to boost your engagement, is to post an image to your account, then go Live on Instagram and tell them all about your new post and ask them to comment what they think of it!

When Instagram sees your post get a lot of engagement all at once, they boost your page!

Bottom Line: 

Gaining followers on Instagram can sometimes seem impossible – but I assure you it isn’t!

I know many profiles that are growing organically. 

Most of these profiles have a clear mission, a narrowly defined niche and post very consistently.

But as earlier mentioned, if you own a painting business, posting consistently on Instagram or any other social profile can be quite a challenge.

At DYBVirtual, we help painting businesses like yours post engaging, funny, and informative content on Instagram and other social media platforms like Facebook, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.

[Related – 11 Google My Business Post Ideas for Painting Contractors] [Related – 9 Facebook Growth Hacking Tips for Painting Contractors]

All of the content we create is ‘evergreen’ which means you can recycle the posts for years and years, until… well forever.

Let us take away the pain of hunting for social media content and keeping your followers engaged, so you can focus on more important functions of your business like sales and hiring!

Click here for more info on automating social media!

Until then… happy posting!