One of the best ways how to grow your Instagram? Use AI. AI is a ridiculously powerful tool—in fact, a study from 2023 states that over 42% of marketers use AI for social media copy. And that number is growing more and more by the day. If you have no idea how to grow Instagram followers with AI yet, then you’re in the right place.
Whether you use Instagram for a personal project, a business endeavor, or a creative pursuit, all these Instagram growth hacks can help you. From offering data-driven insights to automating repetitive tasks and everything in between, AI can completely revolutionize your Instagram strategy.
Here are five concrete tips on how to grow Instagram followers with AI.
Table of Contents
#1. Understanding Your Audience
The very first part of learning how to grow Instagram followers with AI is understanding them in the first place. Without a clear understanding of who your followers are, it’s difficult to create content that resonates with them.
AI doesn’t only speed up the process of observing your audience. It also does so comprehensively, so it can also generate insights that you might not gain yourself.
It can help with:
Demographics
AI can break down your follower base age, gender, location, and interests—or even any other category you specify. Then, you can tailor your content to appeal more to your audience. More on that below!
Behavioral Analysis
AI can also analyze how your followers act with your page—whether they like, comment, share, or save. Furthermore, it can even help you understand what kind of posts lead to what kinds of engagement. Like what posts attract new followers!
It can also determine which of your followers are most active or are most likely to buy. You can then use this information to send them targeted ads! After all, it’s important to acknowledge that while some people may benefit from targeted ads, others will find them annoying. Thus, it’s important to know which segments of your audience are which.
Suggesting Relevant Content
AI can also point you toward other creators that appeal to your audience. Then you can check them out for inspiration or to see what kind of posts are more effective. You can even ask AI to explain why those posts are popular!
#2. Creating and Optimizing Content
After analyzing your audience, you now have a much better idea of what kind of posts will be best. And perhaps the most common way of using AI for social media is using it to help create and optimize content.
Here are some ways to do just that.
Brainstorming Ideas
If your creative juices are running dry (as they likely eventually will), AI can suggest some creative post or reel ideas. Or maybe you have a rough idea that you need to flesh out—AI can help with that too. It can even suggest other like-minded creators with which to collaborate!
AI chatbots function like robot friends you can talk to, so you can simply type in your concerns and ask for suggestions. Then, you can filter out which ideas resonate with you.
However, by doing just that, the AI will likely give you answers that are too generic. A better way would be to ask the AI chatbot to specifically consider its suggestions based on:
- The style of your pre-existing posts;
- The preferences of your specific target audience;
- The trends that are getting the most engagement in your niche;
The more you use AI, the more you’ll learn to be specific and creative when giving it prompts.
Peruse its output and evaluate if it’s something you can use for your Instagram page. You can ask it to further refine its output by giving it prompts based on even more specific statements.
For example, when conducting Instagram marketing, you can tell it to “Give me an idea for a funny skit where I can insert a product placement of my makeup brand.”
But again, the more specific the better. Ask it to consider things like your target audience, the tone of the reel, or even the limits of your resources:
“I am making an Instagram reel to market my makeup brand. Give me an idea for a funny skit where I can insert a product placement for my makeup brand. It must be lighthearted and appealing to young women aged 18-34. Incorporate Generation Z humor. It must only be 20-30 seconds long. It must only feature 1 actor.”
Creating Visuals
Instagram’s highly visual nature demands high-quality photos, posters, and videos. AI is now advanced enough that it can generate entire photos or posters for you! AI-powered image and video generators are widely available and can easily be used by most people.
As aforementioned, it simply needs enough direction with the prompts you give it. Let it analyze your past content (especially your best-performing ones) and/or the posts that you want to emulate.
And given specific enough direction and sufficient basis for imitation, it can even optimize different aspects of the visual product, like:
Color Schemes
AI can identify the best color palettes for your stories or posts based on your brand image and audience. For example, if bright, bold colors generate more engagement for your page, it can prioritize them.
Composition
AI tools can choose the best cropping, angles, or layouts that will be the most visually appealing to your audience. For videos, they can also suggest what editing styles would be best.
Formats
AI can determine whether carousel posts, single images, or reels would work best based on your content and your audience’s preferences.
Creating Captions
While visuals may be the star of the show, the quality of your written content is also crucial. Your posts’ captions give context to the graphics, clarify their message, and encourage specific engagement.
It can generate entire captions for you—which you can then edit or even copy-paste directly. Alternatively, you can ask it to edit a draft you’ve made before based on certain parameters.
Whether you’re writing ad copy, telling a story, or even just writing a short, quippy remark, AI can help by:
- Optimizing writing style (language, word choice, tone of voice, etc.) for the post;
- Perfecting the length of your captions for readability and engagement;
- Incorporating calls-to-action (CTAs) that encourage followers to comment, save, share, or even purchase (for Instagram businesses);
- Including the most appropriate hashtags;
All in all, having an effective caption will:
- Maximize reach without annoyingly spammy;
- Attract users genuinely interested in your content;
- Create a balance between broad exposure and targeted engagement;
#3. Perfecting Your Posting Schedule
In social media, things come and go rapidly. Even the most of viral of posts will fade away into irrelevance soon enough. No matter how high-quality your post is, publishing it at the wrong time just might leave your content overlooked.
By analyzing when your followers are most active, AI can suggest the best times to publish your posts to maximize reach. They’ll base their recommendations on things like:
- Geographical time zones of your audience;
- The niche or industry of your page;
- Daily activity spikes (e.g., lunch breaks, evenings, weekends);
- Past engagement trends;
Then, instead of constantly watching the clock and manually putting up each post, you can let AI do the work. It can do the posting for you through AI-powered Instagram tools like AiSchedul. Or even create entire content calendars for you that include things like:
- Weekly themes (e.g., Motivation Mondays or Throwback Thursdays).
- An appropriate mix of content types (Reels, Stories, carousels).
- Scheduled time slots that align with audience activity.
With this, you can consistently engage your audience!
#4. Automating Engagement and Housekeeping
Another way how to grow Instagram followers with AI is by automating repetitive tasks like replying to comments or managing bot activity. While automation is a major time-saver, balancing it with genuine interactions is crucial.
And so you cannot stop at just posting. You need to consistently do things like:
- Responding to frequently asked questions on Instagram DMs;
- Liking and replying to comments;
- Sending welcome messages to new followers;
However, with how often these things can happen, it can get quite tedious. And of course, this is where AI can step in. You can program it to respond in specific ways to respond to common questions or comments. Or it can even automatically like positive comments!
While these automated responses save a lot of time and effort, it’s crucial to balance them with genuine, personal interactions. This is especially the case when someone is saying or asking something that is very specific.
After all, you’re not just building a page, you’re building a presence. And relying too much on AI can leave your page feeling cold or robotic and without a human presence.
Managing Fake Engagement
Unfortunately, one challenge of Instagram growth is the fact that the platform is plagued with bots or fake followers.
Suddenly getting an influx of random followers? You can use AI to swiftly check whether these are bot accounts or actual people. It can also automatically remove comments from these fake accounts, especially if your page gets a lot of comments.
But why would I want to decrease my follower or comment count?
While many will say numbers are everything on social media, quality is just as important as quantity. A high follower count will not lead to meaningful growth if most are fake accounts that don’t engage with your posts!
And even if they do engage via bot comments, this will only make your page seem uncredible and unprofessional. Your genuine followers—the ones who actually keep your page alive or buy your products—will inevitably be put off by this.
#5. Measuring Performance
Because social media is broadly defined by trends, what may be effective today won’t be so forever. That’s why it’s important to constantly measure your content’s performance.
While Instagram and other social media platforms provide basic analytical tools, AI can go a step or two further with their analysis. It can efficiently track key metrics like clickthrough rates (CTR), impressions, or follower growth.
Then they can provide you with insights or suggestions, like adjusting posting times or doubling down on high-performing content types.
Remember: regular analysis ensures your Instagram strategy remains dynamic and responsive to audience preferences. Because if you don’t keep up, your page will eventually die out, no matter how large it is right now!
Why AI Can Be So Powerful for Instagram
AI isn’t just about automation—it’s about intelligent automation.
Not only can it learn from patterns and analyze massive amounts of data, it can learn from your patterns and data. As a result, it can help you strategize in ways that are specific to your Instagram account.
You can use this great analytical and automotive power in many different ways:
Data-Driven Insights
There are so many factors that go into Instagram growth. AI can take care of all the tedious busywork of gathering and analyzing info, then leave you with easily digestible and actionable insights, like:
- Why some videos get more views than others;
- Why some posts get more likes or comments than others;
- What styles of caption copy convert more than others;
- How your followers behave with your content;
- What aspects of your content does and doesn’t appeal to your audience
Content Optimization
After conducting analysis, AI can offer suggestions on how to refine captions, edit images, or which hashtags to use to increase visibility.
Some would also say that AI-generated content has a reputation for feeling “inauthentic.” But use it wisely and you can achieve the opposite effect and make your content feel more human and overall more effective.
Audience Engagement
While visibility is one thing, engagement is another. You can have a lot of followers, but if most of them routinely scroll past your posts, your page might as well be dead.
AI can tell you why some videos get a lot of views but not many likes or comments—or vice-versa. It can even interact with your followers for you, like giving automated replies in the comments to frequently asked questions. For example, when people ask for the price in Instagram businesses.
Process Automation
Repetitive tasks like scheduling posts or deleting bot comments are incredibly tedious. You can let AI take care of that so you can save your time and energy for more critical decision-making.
By combining these capabilities, AI empowers you to grow your account with greater precision and less manual effort.
Below, we’ll get into more specific details of how to grow Instagram followers with AI.
Conclusion
From chatbots to Instagram schedulers to image generators, mastering how to grow Instagram followers with AI involves combining automation with human creativity. AI simplifies tedious tasks and maximizes efficiency, but remember to keep your page personal and authentic.
Knowing how to grow Instagram followers with AI means leveraging technology without losing your unique voice. With the right balance, you can achieve meaningful growth and build an engaged audience for the long term.
FAQs
Q1. What are the risks of using AI to grow Instagram pages?
While AI is a powerful tool, it comes with its own fair share of risks like:
Data Privacy
Using AI will inevitably involve your data. That’s why many AI users use VPNs like Surfshark to protect their privacy.
Instagram Policy Violation
Some AI-powered tools use highly aggressive engagement tactics that may violate Instagram’s terms of service. This can potentially result in shadowbans or account suspension. For example, using AI bots for fake likes or comments.
Always review Instagram’s terms and conditions before coming up with a new way to use AI for the platform.
Overly-similar Content
Remember that AI’s output is always based on pre-existing content from other users (as well as your own content). So it might create something that is unoriginal (and thus unappealing). This is why it’s highly recommended to always include your personal touch in any AI-generated content.
Q2. Do I need to use paid AI tools and services, or can I stick to free ones?
While free AI programs like chatbots are powerful in their own right, they often offer very general services. As a result, learning how to use them for Instagram-specific purposes may involve steep learning curves.
Paid services, like AI-powered tools specific to Instagram growth, will be far easier to use and consequently more effective.
Q3. Can AI predict what type of content will go viral?
While AI can analyze trends, audience behavior, and historical data, it (unfortunately) can’t predict the future. Trends will always be dictated by human behavior, which AI cannot quantify and thus analyze completely.
Q4. Do AI tools require technical expertise to use?
Most AI tools are designed with user-friendly interfaces, making them accessible even for those who are not super tech-savvy. However, there’s still a bit of a learning curve. While you do not need to know how to code, you may need to watch a few tutorials or guides to get started.