How to get Instagram Followers (fast)
- Frederic Wolny
- Dec 8
- 7 min read
Why your goal shouldn't be to simply gain new followers as quickly as possible
Spoiler alert: There are shortcuts—but they won't get you where you actually want to go.
The desire for greater reach and a growing community on Instagram is strong—especially for creators, freelancers, and brands. Understandable!
But how do you actually get new Instagram followers quickly?
Preferably for free?
And which methods are really worthwhile?
Here's an honest look at the possibilities:
1. Buy Instagram followers online – quick, but not sustainable
Sounds tempting, doesn't it? For a few dollars, you can suddenly get 1,000, 5,000, or more new Instagram followers – often overnight. You can find offers everywhere on Google. And surprisingly cheap too: a well-known retailer of Instagram followers will give you 10,000 followers for a mere 60€.
Sounds too good to be true? It is too good to be true.
The Instagram followers you buy are, of course, not real. They are just fake accounts/bots that automatically follow your profile when you make a purchase. This increases your total number of Instagram followers, but what have you achieved?
Ultimately, you want to increase your reach. And all you're doing is increasing your reach with fake accounts that don't respond to your content.
Keep in mind:
➡️ These followers are not real.
➡️ They don't interact with your content.
➡️ Instagram detects such activities fairly quickly – which in the worst case can lead to less reach or even a ban.
For the Instagram algorithm, it's not the number of followers that counts in the first place, but the quality of your content. Therefore, the engagement of your Instagram followers with your content is a much more important indicator for Instagram than the number of your followers.
Engagement means that your followers interact with your content, either through likes, comments, or views on videos.
And what do fake followers do? Right, nothing. They're just dead weight.
This can even hurt your reach.
Beispiel:
You have 100 followers. Of those, 30 like and comment on your latest post.
30 / 100 = 33.3% engagement rate
You have 1,000 followers. Of those, 30 like and comment on your latest post.
30 / 100 = 3.3% engagement rate
In the first example, you have an engagement rate (calculated based on followers) of 33.3%.
As long as fake followers don't interact with you (which they usually don't), you reduce your engagement rate to 3.3%.
From Instagram's perspective, your content is therefore less relevant to your followers. This can lead to your content being displayed even less organically than before.
This achieves exactly the opposite of what you actually want to achieve!
The greater danger: In my opinion, Instagram recognizes fake accounts relatively quickly (but that's pure speculation). This is because fake accounts behave fundamentally differently from real accounts. In my opinion, fake accounts can be recognized relatively quickly based on the name, the images, and the followers that follow the account. You can recognize fake followers by these signs:
The account name: Most accounts have a colorful mix of a name and a series of letters as their name.
Posts: They often have no posts of their own, or only very few with confusing descriptions.
Followers: These accounts often have no followers of their own, or only very few, most of which are fake. They themselves usually follow only a few accounts.
And since Instagram thrives on the authenticity of its users, the platform does not like it when people try to circumvent the rules. Meta calls this its
“Circumventing Systems” policy.
Meta (or Instagram) is familiar with typical user behavior and can therefore recognize deviations.
And if an account gains 10,000 more followers overnight, Instagram quickly sounds the alarm bells. Then it can happen that your account is simply blocked overnight. This can even happen if you don't buy followers. Instagram is almost notorious for its sometimes rigorous enforcement of its own community guidelines. That's why influencers with lots of followers often create backup accounts or include the sad statement in their bio:
“Main account deleted at 500K followers.”
And then your money for the fake followers is gone too.
Conclusion: Purchased followers may look good, but they won't bring you visibility or sales. So if you don't want to mess with the platform, don't do it.
2. Giveaways – Reach with a catch
Contests are a classic method for generating more reach in the short term. This is particularly common among major brands. The brand gives its agency the following specification:
“We want to gain Y number of followers with campaign X.”
This can only be achieved with contests. There is no other way to gain a certain number of followers with a single campaign, except for a truly viral post.
That's why the terms and conditions often say: “Follow my account & tag two friends.”
This works in principle – but only under certain conditions:
The contest must be relevant to your target group.
The value of the prize must be balanced:
If the prize is not worth enough, there is no incentive to participate.
If the prize is worth too much, you'll get users who are only interested in the prize and not your account. The same applies to the frequency of contests.
Many people will leave as soon as the contest is over. This is inevitable and must always be taken into account.
To keep your followers, you still need to post relevant content.
Note: You must publish the terms and conditions for the contest on your homepage and link to them in the post.
Conclusion: Okay as part of a well-thought-out strategy – but rather short-lived as a sole tactic. It leads to most of your Instagram followers only being interested in your contests, but not in your brand content. And that in turn leads to a lower engagement rate.
3. Relevant Content – the hardest but best way
The answer to how to get lots of engaged Instagram followers in the long term is as simple as it is vague:
Regularly post relevant content that offers added value.
Over a long period of time.
And interact with your followers. Build a community.
There are no shortcuts.
Relevant content and your own engagement don't cost you money directly, but they do cost you time. And if you don't want to do it yourself, you need someone else to do it for you. That costs you money.
Yes, it's the most exhausting method. Yes, it takes time, strategy, and creativity. But it is and remains the most sustainable way to build a real community:
✅ Content that really helps your target audience
✅ Posts that invite comments, saves, or shares
✅ Storytelling, personality, and clarity about what you stand for
Whether it's reels, carousels, stories, or lives—if you create content that offers added value to your Instagram followers, you will grow. Maybe not overnight—but genuinely, steadily, and for the long term.
Conclusion:
Wenn du auf schnelle Instagram Follower setzt, bekommst du schnelle Zahlen. Wenn du auf relevanten Content setzt, bekommst du echte Menschen, echte Interaktion – und am Ende echten Erfolg.
Und ja, es ist der schwerste Weg. Aber auch der einzige, der dich langfristig wirklich weiterbringt.
Das gilt übrigens für (fast) alle Plattformen, vor allem Instagram und LinkedIn.
Get more followers with paid social campaigns
Facebook also offers the option of running campaigns with the explicit campaign goal of “page fans.” This allows you to essentially buy fans on Facebook, completely legally and without risk. Your profile will be given preferential treatment, which increases the likelihood that users will follow you. However, I still advise against this, as these fans are usually not of high quality.
TikTok is a special case here. With “Spark Ads,” you can officially improve your reach, but it also quickly leads to people following you on TikTok. So you can basically buy followers on TikTok as well. But here, too, the followers are usually not of high quality.
There is no explicit campaign goal for Instagram to get more Instagram followers. But with reach campaigns, you can increase the number of visitors to your Instagram page. This also increases the likelihood that users will follow your account.
The most important question at the end is:
Why do you want to have more instagram followers?
What advantage do you expect to gain from this?
Most people think that if they have more followers, they will also have a greater reach.
This is true, but only to a limited extent: organic reach has been throttled on Meta for years. This means that your posts are only actually displayed to a fraction of your followers. The percentage is around 10% or less.
So even if you have 10,000 followers, your posts will usually only be shown to around 1,000 followers.
The reason is quite simple: Meta wants to earn money from reach.
Accordingly, it's not worth focusing your attention on getting users to follow you with the most expensive gains possible if you have to pay to reach them anyway in the end.
So save yourself the trouble and focus on creating content with added value instead.
When people see that I have a lot of followers, they are more likely to follow me.
Have you ever followed a brand just because it has a lot of followers?
I haven't. You only see the number of Instagram followers when you're on the Instagram page. If you like the content, you follow the brand. If you don't like it, you don't. No matter how many followers it has.
And if you want to reach users with it, run a reach campaign. This will allow you to reach not only your followers, but all users on Instagram who might be interested in your brand. And it doesn't matter whether they follow you or not.
Do you need help with your content strategy or want to know what works for your target audience?
Or how to run a reach campaign?
Feel free to write to me—I'll be happy to help!
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