Instagram is all about the story but growth requires strategy. To reach more people you must follow more people. According to Crowdfire’s help section, you can follow a total of 7,500 accounts on Instagram, even though the number of followers your account can have has no limit. There also is an hourly limit on Instagram - you can have a maximum of 60 follows and unfollows (combined) per hour. Instagram has this limit to control crazy spammers.

Like other social media platforms, there are third party apps available to help you manage and grow Instagram. Here are the best free and paid apps I found when I spent 30 days intentionally growing my Instagram account.

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Free & Paid Instagram Apps

1. Crowdfire

In the Crowdfire App, you can see who does not follow you back, who you do not follow back, who has followed or unfollowed you recently, you can see which friends you have in common with another account, and you can follow (copy) the followers of another account. You can also “whitelist” people you might not want to ever unfollow - though this is not recommended for a healthy account. Crowdfire is free up to a certain number of actions, then they ask you to purchase a monthly plan. You can link up and manage 2 Instagram and 2 Twitter accounts for under $10/month.

I would log on a couple of times per day to unfollow 30 or so of those I had followed first who were not following me back, and then follow 30 or so new people. This helped me to consistently gain more exposure and followers.

2. Latergram

If typing on your mobile device is difficult or clunky (like it is for me) or it is time consuming to move photos to your mobile device to upload to Instagram, you can use Latergram.me to upload and schedule photos. I find typing in descriptions and hashtags on the computer keyboard to be much faster and easier than on my iPhone.

The Latergram app on your phone can send you a notification at your scheduled posting time to open the app and send the image and text to Instagram to post. You can schedule up to 30 posts per month with the free account, or upgrade to add more photos or more accounts.

This app helped me to plan out my content strategy ahead of time and ensure that I was posting to my Instagram account at least once per day.

Free Instagram Apps

Repost

The Repost app allows you to open Instagram from within the app and re-post photos to your feed. It will automatically include a small retweet symbol and attribution on the bottom of the image for you.

Tag-o-matic

Tag-o-matic is similar to hashtagify, but is a mobile app and you can actually create a list of related hashtags and save them to copy/paste into Instagram as you need them. This is great if you post about the same topic often, you can save time by having all of those tags saved together.

Hashtagify

Hashtagify is not an app, you have to view it on your computer, but it is great for Instagram users as it will tell you what other hashtags are closely related to the one you type in. On Instagram you’re allowed 30 hashtags per post and if you have over 11, your post is more likely to be seen, so this tool is golden!

RiteTag

You can use the free one-week trial of RiteTag (online) to research which hashtags are considered hot, longlife, underused, or overused. On Twitter, you would only want to use 2 or 3 top hashtags per tweet, but on Instagram you want to use all of your 30 hashtags per post for maximum exposure. For instance #bloggers was not listed as a hot hashtag but #blogging was.