I see so many people struggling to grow their Instagram profile.
As someone who successfully builds Instagram accounts for brands, personalities, bloggers, and artists, I thought I’d share my process so if you choose to, you can follow the same process.
It’s Christmas after all, so it’s my gift to /entrepreneurs for keeping me so motivated this year.
This strategy does use some controversial tactics. They work and I continue to use this strategy to build powerful accounts. In fact, after Instagram’s recent algorithm changes, this has become more relevant than ever before. It’s not for everyone, but for those who see the benefit of social proof and want engaged targeted followers, this will work for you.
I’ve found for people who have no existing social proof/brand, you can grow at around 1500 - 5000 targeted followers per month, and have a steady conversion rate depending on your product/service. For artists/photographers, this can be a lot higher.
I’ve broken this guide up into a few sections: Content Creation, Content Curation, Automation (yes, automation).
Content Creation:
Unless you just signed on to be the next lead actor in Stranger Things, you’re not going to build an engaged following by posting rubbish content.
So let’s spend a minute discussing what kind of things you should be posting, and how to produce it.
You're not selling a hammer, you’re selling a hole in the wall.
You need to apply this mentality to the content your posting on Instagram. I suggest at least 80% of your content should emphasise an associated lifestyle that your product or brand is related to.
Here’s a comparison of two approaches that explain my point.
People want to see new photos from the left account, as it reflects a lifestyle that appeals to them.
This not only means far more people will be subscribing to follow the account’s updates, but it builds brand authority, leadership and loyalty with its followers.
Then, in between the lines, you can passively promote awareness for your products or services.
Instagram is a top-of-the-funnel marketing tool for most brands, so treat it like one.
Focus on brand awareness, loyalty and thought leadership, and then nurture people down the funnel every now and then.
But I can’t afford to produce so much high-quality content?
I’m not suggesting you go out and hire a photographer or produce all the content yourself. There are billions of photos on Instagram already. So, I re-post existing photos and give credit to the original photographer.
This is a very scalable, free way to provide high-value content to your followers.
You have enormous freedom to dictate what sort of style, message, tone etc. that your profile will reflect.
I suggest using hashtags to find 10-20 or so photographers with a relatively low following (>10k) who consistently post beautiful content that is in line with the overall identity you want your brand to communicate.
Keep an eye on what they’re posting and when you see something that would be appropriate for your profile, screenshot it, record their username, and line it up in your schedule.
I’ve probably reposted thousands of photos in the last few years, and have never come across someone requesting my photo be removed. In most cases, they’ll comment on the photo saying thanks for the shoutout!
A little tip, always make sure to caption something sincere about the photo, so the original poster is happy, and also you’ll quickly establish a relationship with them.
You may be comfortable doing something else, but if I’m helping someone grow their following quick, I suggest 80% of the posts are these stunning lifestyle related photos.
It works.
Though of course, some people are not comfortable with this. That’s fine, but this guide is focusing on how to grow your profile quickly and effectively, not slow and steady.
Content Curation:
So how do you get awareness of your images?
Recently, Instagram changed its algorithm to serve more relevant content to people’s feed, rather than in the order of what’s posted.
That means that the engagement of your next photo determines whether or not it’s seen by your followers.
In fact, 70% of content is not seen.
So to overcome this, you need to make sure you spend time curating or amplifying your content.
Here is the process that I follow to make sure I have a solid foundation for making sure content is seen.
Hashtags: Forget #photooftheday. Focus on high engagement, low volume keywords that relate to the lifestyle that you’re promoting.
If you’re a luxury watch brand and re-posting photos of glamorous lifestyles and exclusive travel, focus on getting your images on hashtags like #yachtlifestyle or #jetlife - these are active hashtags that relate to a lifestyle that falls within a ’semantic cluster’ (for those of you who are into SEO) of your target demographic.
I suggest posting around 11-15 hashtags per photo. To make it seem less intrusive and spammy, add a bunch of full stops with line breaks in between them, this way someone has to click ‘read more’ to see the hashtags.
To make life easier, use a program like later.com or Grum.co to schedule your photos. Later.com has a great tool that allows you to save comment templates.
I suggest using this so that you can cycle through 5-7 different groups of hashtags. If each day you’re posting two photos, and rotating through your hashtag groups, you’re going to be generating a lot of exposure.
Automation:
If mistreated, automation can be harmful to your account. Used carefully and appropriately, automation can be very beneficial to grow fast.
For those of you who are unaware of automation, it means that you set up your account to automatically like photos, and if you choose to be very aggressive, automatically following and unfollowing accounts. It generates a lot of exposure and hundreds of people get a notification that you’ve engaged with them each day.
Some people also auto-comment and DM, however, I highly encourage staying away from this. It’s just spammy.
I find that automation is a great way to ensure photos get high engagement and therefore the overall exposure of the photo is considerably increased.
Even if you’re occasionally interacting with some low-quality accounts, by optimising it and making sure your engagement is high and relevant, it’ll make your organic exposure much greater as you’re shown on your followers’ feeds, as well as ranking on the hashtag's ‘Top Posts’ section.
For me, this is the jet-fuel that ignites an accounts growth and can be responsible for 10x’ing the speed of growth, and as long as you’re careful, it’s a sustainable way of building your profile very quickly.
Unfortunately, most people abuse it go on automation rampages, which is why there is such a bad stigma attached to it.
Done correctly, you can stay within Instagram’s limits and only target real people who have a genuine interest in your profile.
For those who are interested, I run a service where I'll set up automation for your profile, and optimise it over time.
I’m going to be posting a few more case studies and life-hacks in the coming weeks.
For me, investing in Instagram has been a great way to life-hack my travels.
If people are interested, I’m going to write an article on how I set up and grew a travel influencer account, and set up an auto-outreach process to reach out to top restaurants and hotels on Yelp offering exposure on my account in return for a complimentary service.
It works, I currently average 3.5% success rate from restaurants, which sounds low but I last month I was in NY, and set up an automatic process to reach out to Yelp’s top 1000 restaurants and had about 50 offers for meals for my girlfriend and I. Of the restaurants that I did go to and post about, I actually feel that I helped the restaurant quite a bit, as it ranked in the top-post section of plenty of high volume travel hashtags and had plenty of local people tagging their friends in the comments.
Let me know if you’d like me to write a guide on how you can do this.
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