Instagram Growth: 0 To 10K Followers In 3 Months
By Vivek Agrawal
According to Statista, Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users. This number is growing at a steady pace, which makes it an excellent platform for marketers. Instagram’s Ad Revenue is expected to reach over $10 billion in 2019.
Instagram is famous among the younger generation, and hence, Instagram enjoys the highest rate of engagement among other social media platforms. On Instagram, engagement with brands is 10X higher than Facebook and over 80x higher than Twitter.
The top 3 countries in terms of Instagram users are the United States, Brazil, and India. Hence, Instagram marketing has great potential for business. Here is the step-by-step method that has helped me grow my client’s accounts organically on Instagram, and how you can do it too!
Step 1: Market Research
One of the critical factors that determine the failure/success of a business is either its coherence or its uniqueness in the market. If you try to sell something that isn’t in demand by the local audience, you are potentially wasting a lot of time, effort, and money. However, you are likely to see positive results if you are catering to the needs of your target audience.
Hence, to become successful in your work, you first need to find the right platform, right audience, proper choice of words, correct packaging of the product, and so on.
The first step to growing your Instagram followers is market research. Here are the things that you should research during this phase.
Accumulate the following metrics in a spreadsheet to form a plan to execute:
All of these statistics can then be interpolated with data collected on each day to make it into useful information. This interpolation allows you to get a snapshot of the activities that were done on those accounts.
A simple subtraction of the numbers gives you an idea of the growth rate in terms of Posts, Followers, and Following of these influential accounts in your niche.
This data can be used to understand trends in a particular industry.
Step 2: Create a Monthly Calendar
Based on the data collected for a week from the previous step, you can plan a posting schedule. Here is the information you require:
Create at least five buffer posts. It is essential on Instagram to post almost daily. Instagram gives importance to content creators and businesses who are active on their platform. Hence, the buffer posts can be used in cases when it is not possible to generate new content.
Your competitor is posting daily and is showing up on your audience’s feed. If you skip a day, or a few days, your audience sees more of your competitor and less of yours. The downside is that your audience is more likely to engage with your competitor. This will also give Instagram the signal that your audience wants to see more of your competitor than you, so your content is more likely to get bumped down in the future.
You can either upload your posts manually on specific times or use post scheduling service providers such as Later, Hootsuite, Buffer, PostCron. Automated posting has the advantage of scheduling once and forgetting about posting. The downside is that once scheduled; you are less likely to make any changes or make use of the current market trends. So, be wise and make a rational decision about posting.
Step 3: Optimize the Current Profile
The reason for marketing on Instagram is that people come to visit your profile and enjoy seeing it. Since Instagram is a visual medium, it would make the most sense if what someone sees is pleasing to the eyes.
Whatever steps one takes (Except Ads & Stories) to grow an account on Instagram, is to direct the traffic to their Instagram profile. Hence, all your growth efforts will go to waste if you do not have a great face to put on when someone visits your profile. Once the user is on your profile, they have a few actions they can take:
As they say, the first impression is the last impression, and it is valid for Instagram marketing too. When someone opens your profile, you have about 3 seconds to catch their attention. Making sure that every element is optimized to grab your audience’s eyeballs is very crucial. Using online tools such as LingoJam, one can create stylish looking fonts for Instagram Bio to grasp the user’s attention.
As soon as someone opens your Instagram profile, they see the following:
Make sure to create a likable profile that gives off significant social signals. If you do not have a business account, convert your profile into a business account.
Maintain healthy followers/following ratio.
Your Instagram profile is like a landing page and so design your landing page to get the maximum viewers to like and engage with the profile and possibly send a DM or navigate to your website.
Changes must on the background and not just the foreground. Change the “Alt Text” of your posts to make them more friendly to differently-abled people as well as to the search engines.
Adding a little bit of metadata allows our profiles to be more easily searchable by Instagram.
“You do not have to be perfect to be the best, you just have to be one step ahead of the rest.” TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay”
Step 4: Engage with the ideal audience
Next step is, engaging with the ideal audience.
Here are a few ways to be seen by your target audience on Instagram:
and so on.
Explore page is influenced by Instagram algorithm; you have less control over its results. The same applies to Suggestions. The amount of traffic/attention you can get by Hashtags depends on the time you post, as well as the competition for that particular hashtag.
The thing that you can control is tagging and engagement. You have full control over who you tag in your posts, who you follow, and whose posts you like/comment.
When you run Ads, you trust Instagram to show your content to the most relevant audience. If however, you have a list of accounts that you think are your target audience, you can engage with them.
Start engaging with your target audience via likes, comments, follow, etc. along with getting shoutouts, and engagement exchange. This allows you to increase your reach, and be seen by more people. Instead of using generic comments, post comments that are relevant to the post.
Once you start engaging with the target audience, the audience begins engaging back since you have found them based on their preferences. This way, not only you start growing your followers, but also start getting more likes, comments, shoutouts, and so on.
Step 5: Analytics
Instagram comes with a bunch of options for you to know about your account as well as get feedback about your marketing efforts. When it comes to improving on Instagram, Instagram Analytics is your best friend! This is a side of Instagram that needs to be opened daily to know about the growth.
On the Activity tab, you can have a look at all the information about Interactions taken on your account, as well as the Discovery of your account.
On the Content tab, you can see specific information about each post and story. You can see metrics such as Calls, Comments, Emails, Engagement, Follows, Get Directions, Impressions, Likes, Profile Visits, Reach, Saved, Shares, Texts, and Website clicks. This data is highly crucial to understand how your content is performing.
On the Audience tab, you see the demographics of your audience to know the health of our audience and if you are attracting the right kind of audience to your page. You can see the Location, Age range, Gender, and active timings of our followers. This allows us to make changes to our marketing campaign and optimize our posting time, area, and so on.
Also, track the performance of individual posts. The “View Insights” button comes below every post of an account. There, you can see the no. of Impressions that a post gets and what are the sources of that impression. Your target should be to get most of your views from Home because if someone sees your post on their home, it means they are your loyal followers.
Create content that is share-worthy and engaging to your target followers. It is easy to get fake likes, however, is tough to get real engagement from real people who enjoy seeing the content that you share. This is the reason that the one metric that you should try to increase always is the no. of shares and saves. The higher number of shares sends a positive signal to Instagram because if someone is sharing your content, it means it has some value.
You can start implementing NOW!
Irrespective of your niche, you can use this 5-step method to grow your Instagram account from 0 to 10K in 3 months.
Instead of relying on other service providers to automate your tasks, you can take charge and do it all yourself. You can automate all repetitive actions using free tools at www.agrawalvivek.com and grow organically on Instagram!