Okay, so this post will be about how I was able to grow my brand new Instagram account from zero to 1k / One thousand (real engaging) followers in just only 25 days. Sounds good? lets begin!
I will be making this very simple and straight forward. Everything I did will be listed in a step by step fashion. Hope that's cool with you. But before that, let us get some facts out there. Information about my account that may be relevant to this post.
I joined Instagram a long time ago, actually. This is not my first account. So I have some experience with the platform and that helped me build my second account. The reason I created the second one in the first place was to showcase my photography. It was an Instagram profile solely for nice beautiful pictures taken by me. The original Instagram handle I had (and still have) was for my personal stuff and not particularly about my work in this regard. And when you are trying to get exposure for your work, it should be only about your work, no personal stuff. So I was inclined to make a second one and I did. One of the best decisions ever.
So, let us see my 25 days long journey in a just three screenshots.
Ready? here goes:
Even though it is not a super pretty collage, it depicts my account in it's three crucial stages and the analysis of each one of them is kind of important to understand how this thing actually works. More details will be shared the following steps.
One thing that you should keep in mind before trying to implement my technique is that it will work effectively only if your account is about quality content in a specific niche. That means if you are going to upload only your selfies and snapshots about your day-to-day life, you will not get this exact result. But you will, however, get results. So yeah, let us start.
Step One: Decide what you are going to upload. What niche will you be working with. What will the content you put up be about. Once that is figured out, you can proceed to the next step. Just incase you did not read the first part of this post, the niche I chose was Photography. That was pretty obvious for me as I am a big-time photography enthusiast.
Step Two: Start the account. Once you do that, you will be required to give three important info to Instagram: the name of the account, the user ID and the profile picture. Yes, these are crucial, believe me.
So if you are a chef and decided to start an account, the niche will be Food photography for you. So firstly put a nice picture that is related with the content: a snapshot of a dish taken from above. Or maybe an overdramatic photo of you cooking in your chef's attire. It should not be a mediocre selfie of you and your wife in your living room. Got the idea?
The user ID should be relevant too. If your name is Dave Parker and you are going to post photos of your pets, don't just put your name as the user ID. Go with something along the lines of 'incredible_pets' or maybe 'animalsofdave'. Same goes with the name of the account. Make it very much related to the niche and ensure that it is eye-catching & interesting.
Step Three: Write a very neat and concise bio about your profile and the content. It should be well written and has to include important keywords relating to the niche. Instagram's algorithm and the people who may visit should get a very clear idea on the first glance itself. A simple request to follow the account at the end may also prove to be a very good idea. Be creative!
Step Four: This is the most crucial step, hands down - Find the top IG profiles in your niche. How you find them is totally upto you. The most simplest method is to go to Google and search for the biggest people on Instagram who do what you are trying to do. Or maybe you can visit some big shout-out pages that feature the top users in the niche. The goal is to somehow find the biggest players in the field.
Step Five: Upload the photos. You saw this coming, didn't you? Well we had to talk about this at some point. I'm hoping you have some good photos (content, basically) to share that are in the niche. Curate the best 12 photos you have. Upload twice daily, one in the morning and one in the evening. You should also follow all your friends who are on Instagram while you do this. Your name must be on the account so your friends will know that it is you. Or maybe do what I did: Put up stories on the first personal account saying that you created a second one.
The caption should be very short and should (most of the time) include some engagement encouraging questions at the end like 'Here is a photo of my Dog Bruno. He is a Labrador. Which is your breed?'.
Also, Make sure you include about 10-20 non-cheesy hashtags that you stole from people you found in Step Four. Yes, you stole them. You need to. Or maybe borrow, I don't know. But the point is to include them. If they are using it, it must be good ones, right?. Simple.
Step Six: Fast forward 6 days. You have 12 very good photos right now and about 120 followers (who are just friends who followed you back, who like you and not necessarily the 12 pictures you uploaded). Now it is time to meet people who are interested in your content and not you!
For that, unfortunately, we have to borrow again, from the people you found in step 4. Go to their profiles, pick any photo you like and look at how many likes it got. Tap on it to see the list of people who liked that particular photo. Follow everyone in that list.
Yep, I said it. To make your new account discoverable and gain real engaging followers, the fastest and the safest way is to simply follow everyone in these particular lists. At a time you can only follow about 200 people. Follow them all.
End of steps
At this stage, when you follow a person, you are basically letting them know that you exist on Instagram land. You're saying "Hey, I followed you. Please check my account out. You may like it."
Each time you upload a new picture, you follow about 100 to 200 people.
So after you post that 13th picture, you go to the top profiles, enter the list of people who liked their content and simply follow them. It sounds insane but it is actually way easier than you think it is. Also did I forget to mention that you need determination?
Anyway, when you follow these accounts (who are engaging people interested in content of the niche), depending upon the effectiveness with which you executed step 2, a number of people will visit your account. And if you did a good job in Step 5, they will follow you back. But only if you did a good job ie, you should have high quality content that should tempt the visitors to tap that follow button.
Keep doing this, and when you run out of people to follow from one of the top account, go to the second account. So basically you steal their followers from them. But this is a good kind of stealing, you know.
"I'm following too much people!"
And when you reach a point where you have too much people in your following list, you can quickly reduce the number by using an app called 'Followers Assistant'. Open the app, login with your account and hit 'refresh list' after some time. Browse to the section where it shows you a list of people who you follow and but don't follow you back. You can tap on unfollow (on the left) and bulk unfollow upto 200 people at a time. This way, keep in check of your Following status.
Continue to upload new good photos and follow niche-specific people till the you have enough number of followers. The perk of these followers will be that they will engage in your posts a lot more than the usual followers.
In other words, people who made 1000 followers in the regular way will only receive around 100-150 likes on their posts (depending on the quality) but you (a person who made 1k followers using this technique) will get more than 250 likes on your posts. And maybe a few comments if the photos are that good.
Slowly you can keep on building your account to heights you never imagined it could climb. But always remember that content is king and your journey will mostly depend on the quality of the content you offer to your audience.
Yes, that is my account above. First photo was posted on November 30 and by 25th of December, that is Christmas night, I was able to hit 1k followers. You may follow me if you are interested in photography. Also, you can also check out my personal Instagram account down below. Happy instagramming!
Banner photo credits: Adarsh Jon Alex