insta tips
I get asked this a lot so I decided to do a writeup about how I grew my instagram account, so here you go, Joe!
When you first start your account or decide you want to grow you have to ask yourself, “what kind of content could I make every day for this?”. There’s going to be content that requires no effort to make, and some that need hours to produce, and it all comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish. My art page, for example, had no direction for a while. I started out by curating artists that gave me inspiration, and eventually decided to make my own cover art for my music, eventually changed to selling prints, and currently it’s to showcase my music through my art. So figure out your goal: is it more sales? setup your instagram shop through facebook, more exposure? post reels daily. Now for the building part.
HASHTAGS
I personally don’t use hashtags. If you use them incorrectly it will shadowban you and insta says it isn’t real but it is and it’s stupid. The other reason is it blows your reach off the bat. Lets say I want to promote my new track and I use the hashtag #newmusic. This tag has 400,000,000 posts which is astounding, so every second yours will get burried under a #newmusic post and the few views it will get will be from the thousands of music spam bots that will waste your precious impressions. Let’s say I instead use #beatsforthestreets which has less than 1 million posts, i will get wierdo’s who search for this tag and those are who my music is made for. So do your research and save these tags that have around 1 mil or less posts. Don’t use every one of them for every post, and limit it to about 5 hashtags per post. “Why don’t you use them then bub?” well I want my impressions to fall on my following. If my follower shares my post to their audience it will likely bring me more followers than a few strangers from a hashtag.
POSTING FREQUENCY
The sweet spot I found for posting is at about 2 posts a week with a reel in the middle. This will be different if you can produce more video content; I don’t, but the general concensus I’m seeing from people I follow that do is about 1 reel every other day. Think of your reach as a fire. If you let your fire die it will take a lot of work to get it back, too much fuel and it will burn out faster, but if you feed it every so often it will keep it burning just right.
STORIES
Stories are imperitive kindle to keep this fire at the right level. and will hold your momentum from your last post to your next. If I know I’m going to have a link in my story I will post one with no link first. Instagram does not like it when you try to take people off their site, which is why links harm your reach. I decided to only show my face once a week or so to boost my reach, wait a few hours, then share another story with the link. The better way to do it is to have the link in your bio and suggest they visit that from your story; this will also trick the algorythm because people who travel to your profile from the stories boosts your reach. Polls and other interactive stickers instagram provies are great ways to boost story interaction. I posted this stupid story asking people to pick from “this or that” in a poll and after keeping track of the results in my stories all day it ended up with 1,200 story views which shattered my next best. Try not to be spammy on your stories, people will mute them forever and never unmute which is aboslutely crushing. 1-4 stories a day is great, just space it out every couple hours.
CONTENT
Now for the fun part. Your content you post should give you joy making and not feel so much like a job, otherwise you’re going to resent instagram and quit. Make it unique but also emulate people’s success that have already done what you’re doing. Find your niche, explore that community and the most important advice i can give you is
support other peoples work.
I promise you, if you try to do this alone it will take twice as long with twice the work. Be real with others and they will return the favor. My account took off because I started by currating others’ art and genuinly loved it. Once I started making my own they returned the support and it expidited the whole process. They will inspire you, share your work and their audience.
Here’s the ranking of content interaction: Saves>Shares>Comments>Likes. Saves and shares are recieved by producing high quality content, so they’re the most valuable. If you make something relatable they will be shared and saved in silence and boost your post by a lot. Comments are big to me because if you support others’ work with comments they will likely return the favor. Likes are at the bottom by a lot but still matter because you will look cool with more likes, or just turn them off nobody actually cares.
That’s pretty much it, stick to your plan and track your growth. If it feels like you’re not getting anywhere just look at where you started and you’ll see how far you’ve come. If you have any questions email me and I’ll answer :) auracane@outlook.com