Ok. So how do you actually grow an Instagram following?!

This is something I have experience with. I grew multiple accounts up to hundreds of thousands of followers on IG.

My last one was in the fashion niche. I sold the project when it got to 200k followers: https://www.instagram.com/thestyledogma

(Note: when I was running it engagement was way higher, now it sucks).

If you want to really grow an account there is only one thing that matters: going into the explore tab. That's where 99% of your new followers will come from.

How do you make your photos go into the explore tab? That's THE question. Nobody knows for sure, but from my experience you need essentially 2 things:

• A themed account (in my previous example I posted only photos in the men's fashion niche)
• Amazing content (your photos need to really stand out)

How can you apply this to Marketing Examples? Honestly I have no idea 😅

Check out the article @justincruz wrote, might help -
https://www.blog.curate-app.com/20-modern-instagram-growth-strategies-that-work-in-2020/

TLDR from the article:

1. Take advantage of your new account boost - your first posts are crucial because Instagram will promote your first posts for you. Since Instagram doesn't know you yet, they have no choice but to show your content to people to find out.
2. Fill out your profile page completely
3. Follow 50 of your closest competitors and similar Instagram accounts in your niche before you even make your first post.
4. Important metric - how long people spend looking at your content - you should be writing a few paragraphs instead of a sentence or two.
5. Produce "scroll stopping" content - here they show images, so it's better to look inside the article.
6. Max out your hashtag usage
7. Add your hashtags ASAP
8. Follow, like and comment on real people after every post

We've had our Instagram account up for like 14 months and have 6,500 followers now. I think the nature of my company is different than your's though. Our growth has been very local.

Is Instagram the right place for marketing examples? If it is, does it need a different kind of branding. Instagram seems more social and fun than LinkedIn or even Twitter. The example you shared has a more "fun" vibe (lots of excited faces) which is what most people want out of Instagram I think.

Follow me and I'll follow you, I know you really want to see my family pics :)

From what I understand:

• post regularly
• use hashtags
• use stories
• comment on other people's things
• be your normal awesome self :)

And perhaps some useful tidbits to pick up here - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/hi-im-jessica-chan-and-i-m-a-self-taught-web-developer-and-founder-of-coder-coder-ama-b779fb7c9d

Not huge on instagram but grew organically from 100 to nearly 1000 within 2 months. Not that many for sure but I am within the trailrunning niche. I didn't anticipated that much growth because the niche isn't that big.

I mainly grew from:

Communicating with the community
IG really does take this into account. You do not only have to post but you also have to like other posts comment on them. If you are not spamming accounts with emoticons or the default phrases but giving good insights or adding to the post with value you will get followers from that.

Quality content
Yep. People need to get value out of it. Be it the quality of the pictures. A thoughtful description. They need to get something.

Be you (does depend on the type of content)
If you want to bring in your personality then use it to your advantage. Don't try to be someone you are not. Tell your audience about things that didn't work well. What excites you. Why you are doing this.
You get the point. This adds value and makes you more relatable. Also having 100 highly engaged users is more important than 1000 that do nothing.

Be active often
What I mean by this isn't that you necessarily need to post every day but bring some kind of content daily (at least in the beginning). If you have no post lined up for today make a short story what you are up to. Use relevant hashtags and this will also drive traffic.
Also be as active as you can around the time you post new content. I normally post a picture and then go over to my feed and scroll through it. Commenting, liking etc. Also a quick search for you main hashtags and looking at the new posts is valuable. These people are active currently because they posted something and will look at your feed if you added some value to their post.

Tell a story
This is the most important for me. I will not think of something that did not happen but just telling people why I did something or what happened on that day does create so much more engagement. A post with just: "Look at these great tips" will not get to people that want to engage in a more meaningful way. A short story why you came up with the tips and why they are important is way more engaging.

Call to action
I am bad at this and nearly never do this but others have great success with it. At the end of the post ask your audience for some kind of input. If they engage with your post by commenting etc. instagram will rate it higher and it could show up on the feature page of some of the hashtags you used. This will get you better visibility which basically snowballs into more likes, comments etc.

Hashtags
Use Hashtags from your niche but use hashtags from a wide range of usage. Example: #sport has huge amount of posts. #mountainrunning has somewhat of an audience. And then go down to something that maybe has 1-5k posts. There are sites to look this up or search for related hashtags. This will take some time to figure out but you have to do this only once when you serve a specific audience.
By doing this the probability to getting featured is higher. If you post gets a good amount of engagement it will be featured in the low ranging hashtags. Which will get more exposure then nothing. This will if the post is good get you into the middle range and so on.

I think that is all I can say to this topic right now :D Hope it helps!

I found this video a while back, from The Futur.
Using solely the carousel feature!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89bF5Dzh_F4

I started Space Bandits as an Instagram page in July 2018 and it grew to over 40k followers in about 1 year.

My niche was/is space exploration, specifically showing people how humanity could settle our solar system within the next few decades. It turns out there’s a fairly large audience of space enthusiasts on Instagram!

The first few months it grew slowly to around 2k and in Nov/Dec 2018 I wasn’t active at all. In Jan 2019 I started posting again (daily) and also partnered with a bigger space account to get in front of more of my audience (growing by 1k in that month). I decided to keep doing things by myself and then several months later (by mid-2019) had grown it to 42k where it has been up until now (I’ve been focused on other projects).

Here’s what I learned:

• make sure to consistently post daily or multiple times a day. Or, at the least, post a few times a week but keep it consistent. There’s nothing worse than missing a day and seeing your engagement plummet the next time you post.
• people are used to seeing the same thing on Instagram so you have to try to be unique to get their attention. I did that by finding images that no one else has used (a quick browse through the hashtags will make it obvious) or combining images (use Layout).
• images with text definitely did better than images without. 7 of my top 10 posts have text in them. Here’s an example
• comments (good or bad) will boost your engagement. In a lot of my posts I ask a question at the top of the caption (example), so it shows up before the “more” bit. This gets people responding and sometimes a bit of controversy helps (ie Elon Musk v Jeff Bezos).
• the other thing I did was include detailed captions which were much longer than you’d normally expect on Instagram. I can’t say for sure if that helped boost engagement but it definitely left an impression on followers who would continue to comment and discuss a long time after the post was out.
• sometimes you just have to get a little creative in order to give people more value that also makes your post more interesting. For example, I had seen that image of a cool looking astronaut suit concept posted many times. By adding captions, it educated people about what a suit needs as well as got them imagining about the possibilities (resulting in lots of comments).

I’m sure there’s more specific stuff I could mention but I think this advice could be applied to any niche. I would keep experimenting and see what works best for Marketing Examples. There are a lot of marketing instagurus out there so I think your detailed image + text breakdowns in a carousel could do well.

Let me know if you have any questions or just shoot me an email :)

My personal account (about stoner rock photography) got nowhere and I decided to just not care anymore and just post as I see fit. I am always wondering where people get quality content for 2 posts a day. Reposting other people's photos I find appalling. But maybe it also depends on the niche.

I tried all the suggested methods for quite a while. Also with other accounts. Following the usual "How to grow on IG posts" did not really make much of a difference for me. I think Explore is where it's at. And nobody really seems to know how to get there.

I'd check out these IG's below. I think something similar to their work will be a good fit for you.

@janlosert
@yurii.flow
@ransegall
@thefuturishere

Exploit hashtags ruthlessly.

If you see big accounts on Instagram, you'll see a caption like this:

"All you have to do is believe in yourself.
.
.
.
.
.
#hotgirls #sologirl #womensfashion #whitegirl #digitalnomad #vanlife #tbt"

People who follow hashtags like me will see your content, and some of us will follow you, not to ention that you'll show up in the Explore tabs of people who're interested in your hashtags.

What some others have said, I have a friend who has grown her following to 10k+ followers. It's because she posts about who she is and her photos from her interior design clients. People follow you for you and are interested in the process. She is just now transitioning to be a full-time designer and she said her Instagram has been the number one driver of that to allow her to quit her dayjob.

Instagram is photo-centric so perhaps your comparison images may do well on there as well as personal or relatable stories of your process.

An actionable tip I heard in a workshop: what are the 6 things your known for? Pick six categories. It could be coffee, design, whiskies, whatever defines who you are. Those are now your 6 things you post about. Look at how most influencers operate and you'll see that pattern. Each time you post, you go through the categories and repeat. If your number one is Coffee then every 6th post is about coffee. That's one way to start!