Passed 3,000 Instagram Followers
by Courtland AllenWe've been sharing deeply personal indie hacker stories on our Instagram account all year, and growth has been pretty steady.
(You can check out a chart here.)
We bootstrapped the first 1,000 followers from the IH mailing list. We've continued to send out new posts in our mailing list every week, and we've also experimented hashtags, with different story types and lengths, with IG's "stories" feature, and a few other things.
But nothing has moved the needle like influencer marketing. We've done two or three stories with IG influencers who also happen to run businesses, and their shares have given us a noticeable bump in follower accounts every time.
Still a lot to learn here, as IG doesn't seem quite as easy to grow as Twitter etc, in part because there aren't as many indie hackers there, and in part because there aren't any native retweet/mass sharing features.
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Why did you choose to build an Instagram presence rather than double down on Twitter or some other channel?
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A couple of years ago I grew an IG account in the fashion niche from 0 to 200k followers within 1 year.
The key to hyper growth was (and still is!) getting into the explore page. When my photos were featured there, I was able to get up 1000 new followers per day!
How do you get into the explore page?
Every user’s explore page is different. The algorithm learns about your behavior and try to show photos you’ll like.
If you follow and engage with a lot of fashion accounts, in the explore page you’ll likely see a lot of fashion photos.
So one of the keys to boost your growth is to have a themed profile.
This is a good example of an Instagram profile in the coding niche that is doing it right:
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Interesting insight, thanks! :)
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IG is not just hard to grow but also to me; it's useless. Even from the beginning of our pandemic, it was so evident that Instagram would end after the growth of TikTok. Everything Instagram was good for now is available and even better on TikTok. I need to say that I had to win when I moved on from Instagram, I had massive help from https://famoid.com/buy-tiktok-followers/, and after less than a month, I had more followers on this new platform. I even started gaining money for it, which was just something that made me happy, so don't be afraid and get rid of that old and forgotten app.
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Really interesting use of the platform.
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Good stuff... when I see the photos in my feed they often remind me of HONY photos and l stop scrolling to read the caption.
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That is great news, interesting to note the spike in growth rate in mid-May from 4% to 11% (~ 3x) !!
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I've noticed the huge push for Instagram… why the interest in sending people from this site to that platform, specifically?
Do you feel it's a better platform for an entrepreneur to be on than YouTube, blogs, podcasts, Kindle, etc?
I've largely avoided Instagram due to the research I've read about its psychological effects, but I'm interested in hearing the bull case. Why should I give Instagram my time?
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