How I Grew Our Instagram Following by 17k in 6 months

About a year ago, my team and I launched an Instagram page for our company account. At the time, I was thrilled to start creating content and spreading the word of our endeavors to the community. I hired a trained social media intern to help us grow our account and start testing the waters. After three months of trying just about every strategy we could think of, we grew the account (drum roll please) to 600 followers!

For some people, 600 followers might sound like a decent number but the truth is we blew money on giveaways, ads, and sponsorships and got nowhere the results we wanted. It sucked the energy so much out of my team and I that we decided to stop posting content altogether.

A few months passed and our following plummeted to less than 400 followers since we stopped posting content altogether. At this point in time, I had some downtime and decided to brainstorm content for our page. In order to brainstorm the content, I needed to establish a direction. Here’s where things got interesting.

As I was researching content, I came across different community pages that featured computer graphic (CG) artwork and renderings. Digital arts have always had a role in the formation of 4am’s brand, so intuitively I knew this type of content would reflect our ethos and identity. Shortly thereafter, my team and I began conceptualizing ways to distinguish our page while implementing this stimulating, hi-tech aesthetic. This served as the foundation for our content strategy, which allowed us to best position our page to stand out.

Once we established a direction for our content, growing our account became easy. We had newfound clarity on what audience to target and what to post. From there on out, I made it a point to document all our successes and failures in building a community. In this guide, I outline the strategies I used that got me the most results. For the sake of concision, I’ve broken these down into five simple tips. In following these tips, I hope you can dramatically increase your Instagram following and start building a strong community for your brand.

Tip #1: Find the Right Hashtags

I started perusing the pages I mentioned before to get an understanding of where they sourced their content, in addition to which hashtags they used. One thing I’ve learned about Instagram’s algorithm is that hashtags are the holy grail for funneling your audience organically. The best part is you don’t have to spend any money to sponsor your posts if you select the right hashtags.

By picking the right hashtags, we’ve been able to generate millions of views in our videos, which has dramatically boosted our following. We’ve sometimes gotten over a 1,000 followers on just a single post.

This is the golden age for organic reach on Instagram. It is a time similar to Facebook’s peak in 2010-2012, when your posts were more likely to be seen. Back then, Facebook realized that they were making it too easy for publishers to reach users, and decided to change their algorithm. At present, Facebook is still a powerful platform. Unless you invest in their ad system, however, your chances of getting noticed are slim. It’s important to take advantage of Instagram’s algorithm now before it follows Facebook’s trajectory.

When selecting hashtags for your posts, look at posts from your competitors’ pages and see which ones they’re using. One trick I use while researching hashtags is letting Instagram recommend the hashtags. For example, if you search “#instaart” on Instagram, it’ll show you related hashtags in the category including “#artgram”, “#artcollective”, “#drawdaily”, etc. I like to include these hashtags in my posts since they have a higher chance of trending. It’s much easier to trend in a hashtag like “#drawdaily” that has 450K posts than in “#instaart” that has 49M posts.

It’s important to also attribute the hashtag to the content you’re posting. You shouldn’t use “#fridayvibes” if you’re posting your content on Monday. If your hashtags don’t match the content your posting, it most likely won’t trend.

Tip #2: Experiment

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to experiment with the type of content you post. I’ve worked with companies that won’t post for weeks because they’re scared of pushing content out and losing followers. I’ve posted content that caused us to lose followers but it taught me the type of content to avoid. On the other hand, it also allowed me to uncover which content resonated the most with our audience.

Without experimentation, there’s no way to uncover insights to grow your account. You have to understand your audience and how they engage with your posts. If you have a business page on Instagram (which I highly encourage you to do), you get access to detailed insights including the number of likes, comments, DMs, bookmarks, profile visits, reach, and more. It also shows how many followers you gain from a given post and how those followers discovered your post. 

Another tool I like to use for insights is HypeAuditor. It allows you to track engagement on your page and view demographic data on your followers including age, gender, location, and interests. Using this data, you can get a better understanding of your audience for planning giveaways or influencer campaigns.

Try to also experiment with posting times to get the most engagement for your posts. If your audience is distributed in different timezones and regions like ours, try to find a sweet spot to post content. For example, if you publish a post at 8pm ET and have followers in Europe, they probably won’t see it since they’ll be asleep. Post at different times throughout the week and after a month or two, look through the posts and see which posts got the highest engagement. Hopefully, you spot a trend with your audience so you can forecast the best times to publish your posts. 

Believe it or not, engagement plays a crucial role in getting your posts to trend. Within the first hour of posting your content, Instagram will determine how many people will see it and at what rate. I’ve found the main factors affecting this are the number of comments you get on the post, the quality of those comments, and the number of times it was DM’d. Instagram’s algorithm also tracks engagement over time. It gradually starts displaying your content to more and more people to test its reception. If the engagement is consistent, it’ll keep expanding the reach of your post. We’ve had posts get over 100K views in a single day and others that got only a couple thousand in the first day but skyrocketed to 250K+ views over a week.

Tip #3: Engage, engage, engage.

Although content is vital to garnering an audience, I would argue engagement is just as important. When your account is first starting off, engagement is a great way to funnel viewership to your page without spending a dime.

Engage with people that follow pages or communities similar to yours. This audience will probably be drawn to your content and likely to follow you. I used this strategy in the first couple of weeks after I started the page and it worked wonders. However, it’s important to not repost content from rival pages to ensure your page remains distinguishable and authentic.

Another trick I like to use is Gary Vaynerchuk’s “$1.80” method. To follow this exercise, start by identifying the 10 most important/relevant hashtags to your page. Spend about 20 seconds scrolling through the top 9 posts of each hashtag. When you click on a post, identify who posted it, read their bio, and audit their activity. Now leave your “2 cents” in their post through a thoughtful comment. Do this for the top 9 posts in each hashtag you identified. Make sure to do this at least once a week to keep expanding your audience.

Tip #4: Conduct Giveaways

Before I began running giveaways, I was always skeptical of its effectiveness. My biggest fear was investing money on a giveaway campaign and gaining followers that would disappear shortly thereafter. I had spent money on giveaways before but never got the results I wanted. Then I realized the problem was I was not budgeting or planning appropriately.

Here’s a tip I can’t emphasize enough: make sure to set an objective for every giveaway! Before running any giveaway, assess what you want the end goal to be. Maybe you want to gain more followers for your page or start growing your mailing list. It’s important to set this goal from the beginning so you can budget how much you’re willing to spend and the expected outcome.

For example, we ran a giveaway contest for a 3Doodler pen. We set the goal to acquire 150 email subscribers. The cost for the pen was $75 and we forecasted $100 on ad spend. This allowed us to estimate the acquisition cost for each email, which ended up being $1.16. Thankfully, we crushed those numbers and were able to acquire 230 email subscribers. We ultimately spent $5 less than the projected ad budget, which drove down the acquisition cost to $0.74 per email. 

As another example, I reached out to a local festival called iii Points to see if they were willing to partner up on a giveaway. I knew their audience’s interests were very similar to ours so leveraging their following would allow us to potentially grow ours. A few days before the event, they replied saying they’d be willing to comp two 3-day passes (valued at $500+) for the giveaway. Shortly thereafter, my team and I scrambled to put a campaign together. We set the objective to gain more followers from Miami and as such, set the rules of the campaign for people to follow our page, iii Point’s page, and tag 3 friends in the comments section. We also set an ad budget of $250 and targeted a 10-mile radius of where the festival was taking place. In only 4 days, we were able to gain over 300 new followers. As an added benefit, iii Points copped tickets for me and my team and gave us an unforgettable weekend. Doesn’t get better than that!

Tip #5: Develop a Content Strategy

In this final section, I want to emphasize the importance of developing a good content strategy. The most important factor that will determine the success of your page is the quality of your content. You have to possess a clear understanding of how you want to position your page before you even begin to think about content. Without a proper content strategy, you can’t pick out the right hashtags, conduct effective giveaways, or most importantly find which audience to engage with. It’s vital to decide which niche or community you want to target early on and design your strategy around it.

This part is the one I see most businesses struggle with given the level of energy and time that needs to be invested. I’ve seen companies struggle so much with this step that I’ve integrated it into our core offering for our clients. We work with companies and people to hash out their content strategy to ensure they set their sight on the right audience from the get-go. Then we brainstorm creative ways to push their content and ensure they stand out.

Many of the strategies mentioned in this article are stuff we do for companies. At the core of what we do is build communities around brands. As I’ve witnessed time and time again, building a strong following is a sure way to gain leverage since you’ll always have people that will listen to you and potentially buy your product or service.

I hope this guide was insightful and that it provides some value to you and your organization. If you’d like to learn more about 4am's services and how we can work together, please message me directly or email me at [email protected].