How I saw a 400% increase in followers on Instagram in 2 weeks

Let me tell you the story about how I grew my photography Instagram account from 200 followers to 800 followers in UNDER 2 weeks.

For starters, no, I didn’t buy followers. I didn’t use a bunch of growth hashtags or follow hundreds of people and then unfollow them. Although this can help you get followers, I found a few growth hacks that were guaranteed to send followers flocking to my account.

I started the Instagram account in the spring of 2017. I had just created a YouTube account where I was posting, what I would call at the time, cinematic sequences. To be honest–they were just a bunch of video clips put together with no real eye for art. I digress.

I loved taking pictures of buildings. Exterior architectural photography started to become my hobby. I would travel around to cities in North Carolina, taking photos of buildings and trying to edit them in different ways to find my style. 2 years later, in January of 2019, I found a style that worked. Not only that, but I found a style that others loved: it was unique, it was bold and it was creative.

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When I saw that these posts were performing better than normal, I kicked it into high gear and started pumping them out more. I grew my account from 150 followers to 600 in just under 2 weeks with another 200 followers over the next month by following these 5 growth hacks:

Create GOOD content

This is kind of obvious, but the most important. Without good content, people who come across your account will have no reason to follow you. Like they always say, “content is king.” You need to create consistent, shareable content that will make people click and say “huh, this is cool.”

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Find a niche and stick to it

This is easier said than done. Finding your niche, something you want to stick with for a long time is very hard. I switched “niches” multiple times before settling on city architecture, specifically architecture in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. Finding a niche is important because it comes with a special perk: community. If you can find a niche, you can find hundreds, if not thousands of people, who enjoy the same content you enjoy and who will follow you if create good content. It’s a grind but finding that niche and community will help you grow your account exponentially. When I started posting photos of famous landmarks and buildings around Durham, a bunch of Durham-centered accounts started sharing my photos and a cult of Durham-loving people come flocking to my profile. Because I created good content within this Durham niche, people knew what to expect and kept coming back to me for more.

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Engage

This hack is a bit of a grind, but it is so worth it. There is no other way to create and build brand loyalty than to interact with your followers. Don’t think you are all high and mighty because you are starting to build a brand. It’s a simple formula: engage with others and they will engage with you. Take the time to formulate a simple, authentic response and your followers will come back. Guaranteed.

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TAG people

To be fully transparent: this step can be hit or miss. If you leverage this hack correctly, it can pay dividends, but if you do it incorrectly… you’ll just be wasting your time and annoying some social media manager at work. You want to tag people in every photo you post: a minimum of 3 tags. It is very easy to do, but you must tag the right people: relevant accounts who share some interest in what you post. Not only will this increase the likelihood of engagement and post resharing, but you might get placed on a content calendar and see your post getting reposted to accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. I shared the photo below and tagged @WeWork, and a few weeks later my photo was shared with 600k people and received tens of thousands of likes (before their account died…).

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Engagement circle

This last step is a scalable hack and worked for me back in 2019. I am not sure if this works as efficiently as before, with any changes to the algorithm, but it should still be somewhat beneficial. Create a small group of friends, family and supporters who will engage with your posts early. Send them your posts and always engage with them, and they will begin to become some of your biggest supporters or brand advocates. At the time, earlier engagement helped my posts more and I had people who would comment and share my posts to their stories within minutes–putting my work into more eyes than my account can by itself.

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Please note: these hacks might not work for everyone. Though they worked for me in 2019, every account is different and certain tactics might work more effectively in some niches over others. Additionally, this is not an effective strategy for growing a large corporate account, but rather a set of starter tools for small brands and social media personalities.

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My name is Matthew Rigsbee and I am a senior at the?University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?majoring in Advertising and Public Relations at the?Hussman School of Journalism and Media. In the summer of 2021, I interned with the New York Rangers Social + Digital Team as a Student Associate and had the opportunity to ideate content, brainstorm partner activations, monitor fan chatter online, and much more.