Category: Brand Sponsorships

There is one rule to growing a following on Instagram.  Post great content.  Sure, it helps if you’re already famous but anyone can become an instagram influencer.  Here’s how I grew my following to over 100,000 in under a year, organically, without bots (Asterisk! See below!), buying follows, follow/unfollow schemes and other tricks.

First, let’s talk about what not to do.  Do not pay for followers.  They don’t hit like on your posts and they don’t ever comment.  Those types of accounts inflate your follower count, but in my experience, real brands care way more about engagement numbers.  With the constant algorithm changes, what constitutes ‘good’ engagement is always in flux.  Currently brands are expecting between 1% and 2% for accounts over 75,000 followers.  Smaller accounts can easily attain much higher engagement rates.  At 10,000 followers you should be in the neighborhood of 15%.

Don’t try the old follow/unfollow technique either.  If you don’t know what that is, it’s pretty simple.  Most people will follow you back if you follow them.  So you follow a bunch of people every day, then the next day, you unfollow all of those who didn’t follow you back, and then follow a new group of people. The next day, unfollow all of those that didn’t follow back, and repeat.  You CAN grow that way. But typically, those users aren’t engaged, they don’t really care about what you post, they just followed you back to be polite.  Engagement is KING. Engagement is everything. Without it, you’ll never be successful.

Don’t use a million hashtags. Don’t use hashtags that aren’t relavant to what you’re posting.  For a while I was posting a photo that may have been taken months before, and the caption was just something completely unrelated that was going on in my life at the moment.  Making up captions is surprisingly hard.  Making up hashtags to go with them is also surprisingly hard.  Do the work.

Use a few hashtags, at least 4 or 5. Instagram allows up to 30, but don’t fall into that trap.  Mostly because if you use 30 hashtags per post, you’ll quickly run out because repeating hashtags is bad.  Don’t use the same hashtags more than once every few weeks at most, maybe even once every 60 days.  Basically, if it says “recent” next to the tag when you’re selecting it from the list, don’t use it.  If you are an instagram model, and your niche is posting sexy photos, be very careful about using hashtags.  Many hashtags get burned by the ‘community’ reporting posts for being appropriate.  If the hashtag “booty” is used on too many posts that get reported, the entire hashtag gets blacklisted.  Once that happens, adding it to your posts does more harm than good.

Engagement is king.  That goes for you, too. Engage with people in your niche.  If you’re a model, find other models and comment on their stuff. If they comment back, follow them and keep commenting.  People see your comments on their posts, they see that person interacting with you, and they’re more likely to come check out your page as well.  This is the single most important piece of advice I can give.

Share-for Shares are a double-edged sword.  This is something I learned the hard way.  When you hit a couple thousand followers, random pages will find you and message you about shoutouts.  You send them a photo, they post it on their feed or story and tag you in it.  Their followers see you, and hopefully come follow you.  The problem is, if you look at the engagement rates of many of those pages, you’ll see that they are absolutely abysmal.  Some of those pages have 300,000 or 500,000 or even a million followers, and the photos they post have 150 likes and 3 comments.  You might gain 1500 followers from a huge page shouting you out.  It’s REALLY tempting to do.  I did it a lot before I knew any better.  I gained 20 or 30,000 followers that way, and in the end I had to go through my follower list by hand and manually block 30,000 accounts, one at the time.  They were all bots.  At one point, over 50% of my followers were bot accounts.  I’d grown to over 100,000 followers, but brands wanted nothing to do with me because my engagement was so low.

Shout outs are different than Share-For-Shares, in that they are for people you know.  Those shoutout pages are pages run by a person, but all the content they post is from other people. Shoutouts are for pages run and dedicated to a single person.  Shoutouts are fantastic, in small doses.  Don’t fill your story with a bunch of them, people will just get in the habit of skipping your story.

Once I figured out the problem with inactive followers, I spent 5 months showing ZERO growth.  Every time I would gain 100 followers, I would block 100 bots.  At times it was incredibly frustrating.  I’m STILL paying the price for it.  I wish I could go back and do it over– almost.  I have at times, been sorely tempted to start over with a new account and do it right, with all that i’ve learned.

The Dreaded Shadowban.  Avoid this at all costs.  When you violate the rules of instagram, they can outright delete your account.  That’s kind of the ultimate punishment.  But we’ve all had photos get reported and removed.  You get a couple of freebies. But after having 3 or 4 photos removed for violating the community standards, Instagram starts to quitely penalize you.

In all my research, I’ve never seen Instagram actually say that a shadowban is a real thing.  I can tell you from my own experience, it absolutely is.  There is no marker that says you’re shadowbanned.  One way to tell is to use a hashtag, then have an account that DOESN’T follow you check that hashtag list.  If they don’t see your photo, you’re shadowbanned.

The worst part of being shadowbanned is that unless someone is subscribed to you (they get notifications when you post) they don’t see what you post.  New follows come to screeching halt.  We all have people that unfollow us every day.  The trick to growth is that we generally have 10 or 20 unfollows, and gain 50 or 100 new followers.  So every day you’re seeing your follower count go up.

But when you’re shadowbanned and your content isn’t being seen, it isn’t showing up in any of the organic growth lists, you’re not recommended when someone follows someone who follows you, etc.  So instead of losing 20 and gaining 50, you’re just losing 20 (or 100 or sometimes 200 in my case.)

When your account is doing well, you’ve got 10,000 followers, you’re getting around 1000 likes per post, and maybe 10 or 15 comments it’s pretty nice.  Then you post a slightly more risque photo, and it gets 2000 likes and 100 comments.  It’s tempting to keep pushing the line on the community standards.  I’m guilty of it.  I’ve paid the shadowban price for it.  We all crave engagement, because as I’ve said in this post a number of times, engagement is king.  When you post a shot in a sheer white top, you get lots of engagement.  But you also risk everything doing it.

Read the community guidelines, and stay WELL within them.  Don’t push the boundaries. Don’t try to be edgy.  Building an active, engaged following takes time.  Seeing it all fall apart is soul-crushing.

I am now running in-person classes for Instagram Influencers at The Annex in Lebanon, PA.  The first one is Thursday July 26th (click here to sign up!), with online classes to follow.  If you’d like to find out more information about online classes to become an Instagram Influencer, send me an email, elle@elledelsol.com