My Instagram Experiment...
As one of the largest social media networks, with over a billion active users trying to share their lives with the world through selfies, quotes, and photos of food. So, for the past month I've been trying a small experiment on my Instagram account to try and build up some followers to share my life with...
Before I start a couple of things.
1) Most of the people who view this page have come from my Instagram account initially, so the irony of posting about getting people to see your posts is not lost on me.
2) There are lots of websites out there which give advice on how to boost your followers. I'm not going to discuss whether they work or not at all, this is simply my experience with the things I have been trying.
3) DO NOT BUY FOLLOWERS!! This is a waste of money, and the people who you pay to build up your followers will probably do something similar to what I've done as well.
Why are you doing this?
Some of you might be asking why I did this, and the honest answer is for self promotion. I am a part time actor/model, and am constantly looking for more people and projects to get involved with, so I thought I'd use one of the fastest growing social media systems to build up a following of people. My logic is that by building up a larger social media following for myself, I might open doors to certain opportunities which I didn't have before, and maybe even being able to do this full time?
Will this lead to more work? Will it just be something to boost my ego? Keep your eyes peeled on my Instagram to see...
How are you doing this?
What I did for this was fairly simple. I did three different things to try and boost my visibility to the rest of the world outside my current followers, and they are really easy to do.
Time your posts
There has been quite a bit of research into what times people use Instagram during the day, which you can find with a simple internet search, marking what they call peak times. It stands to reason that if you time your posts to one of these peak times then there is a higher chance that people will see your post, potentially leading to more people looking at the rest of your profile and following you.
As my research into this highlighted, then most people will be looking at their Instagram feeds at one of the following times;
First thing in the morning (6-9am),
When they finish work (4-6pm),
Just before they go to bed (9-11pm).
Now, while this is a useful technique for getting people in a specific timezone to see the post, as Instagram is a worldwide social media site, then people in different countries will have varying overlaps of these times, so while the suggestion is good it's potentially not the most important thing you can do.
#Hashtags
If you look at my posts, including the one you probably clicked to get here, then you'll see that I use a lot of hashtags on my posts. Instagram lets you include up to 30 of them on your post, and each hashtag you use has a page dedicated to showing posts which have those hashtags alone on the page. So the more you add the more chance there is that people will see them.
So I use lots of hashtags, particularly popular ones to get my posts circulating in as many circles as possible, so more people will see them.
You can add these hashtags to the caption of the post itself, or in the comments underneath, either way the photo ends up on the same space. I always used to add them to the caption of the photo, but have now decided to put them in the comments instead, for two reasons.
1) Some of my captions are a bit shorter, so people might be more inclined to actually read them.
2) If people see that someone has already commented on the photo, then there is more of a chance that they will as well (or so the theory goes).
Network
This is one of the simplest ways of getting followers, but one of the longest to write down here. There are two different ways I networked on Instagram, but they both boiled down to the same thing.
If you click on one of those hashtags you've added to your post, then you'll go to a page where you can see all the posts which have also used that hashtag. So one of the easiest ways of finding people who have similar interests and photos to you is to look on these pages. Once you visit these pages, you'll see there are two types of view for the hashtag, TOP and RECENT. I'd suggest having a look at both sides, as they both have their merits.
This is where my two different methods separate.
Method 1
The first was to look for people from these hashtags who have a descent social media following (between 500-10,000 followers), and look through their profile. If they seem to have similar posts and interests then I follow them. I did this for about 30 people, and when they update their profile I made sure to interact with their newer posts, liking & commenting on the photos & stories when they appear. And if you get the chance to, collaborating with them on posts, or tagging them on relevant posts can help boost your name as well.
If any of you are keeping up with my Instagram account, then you might have noticed I'm taking part in the 40x40 Challenge, which involves doing 40 press-ups in a row every days for 40 days, and I was challenged to this by commenting on one of the people I've followed on Instagram. They challenged me as a result, and I've been working through it for the past five days. After starting, and tagging them in the post as well, I gained about 10 followers within the next 30 minutes, and have managed to retain most of them as a result!
It's also good to learn from these people about what they post, and can be used to boost your own following by improving your own post technique & quality, and also might help you find more relevant hashtags to follow as well. I know I've certainly learned a lot about how to make photos which are eye-catching from looking at other people's work, and will be trying out these techniques as time goes on.
Method two
The second was to go on the hashtag pages themselves and comment on people's photos. I look for posts which catch my eye, read the caption, and leave an appropriate comment.
A tip with this method however is to interact with posts which are similar in nature to yours, don't just go for the best looking photos as the people who follow you from these posts are likely to unfollow you very quickly.
For example, I would look at one of my posts, and choose a hashtag (usually #model or #actorlife for me), I'd then look at the TOP posts and view the ones which catch my eye. if someone has asked a question in the caption of their post, answer it. If there's no question then I complement the photo, or tell them what I think of it. After I've done that for about 10-20 posts, I repeat this with the RECENT category.
Note: This technique is good for short term followers, but lots of people will unfollow you if you don't work on sharing your own content similar to those you like. This is unavoidable, but hopefully by picking your posts & working well on your own profile you can reduce this number. As time goes on, the more people you have following you, the more people will keep following you (or that's the theory anyway).
Both of these methods of networking can be time consuming, but are possibly the most effective ways I've found to get people to follow you, in both the longer and shorter term. For the purposes of this I've spent about 5 minutes in the morning and a further 5 in the evening doing this, almost every day for 3 weeks, and I saw that over the next couple of hours my followers slowly increase as people saw my comments.
So what happened?
You might be wondering what the end result of me doing all the above has been? Well, you can see it from the two photos below.
Over the course of a month, I've spent approximately 6 hours of my time on the site, doing all of the things I've talked about above, made 14 posts (one every 1-2 days), and followed nine more people. These things have increased the number of people following my account by 139 followers, and have had roughly a hundred more people liking & commenting on the various photos on my profile in the meantime.
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Is it a massive increase? no
Has it made a massive impact to my life? no
Will I keep doing it? Probably, to some degree anyway.
This whole experiment has been interesting, and I've learned quite a lot about what I could/should be doing to increase my social media presence and profile.
Hopefully, some of you will use this tip to gain more followers yourself, and feel free to let me know if you have any other tips/ideas on what more I should try.
Until next time,
Tim