As you probably already know, one of the easiest and most powerful ways to grow your Instagram account is to simply follow accounts that have a tried and proven interest in your niche. These are people who leave comments or any kind of indication in big accounts in your niche.
When they engage at that level, they show the world that they are truly interested and eager about your niche. You only need to identify these accounts and interact with their content and ultimately, follow them.
When they check out your Instagram feed and your Instagram account and they like what they see, not only would they engage with your content but a lot of them would actually follow you back. That’s how the game works and a lot of people have made a lot of money playing the game this way. It’s pretty straightforward.
All it takes is targeting. This means that you have to be very deliberate in terms of the accounts you follow. Some accounts are just not worth following. Other accounts are just too ambiguous that it doesn’t make sense to follow them.
As long as you pick the right accounts to follow and you follow enough accounts, there’s a good chance that you can grow your organic following. But here’s the problem. You can only grow by following up to a certain point.
Eventually, doing things that way yields a negative return on effort. You need to level up. You need to then switch to viral content marketing. I know that’s kind of a mouthful.
In fact, a lot of people think that it’s mysterious. Well, it isn’t. Seriously, there’s really no mystery behind it.
I know you have probably have come across all sorts of marketers making a big deal that they post a viral content and they’re making all sorts of money from Instagram. Don’t believe the hype. What they’re really doing is actually pretty straightforward. If they can do it, you can do it too. Here’s how you do it.
First, make sure that your account already has 10,000 followers. This really is the rule of thumb when it comes to stopping the following and unfollowing method to grow your account. You need to stop at that point.
The next step is to find interaction groups on Instagram. It’s just a fancy way of saying hashtags because once you have 10,000 people following you, you would have enough of a critical mass for people to share and engage with your content.
The key here is to publish the right kind of content. But do you know what your biggest challenge is? How do you post a viral piece of content? Because from the looks of it, a lot of these photos and videos look very similar. In fact, in many cases, you can’t tell them apart. Well, here’s the secret.
Look at the accounts of your competitors. Pay attention to their photos that get a lot of engagement. Do you see a similarity? Can you spot a pattern? Come up with content that is very similar and then experiment with the hashtags they are using.
If you keep this up for a long enough period of time, you will be able to reverse engineer their success. The bad news is this doesn’t happen overnight. Also, there is one big problem that you need to overcome.
You need to make sure that your followers are encouraged to share or viralize your content. How will you be able to make that happen? It’s very simple. Make sure your content has social proof.
If you’re sharing videos, make sure you buy Instagram video views ahead of time so people are more likely to share your stuff. The same goes for buying Instagram likes for your photos.
Why should you invest in social proof? Well, let’s put it this way. The next time you find yourself at a strange Instagram account looking at different pieces of content, you probably are not all that pumped up about engaging with the content. Sure, it may look good. The videos might be awesome. But if they don’t have enough likes, comments, or any other evidence of engagement, you might think that there’s something wrong with this content. You might even think that it sucks.
See how this works? This is a natural reaction and to overcome that initial default reaction, you need to get social proof.
