So there’s this guy I’m a huge fan, who is traveling the world and has around 1M followers on his Instagram account. Followers were all acquired from TV, newspaper, and magazine coverage (so very organic audience he’s paying for his trip with money made on Instagram). The guy came to my hometown, and I offered to take him to lunch (invite sent from my food niche acct).
Anyways, we went. He made a few stories posts of me explaining about the food, and as a result, I got 5K followers before lunch was over. Lunch only cost me around 80 dollars, so it was a pretty good deal. Note that followers are still pouring in.
Moral of the story, I agree with some automation tactics, but I use it only for my “non-main accts.” However, after this crazy occurrence, I’m going to start exploring the influencer route. Here’s what I’ll be doing: (1) looking for people with at least 500K followers (that I want to sell to his/her audience) coming to my hometown. (2) Offering them lunch/dinner in a restaurant of my food niche. Finally, (3) growing the accts that way.
Here are some of the tools I’ll be using to find and verify the legitimacy of influencers:
The best approach, which is what worked for me, is working with someone you already follow, admire one’s work. But you can always search on Instagram manually for influencers you admire the work. By having a more personal approach, I hope you can escape from CPC type conversations. That worked for me, which is why I’m sharing here.
Hope this gives some ideas, would love to hear people’s critiques and other ideas when it comes to this.
That’s fantastic outcome! I doubt you’ll get to take many that level influencers out for lunch or dinner without paying them a lot.
Here is a real problem! Not sure how much you know about creator accounts and how they work. Many of your listed tools will be useless. IG doesn’t provide API for creator accounts so 3 of your tools are down the drain. Unless they are still on business accounts which I really doubt many still are.
Being verified really doesn’t mean they have good audience. It only means that you are that person you claim to be. I have worked with many verified influencers that use engagement pods and have fake followers.
Just wondering what are you doing with the scraped list of followers?
Hahah just don’t get in trouble with the gf. No doubt it might be better for you to think of another strategy, in case of a gf that doesn’t let u take people for lunch for business
That’s up to you to how you want or are capable to sell it. I’m giving you what worked for me, if you want to try and do it however you want, feel free.
Creator accounts also have I insights and even better then business however you cannot get all information for creator accounts as yet through any of the third party softwares.
Shoutouts are the best way to grow but they are expensive, you got lucky with that guy. But at least you figured out and such followers are 10 times better than followers you gain from automation.
I think there are many factors here. One is like you said, use people coming to your town to take them to a restaurant. Another is if you own a restaurant you can invite people from your town to eat. And so on and so forth. This is just me sharing what happened with me, and then you can go ahead and think of ideas that might work for you based on your environment. Fortunately, and unfortunately there’s not a single way to do things when it comes to Instagram, or just about anything in life. So get creative, and good luck.
In this particular case I was actually following on instagram, so since I was watching the stories I knew ahead of time. Worked naturally though. Hope to make these “natural” occurrences happen again haha. Will def keep posted if something like this happens again. The main point is that even though we are doing online marketing and all, the human aspect of it is still present, and although automation is important, a help from a big acct will def be big. Especially if it comes naturally.
