Have you tried Flex Targeting?

What’s up MPsocial family,

After the limits from this summer, I was thinking about ways to improve follow back ratio for my accounts since the volume basically halved for me. (Or more)

On Instagram most of us choose some target accounts and start following their followers, and I thought:

“Hmm, maybe if I target people who have followed 2 pages in my niche they would be more likely to follow a 3rd one too?” (Kinda like flex targeting with Facebook ads)

I couldn’t find any posts about this on the forum so I made a test using travel accounts last week. I scraped the following of some of the biggest travel pages (I kept them under 500K though since CSV’s capped at a certain point), extracted the lists to my computer and started to look for matches with Excel.

I found out that surprisingly few people followed the same accounts. For accounts with 300-500k there might be only a few hundred common followers. Either way, I collected about 10 of these accounts to build up a list of users who would follow at least 2 of them. I also tried matching with smaller pages under 100k but the amount of matching users started to negate the amount of work put in since I was doing this manually.

Afterwards, I had a list of about 3k users that I then added as my test sources. I was using my normal filters and started following with 2 accounts that usually have about a 15-20 % fbr.

After about a week I can conclude that this first test REALLY didn’t work for me. Follow back ratio from that list was only close to 3% and they don’t seem to be more engaged than any of my other followers.

Have you ever tried something like this? And possibly made it work? Or does anyone have a tool that does this automatically and has more data?

I’d like to do more tests to try this with other niches as well but so far I am quite disheartened by the results so I’m looking to see if anyone has already had some success with something similar. Maybe my targets were just really off.

P

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Hi there,

actually I have tried this, getting the idea from Facebook ad targeting too.

I used several magazine publications and cross referenced with major competitor brands in the fashion industry to find common followers.
The results were good quality followers but the number of targets much lower than expected and it’s quite a bit of extra work.
My conclusion was that good name, keyword, profile image filtering is nearly as effective and much more manageable.

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Yea, agreed. I tried this and the results are not worth the extra effort and computing resources it takes.
What I have found is that taking a profile of your followers and extrapolating that to your settings for scraping in the future helps alot.

For example scrape all your followers info, and take an average of their stats:

  • Average # of followers
  • Average # of posts
  • Average # of followings
  • etc

Then use those averages for the settings on your scraper filterings and it will help increase followback ratio as the new filtered users are very similar to users who are already following you…

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Nice idea man. How about picking like 10 travel related hashtags - scrape each hashtag for 50k people that liked any post that used said hashtag - thats 500k, now scrape for people that are in the list at least 5 times or so. Those people definitely love traveling and related accs. Maybe stupid idea idk…

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This is kinda what I’ve been doing already, although I haven’t limited posts as much. I’ve found that many people just have close to 5 posts and still are active on the platform, even if they don’t like to post themselves.

Good idea! I didn’t think about doing this with people who engage. Could be a way higher number of people since many just like posts/comment outside the pages they follow.

This be my follow up test to be honest. If this doesn’t work out either I’m dropping it for now. It takes quite a lot of time and effort without a program.

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That’s a very good idea. I’ll give this a try :slight_smile:

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Hmm, interesting idea. I hadn’t thought of using a sort of Flex Targeting in this way.

What might be more powerful it to try to look at who is engaging with say at least 2 accounts in the niche as ultimately you want engaged followers. I guess that would be even more work to sort out and put into practice?!

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Nice to see you giving this method a name :slight_smile: I tried to explore this topic in level 2 and struggled to describe it

https://mpsocial.com/t/is-there-a-way-to-see-who-are-the-most-followed-accounts-in-common-from-your-followers/83042

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I can tell you that just 2 gave me problems :smiley:
If someone were to code this to be automatic, sure. But both the amount of computing power and time needed would be considerably more when doing manually like I did.

Ah, cool! Don’t have access to level 2 yet so couldn’t find any posts about this. Still gathering those likes I think (subtle hint for you all :wink:)

I thought flex targeting would be the name if anyone ever gave it one :smiley:

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Let us know how it goes and what niche you try!

I still think this could be a good idea.

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