How I get to 100k followers with no automation

Instagram Marketing
#1

Hey guys! There is so much value being given on this site and I have learnt so much in such a short amount of time. I have limited knowledge in automation, but I do have knowledge in manual growing. This may not be useful to advanced people but here is how I did it. My account was a comic fanpage that had self help tips. The self help side definitely hindered the pages growth, but the comic side ended up overpowering it and made it impossible to sell my ebooks etc. Now, it just a comic repost account with occasional memes. These tips will help people looking at building a repost account, but personal accounts are hard because explorer page is hard to hit. This is why I am learning the ways of automation.

My Journey
0-10k
This stage is the toughest, hashtags don’t work and shoutouts barely do anything.
I started off doing follow/ unfollow manually until I hit 1000 followers, I then started to waste a lot of money on shoutouts. I mean a lot!

It wasn’t till one of the guys that I did shoutouts with gave me some advice. He told me that shoutouts will not grow your page fast. Powerlikes will. He had three big comic pages and offered to like all my posts for a monthly price. he also helped me with hashtags.

This sent pretty much every post to the explorer page, where I gained lots of followers. sometimes a thousand a day. I hit 10k pretty fast. (You will probably not grow as fast nowadays as the alogorithim isnt as nice).

10-50K
I then decided that I wanted to try grow my account without the help of that guy, also It was very expensive as i wasn’t working a lot over the holiday period. So, I went at it alone and my page still grew. It didnt grow as fast, but it still was growing a few hundred followers a day, sometimes more.

The only issue was that not all of my posts went to explorer, I had to find really high quality pictures and get the hashtags perfectly. It was a lot more strategic doing it alone.

50-100k
This was when I started doing lots of shout for shouts and joined a comic engagement group. I noticed another surge in growth and this took me all the way too 100k and then I made a mistake…

I wanted to keep the page growing fast, so I found out what hashtags worked the best and started posting 3-4x a day. It got to the point where i could get 100k likes on a few posts, even chris brown liked a post.

But then when I hit 100k, my engagement rate went from 15% to 4%. For some reason a lot of accounts suffer a drop in ER at 100k. Sucks, But ohwell. Now my account can grow from 200-500 a week just from one post a day.

This is how I did it. I probably left out a few things so if you have questions, ask away.
Sorry if my grammar is bad, been working flat out all day and just thought id write something out of the blue

23 Likes
#2

congratulation buddy
Do you post only original content?

1 Like
#3

Not on my 115k acount. Only repost artwork. i used to make memes and my own self help pics.

On the new account i’m working on its original but i am trying mother/slave on it

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#4

I have few repost account and I feel it’s difficult to grow after 10/20K
Not sure if the algo can detect if the photo was already repost many times and kind of block your reach.

I’m testing Story ad, looks like is going well

1 Like
#5

I still repost stuff and get pretty good hits. Its not the same as it used to be but I can still grow upto 500 followers on some posts. Some posts don’t do well, but its usually because of hashtags.

One thing I do, Is when I post I wait about 10 minutes and check the likes. If they arnt high I’ll delete the post and try another. Usually in the first 10 minutes you will know if its viral.

1 Like
#6

How are your hashtags?
Whats your engagement rate like on your page?

#7

My ER 3/4%. something not crazy
My experience with hashtags: I need to get around 600 post engagement then hashtags will start to be visible. IG will test first the quality of your post to your follower then decided if it will distribute more “external” reach by hasgtags.
I noticed also that the 1st hour is not as much as important like before, I Have some post who hits Top of Hashtag after few days.
You can also check that some post on Top medium hashtag (1-5 millions) are up to 2 weeks old (maybe more)

1 Like
#8

Do you ladder the hashtags? I stack easy hashtags with higher ones and they ladder up.

All my posts that do well usually hit the lower hashtags fast and get high engagement from my own followers. Within the first hour it should be over 1000 likes (on my account). If anytime its low, it usually won’t hit big numbers. It may hit hashtags, but not big ones that get lots of followers.

Are you reposting viral pics?

#9

For my posts the hashtags help alittle but the explorer page does the most. Heres one of my best insights from a few months back

Screenshot_20200608-220812_Instagram
Screenshot_20200608-220812_Instagram1080×2280 195 KB

All the growth came from explorer.
Do you have big accounts in your niche that like your posts?

2 Likes
#10

Thanks for sharing, great job! Congrats on your success :smiley:

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#11

@heroeslair great job :+1:t3: how long did it take to get to 100k and how many hashtags do you use now?

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#12

Probably took just over a year. It would of been faster if it was solely a repost account. I would lose followers after each self help post I did. Hence I ended up stopping and sticking to repost.

Now a days I mix it up and just add what ever I can think of that suits the pic and combine it with tags I know I would hit. Like I know I could hit #thorragnorok if it was a thor pic. Then I would add numbers to the movie eg. Thor1, thor2, thor3 etc. Then I will add higher ranked ones and hope for the best. Once I ranked 1st on #marvel because I got so many other hashtags building it up.

Another tactic is finding things you can attach to it. So, since your in the fitness niche you can add tip, tips, life to lots of things and it lowers the hashtag rank.
Eg fittip, fittips, fatlosstip, ketotip, fitlife, fatlosslife

You will find that just taking the ‘s’ away or rearranging words will help you hit those lower hashtags also.

Usually I keep to 15-25 random hashtags on my comic one. Ones that suit the picture that start from easy to hit and goes up to high ranked ones.

My fitness one only has 2000 followers so I can only work with certain hashtags and most of the time I don’t hit them. Tbh I think hashtags dont work well for small personal accounts. Well at least mine lol

*The reason I use random ones is because I got shadow banned from hashtags for months one time because I used the same ones over and over.

4 Likes
#13

Great post! :blush: :blush:

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#14

great post and nice tips to avoid shadowban, thanks for sharing!

1 Like
#15

Thanks man! Appreciated

I am a firm believer that IG does shadowban. When I was abusing the same hashtags I got a 2 week long post block and then my engagement rate was lowered for months due to hashtag/ explorer ban. I tested it on very low hashtags and my posts wasnt to be seen.

I feel as though my fitness page is shadow banned atm or at least the health of the account is lowered. I was easily hitting 15% engagement rate and getting lots of likes and hashtags. Then i tried ninjagram on it (with no proxy, didn’t know). I got a few temorary blocks and then all of a sudden my engagment swent downhill. it’s still like half of what it used to be. This is how I ended up googling tips which lead me to the automation journey.

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#16

Make sure if you are intending on using automation that you know the limits for all the actions. or it will lead to blocks and bans fairly quick.

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#17

Yeah! Been doing it for a few weeks using slaves not ny actual accounts. Have had lots of trial and error so far

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#18

ive only just come back to using the tool, and haven’t even started any accounts back up until i get all the data on limits. however i know that i rarely had problems before because i always made it look like real human interaction and sat just under limits.

1 Like
#19

You couldn’t post at all for 2 weeks?

#20

Yeah it would get deleted the second I posted. Was all manually, nothing automated. Only thing I was doing was posting regular with the same/ simular hashtags and growing superfast. Then boom.