Instagram Growth Guide (Semi-Organic)

Instagram Marketing
#1

Hey guys, I see some of you always keep on asking how to do follow/unfollow, how to grow via engagement groups etc.

I thought I’d make a little (semi-) organic growth guide for you!

A like and reply from you if you enjoyed and found my tips useful would be much appreciated! :smiley:

So let’s start:

1. Follow/Unfollow is dead

What I have noticed is that everytime you do something that hurts the Instagram Community, your engagement(reach in general) get’s cut down to a minimum. My engagement after a big following/unfollowing spree went down tremendously and I also noticed that for accounts of friends.

YOU CAN STILL GROW YOUR ACCOUNT WITH F/U but you have to be willing to sacrifice your engagement for a very long time after you stop or just continue on doing it the whole time.

Note that your chances to receive a ban are higher if you continue on F/U.

2. Engagement Groups

One thing I noticed is that everytime I took my engagement group out of IG, my reach got cut down.

IG allows engagement groups as long as you use them responsible and keep them on the app!

Try posting entertaining content and use engagement groups to give them a little boost, here’s a little trick for the people that think EG are the sh*t:

Try posting a pic without sending it to your Telegram group and see how many likes and comments it receives…a lot of your 50-150K follower accounts would end up with 200 likes per pic and maybe 1000 views on a video.

Overly used EG destroy your engagement just as much as F/U.

3. Post funny/informative/entertaining content

Now I know a lot of you want to go the easy route to make sales and I have absolutely no problem with that. If you want to build a brand on the other hand IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that you think of ways to make something different than your competition.

Brand Builders: Always try to provide your fanbase with VALUE.

“The customer is king!”

Put your ego aside and think of ways to outsmart similar accounts…be patient and consistent.

4. Post 3-4 times a day

More posts, more reach, more likes, more followers. The circle closes.

Add value to your content and you’ll get exponential growth…You will also have a lot more user data by the end of the year if you post more often.

Think of your IG like a TV Show or a schedule.

If you’re on the informative side of IG this is very important, your followers will get that you post, let’s say for example, at 12 and 5 and they will either check back that time and/or turn on post notifications,

5. Build connections, real connections

Now for the most part building connections is “Give, Give, Give…”

Just like in life, friend/relationships are more about giving than taking…a cool thing happens when you give without expectation…and that is that you’ll perhaps have an ask later on!

So that means: Give s/o, spread love via comments, share contests, participate in them! You will find a few valuable people that later on share your stuff as well!

That we’re my five golden rules to organic growth on IG, but you can also apply them on different platforms of course!

Leave me your two cents on this and what you would do different or add to it :slight_smile:

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Look at that **** - How to deal with haters
Look at that **** - How to deal with haters
#2

I don’t believe this to be true. My clients who share great content receive great engagement. I believe the level of engagement is more a reflection of an overall IG trust score and an authority/influence score among an account’s followers. If you have a highly untargeted F/U strategy, perform far too many actions per day, share average content and do not build a community around your content, your engagement will likely suck.

Or in short, if you see F/U as a means to an end, not creating great content and building a community, then any chance of long-term and greater success is diminished.

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#3

Stopped reading here. Not true.

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#4

Follow/Unfollow is no where near dead man revise this post.

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#5
  1. Follow/Unfollow is dead

This was enough for me to not believe this article. Follow and unfollow works great when you actually have a plan of action. If you just go and follow anyone who follows Kim Kardashian then yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time…

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#6

I equally don’t believe follow / unfollow is dead, but I can understand where OP is coming from with it (and come we can all amp things up a bit to grab attention!) My focus is on building super high quality accounts to use to promote brands / celebs and then sell for pretty big bucks. Doing follow / unfollow on those accounts has seen me having to drop prices as the SB figures can put people off so I try to focus on engaging content, like campaigns and shoutouts. However, on the feeder accounts that support them that I have no real desire to sell for big bucks, but just to juice things up - those I’ll happily do follow / unfollow all day long to find my perfect sources for grabbing content and finding engaged fans!

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#7

I do f/uf as a part of my account ressurection case study an my engagement is up from 6,19% to 12,77% (f/uf is not the reason behind that increase though, but it’s also not killing it). Growing and average of 75 followers a day (on 200 follow actions). Sure growth has become ‘harder’ since we can’t bombard people with likes as much as we could pre-september but hey. If you are using highly targetted sources you can still do it at a respectable rate.

If you are spam following generic, or gigantic accounts there won’t be much to gain of course. I do believe there might be some downranking on IG’s end if you f/uf 800 People everyday and there is no direct correlation with your niche, the content you post or the content they like. This could potentially flag your account as a spam one. But, no hard proof on my end :).

If you do engagement groups and stop using them it’s normal you are taking a (gigantic) hit on engagement, in essence engagement groups is fake engagement. People just give you a like and a comment because they also receive one. It’s fluffing up vanity metrics. But chances are most of them even don’t know what they liked or commented on. Sure EG’s have the potential to bring in organic people through Explore or hashtags, but engagement will tank as soon as you stop using those EG’s.

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#8

I keep hearing that F/U is not dead… But everything I’ve seem points to it being dead. Come on, it definitely lowers engagement. How hard is it for Instagram to say anyone that’s following 300 and unfollowing 300 at a time gets lower exposure.

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#9

Okay, but you’re wrong… I have many accounts that prove this to be wrong. So I’m not sure where you’re getting your information.

#10

Could you message me one of the @names? Would like to see the overall engagement. Also, are you using engagement groups on them?

I’m obviously not set in my opinion because nobody knows for sure. Happy to hear other thoughts.

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#11

As far as where I’m getting my information is plenty of client accounts as well as accounts that I’ve built. Also several other opinions that think the same thing.

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#12

I’m pretty sure about F/U is dead depending on the content quality. I don’t have much fake accounts. Most of my accounts are business related. Therefore, they’re well taken care of.

I’m using only F/U to grow their followers. Beside, they’re having good engagements, likes, comments as well as some shoutouts without even spending a dime. Their content is created manually each post by human beings. Not even one post is auto generated or use any form of bulk creation.

I can assume good quality contents that mix various kind of type such as video, inspiration, information, pre-sale, offer, discount, giveaway and others. And, yes they should be good appearance also meaningful not some sort of showing that they’re auto scraping and bulk generating.

Other than those accounts, the normal fake accounts have low engagement because of the bulk auto generating and scraped contents.

P.S: I’m only F/U. No hashtags, paid shoutout, paid exchange nor joined any exchanged group of any sorts.

Beside this, I’m pretty positive with OP who gave his thought as well as tips and tricks for IG.

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#13

I do like this overall. Follow/unfollow isn’t completely dead, but there were some other good points. No need to bash the whole post

1 Like
#14

If you’re doing F/U, Shout outs, EG, LE, Hashtags, Etc… Of course you’re going to see engagement. In my own opinion it’s pumped engagement though.

Try stopping everything including F/U and then post some content and see what happens.

1 Like
#15

These are for my accounts only, I don’t do any paid shoutout nor joined any exchanged groups.
All posts don’t even have hashtags.

These accounts are doing F/U and post quality contents. That’s all.
Because of F/U, it’s gaining more new followers. Because of good contents and more followers, these account getting good engagement as well as natural shoutouts from those followers.

My whole point is F/U dead or not depending on contents (at least on my case).
If I just F/U on fake accounts that I don’t care to post any good contents, just scrape stuffs here and there. They got very low engagement.

P.S: What’s the point of stop using F/U if it’s so beneficial! F/U + Good Content (alive). F/U + nothing (might be dead).

Anyways, OP is giving a good sharing and information. There is no point bashing the whole content. Sharing is caring. There is no one size fit all. Things work for me do not mean work for other and vice versa.

Cheers!

1 Like
#16

Yeah I agree there were some good parts in the OP thread.

I think the controversy here is whether F/U is dead or not. I think that Instagram detects it and lowers exposure, but other people don’t. I guess there is no way to know for sure.

Someone please make friends with an IG developer lol. We need the inside.

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#17

Yes, information like this could be worthless.

What if IG developer is also among us lol! I’m doomed :rofl:.

#18

with the new Instagram algorithm, It will die a slow death if you just post eventually for the majority of the accounts. Few will grow as organic growth is very ( and I MEAN IT) very difficult to achieve. Instagram is now another Facebook - like it or not, Reach went down from the past by a factor of hundreds, Hashtag growth still works but its a joke from what it just was from January of this year. Every account, every one, reach went down to less than 10 percent majority at 3 percent. Without EG/DM niche specific groups, an account cannot grow at hundreds or thousands a day - why? because of new crap introduced by Instagram.

  1. It is a LIKE based system. the more likes the better the reach.
  2. Engagement now is king and f/u can increase if you target the likers and commenters only. f/u is nowhere near dead.
  3. Shadow bans - make one mistake (wrong hashtag, PV, and a slew of reasons.
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#19

Yes F/U increases engagement artificially, but my hang up on it is that I personally think IG may have filters in place to limit exposure to accounts performing high actions / hour / day. In turn decreasing organic growth. I don’t know this for sure though. It’s just what I think.

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#20

How does it increase it arficually? they followed and liked right?

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