This journey is an odd one for me. I’ve grown pages before, and at one point in 2019, my personal Instagram network exceeded 350,000 followers, before I cut it down to just over 100,000 followers, to focus more on my agency.
When you start an agency and that’s your focus 24/7, and you own big pages at the same time, you sort of lose the motivation to post and actively take a role in growing them. It feels more like work, and you want to reserve that for your clients, so this journey for me will be a little weird, but I hope that it will greatly benefit the people who see it.
Now, unlike every other journey, I am going to be 100% transparent with you. I am in fact going to share the username of the account that we will be growing. This has the potential to be sabotaged but I will put it out there anyway, as it can only do more good than bad. I want to make this both informative, and take an input from the community, so please leave questions or even suggestions.
The account is in the football/soccer niche. The username is @thefootballminute
As it stands the account has 1,564 followers, and 64 posts.
It has been posting since the beginning of 2019 on and off, but things started to take off in November of 2019 when this was posted:
As you can see, it gained the account 56 followers, and racked in over 48,000 views, a semi viral post.
20,000+ impressions from hashtags, and 2,000+ from explore
So what did I do to get here?
First its important to note that Instagram analyses your account and can take a year, or more, to decide that your most engaging content is even worthy of the explore page, but you can bypass this by working on your hashtag strategy. If you go viral on a set of hashtags, Instagram will trigger your post onto the explore page, and once you’ve got that the growth is upwards from there. What I did was find an account with 10,000 followers in the football niche, and I saw they were getting 50,000+ views per post. I then copied all the hashtag sets they were using. You can find these pages on the explore page if you look hard enough, and then replicate their results by using the same hashtags they’re using, the same captions, and the same content!
So how has the growth been?
The account had been pretty much static (no follower gain) from the beginning of 2019 to November 2019, as other than posting, nothing had been done. In November, I started actively taking a role in this accounts growth. It slowly rose, and then at the start of February it just went click.
Here are some insights from posts made at the start of February:
In March, I lost focus and left it to go a bit stale, but anyhow a post made on the 2nd of April still yielded over 20,000 views, 2,982 likes, and reached over 35,000 people.
This is where we are at now, thank you for reading this far, you are all caught up!
I will be posting once per day on the account and updating you here weekly on what I’ve done, the growth, and any significant events.
Thanks,
Laurence
#inforthegiveaway
