I am curious to hear if you spot any flaws in a growth method I have been using that is a variant of the mother/slave method.
I have a portrait photography page that I will call the “Mother” page. I have set up multiple niche feature pages that I am growing on automation (these are the “Slave” pages).
My growth strategy using this setup is as follows:
Make sure that each slave page is growing at least 50-100 new followers per day
On each slave page, set up automated messages to New Followers
In the automated messages you must drive traffic to the Mother page. An example message: “Thanks for following @[slave page name]! Please also check out my personal page @[mother page]”
This method can be scaled up using many slave pages. For each slave page you can expect around a 10% conversion, so roughly 5-10 followers per slave page per day. It’s not explosive but it is a reliable and consistent way to grow a mother page without the downsides of running bots on your mother page.
My one question is as follows: Can anything bad happen to my mother page from using this method (low trust score, shadowban)? My concern is that including the @handle in many of these automated messages will be picked up by IG and they will flag the mother page even though it is not the page sending the message. Any thoughts?
Your problem is going to be with the slaves, not the main account.
If you’re pumping your main account with followers, but they aren’t engaging with your content then the account will suffer, but that’s the only bad thing that can happen to the main.
The only flaw with your plan is that you’re being optimistic with your numbers, if you’ve never done this before.
I think I have experienced this actually. I grew from 0 to 2k in a couple months doing this on the main account. But, the followers like you said are not engaging that much. Is this a bad method in the long term if I get followers that don’t engage?
Would it be better to have an account with low followers and high engagement, or with a lot of followers and decent engagement I guess is my question?
If you have bad engagement you’ll never get your organic reach increased, quite the opposite.
If you have good engagement then IG will give you all the exposure you need for growth.
You can easily grow 10-50k followers monthly just through “good engagement” on a proper post campaign.
Bad engagement and bad campaigns are the main reason why accounts don’t grow organically.
IG gives you plenty free exposure if you’re pleasing the algorithm with your content.
Most people focus on cheap growth hacks, for minimal growth, while dooming their account to minimal reach perpetually.
Instead you can work with the platform, by giving it what it wants, and you’ll be surprised with the results.
Do you think it would be best to start a new account from scratch in that case? Is there any way to determine whether or not organic reach is still possible for my account?
I currently get around 150-350 likes with around 2300 followers and about 20 comments on average. I can hit the explore page on my insights but just barely (maybe 100 reach). My hashtag reach is on average pretty low at 300-500 reach.
It’s hard for me to tell if my account is healthy or if it is doomed.
Your Engagement isn’t too bad right now, I’d just pay close attention the the posts that perform above/below average and try to find a pattern.
You shouldn’t be posting based on what you personally like and make sure you’re posting what the audience likes.
Growth might seem painfully slow until you start getting the organic exposure, but to me growing an account to 50K with a hack and then have it stagnate because engagement is terrible is a waste of time.
I don’t know if this makes you feel better, but with Portrait Photography it’s easier to “blow up” compared to the average, in terms of niches in general.
how many slaves do you have? My biggest flaw with this method is when the accounts start getting phone verified all the time, I have tried this myself and the accounts always become linked somehow, through dm,s or some type of way and you end up in a verification loop. if you could successfully maintain a follow rate per day and avoid pva then this method is amazing but these problems are nearly impossible to avoid from my experience
Would you recommend that I remove some of my ghost followers to increase the engagement rate? Will this dramatically improve my ability to have organic reach?
I have also heard that having followers in different time zones can make engagement suffer. For me, my second biggest following country is India (USA is first). Some have suggested removing followers from other time zones can help. Seems like an interesting idea.
Are the PVA’s from the recent follow limit change?
I have about 5 or 6 slave pages. It’s hard to tell how many followers I get per day using this method because I am getting followers organically as well. When I was tracking this, I was getting about 5-10% conversions on my messages.
I am assuming they could be, but I was doing manual, watching the limits, I was getting 300-600 followers a day depending on how much work, all manually and all followers were engaging. the new follow limit is a strange thing, some accounts suffer while others are completely fine. my biggest advice, create as many accounts as possible and let the survival of the fittest get you the most prone to banned/blocked/pva be your main ones. i created a couple hundred and got about 50 good ones.
Thank you for your sharing, how do you manage the accounts? Do you mention the mother account for each publication? How many Dm do you send per day? Do you always mention the mother account at each dm? thank you