The dark secrets of growing your instagram
Or rather to say dark secrets of the people who teach you how to grow instagram.
Many of us do wonderful art. And many of us reasonably ask why we (some of us) don’t get following we deserve. And that is a valid question. At the same time I am bombarded by lots of ads promising to teach me secrets of instagramming. I decided to put up this text, as many people ask me if I know anything about growing instagram. I know some and that’s probably not what you want to hear š And I am ready to share it completely for free.
Business of teaching how to instagram, not any other business.
There are many ābloggersā and ācelebsā that are offering you their free instagram coaching (and will later offer you paid one). They pose successful businesswomen. Sitting at home and doing their business. Dream! They grew their business on instagram. The first secret is that there is no business apart from selling you their courses. They usually failed their business and started to teach you how to grow instagram and do business on instagram instead. Think about that for a moment. Think about successful business(wo)men (in real business) that you know. Do they have time and desire to teach you how to do that? Seriously? They are busy growing their real business.
You can get all the information for free. Just google it
There is a lot of information that can indeed help your page look followable. Itās out there. Just google it and you will find tons of tutorials and guides. If you are ready to do these steps your instagram will look better, more interesting for the potential followers. That includes creating interesting consistent content and good pictures. I personally use instagram planner (very handy thing to build a queue of future posts). I use Preview because it is free and has no limits on how many posts you can enqueue. Helps me organise content before posting and not forget some nice ideas and images. They also have lots of tips and tricks on their website.
But is it enough to make you a star overnight?
The darkest secret of instagram
Couple years ago great content and regular posting would make your insta grow. Great videos would quickly get viral. But thatās no more the case. Since instagram was bought by facebook, they step by step limit your free opportunities to expand your audience. They want you to PAY FOR THE ADS. That is their main goal. And they want to show you more ads in your feed. This results in the fact that 20-25% of everything I see in my feed are ads. What does it mean? It means that I wonāt see some of my friendsā posts. It means that your audience sees more ads and less of your posts. Even your followers. 2 years ago 60% of people would see my post on average. Now it is only 30%. I seriously donāt think I do worse stuff than 2 years ago.
The darkest secret of āinstagram teachersā.
They will tell you that they grew their XXk followers by following their own rules. Look! My rules work! You can do that too! But remember, how you learned about that blogger. It was an ad. Ad.
I saw an ad one day and I did not follow one lady who teaches you insta when she had 25k followers. I kept seeing her ad every single week since then. Instead of some lovely kitten š Every single week, maybe even couple times. Imagine how much she spends on ads!? And indeed her instagram grew to about 65kā¦ Not (only) because of ads, but ā¦ surely mainly because of that. And she does not teach you THAT trick. Instead she talks about how much authentic you should be. How you should believe in yourself and in growing your business on insta. One day I was fed up and I asked her in comment about how much money she spends on ads and on one new subscriber. I was banned immediately š They are selling the dream, the dream you can get something for free…
She wants to sell you her āknowledgeā while the knowledge is āpay for adsā. And ads are quite expensive. One of my friends with absolutely amazing content (pro quality) would experiment with that. About $ 0.26 per new subscriber. This is hell expensive. And that friend has excellent content. Like I don’t think my content is pro quality, hers is. With worse content it might get even more expensive to get one follower (you will need to show more ads in order to get 1 subscriber).
The silver lining
I published same exact video on both instagram and Tiktok recently. Same exact video.
My instagram had about 35k followers, my tiktok had barely 1k.
- 15k views on instagram, 1.6k likes (less than half of my following has seen it!). Only 325 people were shown it on explore. 3 years ago that would be like 10 times more people if not more. 52 more followers from that video.
- 221k views on tiktok, 67k likes… and about 3k new followers.Make your own conclusions. Video was exactly the same, I put it below.
PS. I would love to hear your stories and your experience, whether that was ads or whether you ever paid someone to ‘boost’ your instagram.