Create Viral Instagram Content: Grow Your Account

1. How I Grew an Instagram Account to 1 Million: Are you wondering how to grow your Instagram account? You are not alone. In the past year, I grew amnesia count from 0 to 2 million impressions a day. And you can tell by using the tips and exclusive hacks that I teach you in this class. Edison's Facebook change their policy for businesses. Instagram is the new hope for gaining visibility in the real world. From a local family run business to large global brands. Everyone wants to know how to grow their Instagram account and get more visibility on the flat bar. And here's why. There are more than 1 billion active users on Instagram each and every month. Nights per cent instagram users follow a business. 84% of Instagram users want to discover new products on the platform. Clearly, instagram is a great platform to reach out to your target audience. But it's easier said than done. You first need to form a strong community of followers. You need more views on your posts, and you need to get your audience engaged in order to see results on your account. In this class, I'm going to show you just how to do that. 2. Understanding Instagram Growth Fundamentals: In this class, we're going to be setting the foundations to your social media presence. We will discuss audience identification and what most people don't do when starting a social media account, which is one of the main reasons why they fail in trying to grow their numbers. Let's face it. People don't follow businesses on social media so they can see sales pitches. They follow your brand because they enjoy your personality and the content that you create. If you're looking at a competitor or a similar account and you see what works for one business. This might not actually suit your brand in. Even when you're in similar industries. Ask yourself, what do you want your town to be? Funny, informative, playful, cynical. Your personality should also reflect what you're passionate about. What topics do you address with your Instagram content? Everything you share on your business account should show off your brand's personality and beliefs. Think of your business account as a person. Design a personality for the account, and create branding guidelines so you can stay consistent. Branding guidelines should also include notes on tone, style, and values, along with your brand colors and fonts. Defining your target audience. Ask yourself some questions about who you're trying to reach. How old are they? Where do they live? What do they do for work? When and how do they use Instagram? What are their pain points and challenges? Answering these questions will help you craft the right kind of Instagram content to reach to the people on Instagram who are most likely to give you a follow. It will also keep you focused on the needs of your target audience to consistently deliver the type of content that makes them want to keep following you for the long term. Create a consistent brand story and aesthetic. Maybe you want to satisfy curiosity by showing off how your product is made. Share it an employee's perspective to humanize your brand. If you want to position your brand in an aspirational way, you should try showcasing the lifestyle or achievement of your customers. No matter what you want to achieve, it's important to maintain a consistent brand personality and look. Your posts should be easily recognizable at a glance. Think of your Instagram grid as one cohesive unit. You can always use Instagram stories to share content that doesn't quite fit with the look and feel of your main feed. Even if your products don't all look the same, you can use consistent styling, give you a grid, a consistent look and feel. So the only fitting account I can think of that we can really talk about brand is Apple. If you define what Apple does, They cell phones, they sell computers, they sell their own tablets called iPad. And so if you break it down, essentially, what they do is what Samsung does is what Windows does. But what makes them better than all of them? And I'm a complete Apple fan girl, I'll say this now. I work on a Mac because it's the best interface. I have an iPhone, I have an iPad and whatever, a MacBook. Well, Apple could have been this company that just creates great products, but in actual fact, it's a status thing as well. So when we look at Apple social media, the bio is short. That's main selling point for their Instagram is everyone has a story to tell. And so what they're doing is implementing an iPhone pictures using the hashtag shot on iPhone. All they do is literally repost content that is made on their products. Which is amazing because they could have had this massive team orchestrating. Well, they do have a massive team orchestrating all of this. But people use iPhones in a professional capacity. And because people have so much respect for this brand, they are using the hashtag. But there are a lot of good-quality images here. And they don't have to send people all around the world to get this content. They cure rate content. This is what curation is. Rather than creation. The theme that they've gone with, obviously as everyone has a story to tell, moving into the point that I made before about brand guidelines, right? I managed to find a online, you can basically Google brand guidelines for different companies and usually they will have them online. Mainly because Apple, this is the affiliate program, Brandon photography guidelines. So it's promoting Apple and in which way can they show Apple's brand as a whole? And these guidelines like and at the affiliate program for example, this isn't social. I couldn't find the social guidelines. But if you see how they laid out their brand guidelines, there's a clear list of do's and don'ts. So once your company is approved to use the Apple provided assets such as web banner or badge. Direct your customers to apple.com. It's important to use these assets as proved. So for example, I think this is more if you have a phone network, for example, like E3, O2. So they'll have the Apple products out and they'll have them on the website. And so on the website because it's a natural is naturally their product, they'd have to link to apple.com. So people have the option to either purchase through them all through apple. And it's a seal of approval, like a badge of approval as well, to show that it's authentic. Best practices for Apple logo. Apple logo in the size provided, don't place the Apple logo within a banner. Don't use the Apple logo as part of your menu options. You can't have it in the menu here. Don't use it as a navigation device and don't place the Apple logo with editorial content. And of course, if you've got a bigger team or a small team working on this, you want everyone to be on the same page, so happy and brand guidelines to guide your vision. So don't place a apple banana within another banner. Don't add lovely little graphics on top of them and don't play. So the banners or messages within an apple banana, because these have been specifically designed, they don't want an Apple product and they're busy, colorful textured or patterned backgrounds. So this is a massive no-no. They also want crisp images. I don't know whether you can see whether this is a little bit blurred. The actual copy content. They have guides on this. So they don't want you to cheapen their brand basically by using the word coupon voucher discounts are promo codes. You can use the term offers. So I bet when the new iPhone comes out or new iPad or whatever, you'll see a lot of people trying to entice new customers in, and they'll probably say offers and obviously the current use. Any of these words. Wow, I think they've gone through most of the brand guidelines. Say, I think you've got the idea as well of what brand guidelines are. If you're ever struggling what to include within your brand guidelines or if this is actually of any use to you. You can find all sorts of companies brand guidelines online to seek any inspiration that you may need. So key takeaways from this lesson include identifying your brand values. Earlier on, it helps you a lot in the long run. You can't create great content without knowing who the content is for and who you're targeting. Having consistency within your brand story and output is key for obtaining your target audience. Understanding your audience is key to creating relatable content for them to engage with. 3. Optimize Your Profile for Searches: In this class, we're going to be setting up your profile so new followers can easily find your content when searching. Optimizing your profile, the search is majorly under utilized Instagram hack for growing your following. With a recent announcement from Instagram, English-speaking users in six countries will be able to search Instagram using keywords. This is a massive game changer for people and brands looking to grow their following. Previously uses search for at home workouts. That hashtag or accounts with the words at her workout in their username would populate. Now posts with captions, names of bios that feature at home workouts should show up in search. Even if that hashtag isn't in the post. According to Instagram, they said the team considers a number of factors, including the type of content, captions when it was posted a more surface relevant results. It also uses machine learning to find the highest quality content that's relevant to you. Instagram notes that keyword search is limited to general interest topics and keywords that are within Instagram's community guidelines. You can see the Instagram community guidelines on their website. So basically the word you're including your name field, and Instagram bio, actually searchable on Instagram, making it the forefront of your profile to users searching on Instagram. Most people now the username, but for the name field trips at all. For your name field, think about what your niche is, which industry you're in, who you target, what solution you offer, etc. When in doubt, pop that term is the search bar and Instagram and see what appears. Take advantage of your bio by changing your name to something relevant to your brand or business. It's a great way to improve your chances of appearing in the top results if anyone searches your target keywords. If lots of other profiles are using that term, this is a great sign. You don't want to be using a search term that no one else is using. So now that we've talked about effectively setting up your account, I'm going to take you through basically two accounts that I curate content for. And I own. The first account is the skin account which I haven't posted on since a while and it tends to gain a few followers per day, but I don't, I haven't posted on it in a while. And we'll just have a look at the reals, the pools in some, alright figures to say how small it is, I managed to actually find a really good username that's specific to the nation. That scheme video, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. I create the logo, the for the profile picture in Canva, which I will show you how to use on a later video. Yeah, going into the actual name. So what I've done is when I'm searching, I want to get excited to go in a skiing trip or whatever. I'll just type in Scheme videos or skin tricks or whatever. So I've had, I've basically got the keywords of skiing, videos and tricks as well. Then when we go into the the bio description, we've got hashtags ski, obviously when people search whiskey will be on there. Then also using hashtags, key video to be featured. Dm for cheap check outs, it's just a way of creating, It's just a way of creating another revenue stream if you ever grew the account to be big. So that's one account that I've just gone through. Let me show you the other one now. This is the second account that I've had for a reasonable float well, more of a reasonable amount of time. I haven't posted on it though for a very long time, perhaps last year. So I haven't yet posted on it in 2022. I should do rarely because I will be on over a 100 thousand followers by now, if I did, I was reaching over a million people per day, which is incredible numbers. The reals did really well as well. A hundred thousand, a hundred thousand. It's I think a few of them went viral or search. I got like, I think it was 30 million on one of them in terms of views of what EPA. But yeah, let's let's go through the bio psycho satisfying car cleaning. I thought, you know what? Asmr people get a payoff for release from watching satisfied videos. And I found that size fine videos to be glycol cleaning, very nice to watch. So I have snapped up a really good use name. I've got a logo that I made on Canva again, and the name of the account. So satisfying car cleaning videos, many people search for whether they want videos, photos, whatever. This is, just a strict video only account. Again, we have our little hashtag so people can basically tag their own content. And I think quite a lot people have done. If we have a look, Yeah, So there's over a thousand posts, people that have used it and I should actually re-post some of these. So that's pretty cool. We've got a community go in there. And yeah, it is very much within the algorithm of car cleaning videos. So there'll be a forefront runner of people searching. Key takeaways from this lesson include, utilize Instagram searchable content. Make sure to use keywords within Instagram's community guidelines. Use keywords that use keywords that not only connect you to your niche, but what your target audience is searching for. Don't use oversaturated keywords that you don't want to get lost within other people's content. 4. 1 Million Followers in 30 Days?: In this class, we're going to be talking, Real Talk. Major organic Instagram growth in 30 days isn't a common occurrence. Let's talk about the platform and how it actually works. Many Instagram users initially panicked about the switch from a chronological feed to the rank timeline. However, since the change, the average post is seen by 50 per cent more followers. Forget about learning how to beat the Instagram algorithm. Instead, focus on learning how to use the system to your advantage. There are six factors that determine what shows up in each person's timeline. Interest. Timeliness, relationship, frequency, following, and usage. Here's a quick rundown of what each of those factors refers to. Interest. How much Instagram thinks a person will like the post based on previous Instagram activity. Timeliness, how recent the post is, relationship accounts a person engages with on a regular basis? Frequency. How often a person uses the Instagram app. Following host from the accounts of person follows usage. How much time a person spends on Instagram. Instagram's algorithm aims to surface the best content that each individual user. So while six separate factors may seem like quite a lot to worry about, the best thing you can do is create high-quality content consistently. Just for proof that it's basically impossible to bills and account to over a million followers within a month. It is possible to get a million impressions a day. One of my favorite accounts on Instagram is this account and it's called visualized value. These guys create really cool, authentic pieces of content which really resonate with obviously the entrepreneur in, in everyone, even though that their content is really, really good. Let me show you how long it took them to get into the position that they are now of 328 thousand followers. So I'm going to use a tool called Social Blade, and I've used this for many years. The data only starts in October 2019 here. And so they've got 6,678 followers. This doesn't mean that the account was made in October. It just means that this website has captured data since then. If we have a look for the last two years, as such, we'll be able to realize what patterns follow with what actions. We see a massive spike of followers in August 2020, which is nearly 30 thousand followers gained in that month. The month after they gained nearly 29 thousand followers, then it dips a bit to 12 thousand followers. However, grown-up page isn't always as straightforward. And you won't always have like really good months despite creating great content. If you knew what content would go viral, everyone would literally be uploading viral pieces of content. They deleted a load of pictures here. They're deleted a load of posts here. I can only assume that the rebranded or they actually bought the account. Remove the media that wasn't relevant to the audience that they're trying to target. But yeah, roughly every month they're posting probably about, oh, whoops, dwindling a bit down here. So the post and less and less recently in comparison to one, the highest months were. So going back to August when they gain 30 thousand followers, they uploaded 38 piece of media. If we have a look further on down, say the last month of December 2021, they uploaded 12 pieces of content and they gained nearly 6 thousand followers. So long story short for this account, it's taken a very long time for them to get into the position that they are in, how, whether they built an audience around it. If we just have a look at their engagement rates, it is pretty high. People are sharing these piece of content, see a 110 thousand views on a video. That's an engagement rate of light. A third, which you just don't really see on average. I'm going to try and scroll back to the August of 2020 and see what piece of content they were they were posting out there. We might be able to see the Content changing and growing such February as it's evolving. So they reached a 100 thousand followers in August. So obviously, the way that you make people want to share content is they either can resonate with it, it resonates with them. It shows, illustrates something that they can usually portray, usually portray with words. So they are pretty fascinated by it, or they share it as a way of educating their audience. And so whether they want to add more information about a certain topic, a certain subject that might be up in society at that moment in time, people tend to share my content when things happen just because of a lack of education or lack of awareness really. So yeah, they did pretty well. Carousels do pretty good here. But you don't really get as much interaction on a video site. It's got 26 thousand views. Yeah, it's only got 3,600 likes. Well, if we look at an image, they roughly get double the amount of engagements. However, just viewing a video from start to end is clusters and engagement because you're watching it for the full duration. Let's have a look at another account. I really love. Okay, let's look at Richard Dutch in here. Richard is just a bit of background, is basically a bodybuilder from the Netherlands. And he has built a community around fitness. And so he's got 1.5 million followers and is quite well-established within the fitness areas, is sponsored by Gymshark and my protein and other brands. Okay. It seems like everyone had a really good time in August 2019. I don't know whether that's because Social Blade had a they had a blackout period where they didn't actually record any sort of statistics. Basically took Instagram off of the analysts cool tool functions just because I don't think they had the right authentication with Instagram to do it. So I think that's why we've got the patterns that we have. On average, Richard is actually losing followers, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means that it's audience is either changing all the algorithms or a change in orange content might have changed a little bit. Who knows? But he's still gaining followers more or less. So he had 1100 followers. Gained. Wow, he had some really good months, really good months. March 2020, you got to think of like the time of year that they're gaining followers as well. So around summer, people are gonna be eating more. We go into lock down around March. So these are the people that obviously he was training from home. He's livelihood is at the gym. So making money from Instagram. Well, I think all these people that are like filtering out are the ones that probably followed him during lockdown, monitor, serious lock town board, and didn't necessarily achieve that. But yeah, he's, he's more or less still gaining followers, so there's no need to worry about that. And roughly he's posting pretty consistently around one post a day. So looking at our consistency video, later on, his best months in terms of follower growth, he's posting every single day. And this is technically a personal account or as he's built a brand around this and he makes money. He's name is technically a brand. We can also see he's engagement right here, which is around 2.5 per cent, probably average, well, we aim for about 4% engagement rate. But you've also got to remember that this guy has over 1.5 million followers to get 4% of those people liking. I mean, let's just have a look at Kim Kardashian and you'll be quite surprised at even though she gets more likes and average, that audience is probably less engaged. Though we're 1.3%. I wouldn't worry too much. Key takeaways from this class. The average post is seen by 50 per cent more people since the recent Instagram updates. Use the tools and hacks you learn in this class in order to maximize your content to get in front of your target audience. There are six factors that determine what shows up in each person's timeline. Interest. Timeliness, relationship, frequency, following, and usage. Defining your target audience early will help with content creation and follow a growth. 5. Does It Matter When I Post?: In this class, wagons be discussing some of the key elements for successful Instagram grid. It's no secret that Instagram wants to promote pages. Post consistently. The question is, what is consistent? At a minimum, you seriously want to grow your Instagram account fast. You should be posting at least once a day. It is more important that the bigger you get, the more you post in the earliest stages under a thousand followers, you should never miss a day of posting. Now this will change depending on if you're an Instagram theme page or a personal page, if you're a personal account, we saw K to go as low as three times a week. However, if you're an Instagram theme page, let's say you post cute kitten videos. You should never miss a day. Everyone loves a cute kitten video. The reason why you want to post consistently is that it gives you many more chances of having a post go viral. By viral, it can either show up on the Instagram Explore page. On Instagram is top page. The Explore page appears on the same page as the search function. The top page for hashtags shows some of the most popular posts tagged with the hashtag being on either page allows you to grow your Instagram followers fast. Think about it, like you were playing the lottery. You increase your chances of winning the lottery. The more tickets you Bye. In this scenario, consider your post to be like lottery tickets. The more you have, the more likely you are to win. In the hashtag portion of this course, we will talk more about what types of hashtags to use in order to have your content go viral. For now, you should really get serious about making sure you're posting at least once a day. If you're a personal account no less than three times a week. The best way to follow a consistent posting schedule is to create a schedule and use a bot that posts for you. I personally use a few tools, including author, preview and later. Instagram only allows the use of certain box and will punish your account if you use bots that aren't part of their Instagram partner program, does it matter when I post? It used to matter what time you posted on Instagram. That's because Instagram use to show your posts to your followers in the order in which they were posted. If you posted at 06:00 PM and somebody else posted at 603, your followers would see the 603 posts before yours. Because this is more recent. However, Instagram has changed the way they show posts to followers. They no longer show post to followers based on when they were posted. The order of photos in someone's feed is based on the likelihood that they would be interested in the content. The way Instagram gauges interests is by analyzing the user's current relationship with the Instagram account. If someone is frequently commenting on your posts, liking your posts and visiting your profile, instagram will show them your post, regardless if it was posted ten minutes ago or ten hours ago. This is why it's really important to create engagement with your followers. But just remember that the key to someone seeing your post is how much they engage with your profile to get people a reason to engage with your content. The easiest way of getting interaction is asking your audience a question within the text of your post. You may want to consider using one of the social media scheduling tools. Afford to automatically publish your posts when the audience is most engaged. Be consistent. Most of your followers won't follow you for what you've posted in the past, but for the promise of what you will post in the future, your audience wants to know what they're going to get if they hit the Follow button. Having the feed with a consistent theme and a consistent posting schedule can have just an impact in growing a following as many other growth strategies I've covered, even a simple pattern can entice new followers as long as it's communicated at first glance to anyone who lands on your profile. Consider your Instagram bio on your last nine posts as your first impression on Instagram, do they effectively communicate some degree of consistency for personality, filters, colors, or layout? Just the clickable link sent peoples the same homepage every week? Or are you linking out to fun and exciting content to the layout of your grid is often underestimated way to get created with the aesthetic of your feed while adding a rhythm to your publishing strategy and consistency, that's worth following. In fact, many accounts that adopt this approach are often able to spend less effort on creating content by focusing on converting visitors into followers, producing text graphics or other content with a faster turnaround and streamline in the overall production of their Instagram content. Key takeaways from this lesson, having a posting schedule may seem tedious to plan, but being prepared is the best way to ensure success. Consistency is key. There's no point using all your time perfecting the content. If people aren't seeing it regularly, aren't seeing the regularly enough. If you post regularly and your content is right, your audience won't have a reason to forget you post when people are online is a great way to successfully get engagement as soon as you post. If Instagram see that post is well received at soon after posting, there'll be more obliged to push content out in front of potential followers. Make sure your content leaves the user with a good impression of your account. Aims. 6. The Biggest Secret for Going Viral on Instagram: In this class, wagons be discovering Instagram's best feature since their launch. Instagram reels. If you're not sharing to Instagram Reels, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity for your brand or business. Rails is Instagram's newest video feature, taking center stage of the new main navigation bar. With Instagram choosing to put Instagram Reels at the forefront of Instagram. This a significant push to have users browse and share Reels. More often. Rails can be found in their own separate tab on individual Instagram profiles and also on the Instagram Explore page. Similar TikTok videos. Instagram Reels have the chance to go seriously viral. Instead of users only seeing reels from the accounts that they follow, users will see reels from all accounts. This is a major game-changer. Sharing your reel to both your feed and the Explore page is an incredible way to increase your reach way beyond your followers and possibly go viral doing so, there are so many creative ways that you can use Instagram Reels. And since Real's is a new feature, it's a good idea to jump on the bandwagon now lost the competition is still relatively low, especially since Instagram is giving extra prominence to rely on users main themes and explore pages. As discussed in a previous class, if you're content resonates with your current audience and gets enough engagement. Instagram pushes that content out. Reals is where I've seen most of my success with my content. By most successful, we'll go over 11 million views in two weeks on Instagram. Video content when it's done right is king. Let's just actually like do something that's more relatable and accessible. Or the average user, which is obviously your own personal account. And so we're gonna go through basically real. So let's go into the reals tab, right? Okay. So Reels really do fluctuate for me. Um, I often find like the reals that I don't put a lot of effort into. And whether it's just a simple clip, I'm tensity the best in comparisons and me doing like a heavily edited piece. So my best real I think yeah, I think it was last year. So yeah, that got over 6 thousand views. Like really played around with them to find out like, what does good, what does bad. And so I found like for me using trending, um, audios such as obviously this one when I was in San Diego. I'm, and this is just a simple clip. There we go. I edited slash graded on my phone, posted it on, and let's see, they tended to view insights. They did quite well in comparison to other ones. I have curated more so like this is like a weekly routine. Recap. Um, it didn't really do as well as others. And even the same hair. This is just a collection of clips put together, um, and I think the most important thing though is like when it was uploaded, obviously it was January. Everyone was like depressed. So, um, yeah, even New York care and so on and so forth. This one did pretty well as well when I was in Lisbon, um, I just put a collection of clips together and it seems to really captured an audience. Um, so, yeah. And then this is one of my lightest ones. Um, this was more of an edited a piece. Um, but other than that, yeah, the only thing that I can really recommend with, um, Reels, for example, is to actually look through your real I'm feed and see which bits of audio like really stand out to you a second, say that this has got over 50 K, um, and this audio as a result. So the original has got a 33 k views, whereas this has got 50 K. So if I have a look and try and find that real, if I can, I'm going to have a substantial amount of views anyway. And so the longevity of these sounds is a way of you being able to be found. The Black Eyed Peas uploaded their own, um, audio of it and then people just remixed from there. Welcome, really recommend is that, you know, reals you get, You feel like you put a lot of effort into them. But in actual facts that you can obviously, I'm quite low return, but at the same time, you're, um, if you have a look at the dashboard of when you upload reals, for example. They do pretty well in terms of trying to get if I did last 90 days because that's when I've really been focusing on uploading reals. I've reached a substantial amount of accounts. So accounts reached, we scroll down, you can see that Twenty-three k of that is actually just purely from reals, um, and then 2200 from posts and then even less with stories. If we scroll down, then you can actually see that how many impressions I've got. So, you know, the, these accounts have seen in multiple times, but in natural fats over 101 thousand times my content has been seen on Instagram, which is incredible. Yeah, that's, that's my recommendation with reals. Key takeaways from this class. If you're not sharing unreal, you're really missing out. Bills has massive potential to reach a whole new audience. Video content is king on social media, but only when it's done correctly. Getting on the Explore page is a vital aim to ensure Instagram growth. 7. Share the Wealth With Influencers: In this class, we're going to quickly run through what it means to collaborate on Instagram. Collaboration can be applied in two ways. Influences or a content swap. Share the wealth with influencers. While the influence of market has certainly grown over the last few years, there are still ways the social budgets of all sizes to incorporate influencer strategy. Micro influences are those that have smaller followers, but often a more engaged audience. These influences have highly specialized niches and are often willing to work with brands who line up with their values. What can we influences? Especially micro and nano influencers, establishes trust in your company as they talk and post about your brand to their followers. Your Instagram account will organically grow with them. Contents swapping is essentially what it says on the tin. You swap contents with another account and post each other's content on your own accounts. Or the contents swapping can potentially be harmful if it's not done right. Most people go wrong by getting star stroke over how many followers a potential swap account has, they usually go ahead and end up with them raping. No benefit. This is because they haven't done the fundamental identification. Who is their audience? In order to have a successful contents, what you need to align audiences, similar audiences will see the most success As they can align your content with the content they used to seeing on the account you're collaborating with. Providing value is key. Key takeaways from this class. Collaboration is only effective when you know who you're trying to target. Collaborating with similar accounts is good. The transferring of audiences and building a community. Choose what kind of collaboration would best suit your account and existing audience. 8. Using Instagram Stories to Grow Fast: In this class, wagons be going through Instagram stories, feature stories are a great way of keeping an audience engaged with your Instagram account. Now that you know it's important to have stories, you may be wondering, what exactly do I post? No need to overthink this. If you're a theme page and you are posting every day, one of the easiest things you can do is just reshare your post on your story. Add a bit of text above the story that says New Post and an arrow pointing to your post. People be obliged to click it and engage. A good way to be found through Instagram Stories is to use three hashtags and an Instagram story and then cover them with a sticker such as new post. I do this because Instagram allows you to use up to three hashtags in your story. You can add more, but Instagram will only register the first three. Having hashtags can look a bit spammy at times. It's best to cover these up with a sticker. The reason I used a big hashtag is that stories disappear in 24 hours. So if you use smaller hashtag, yes, it is more likely to be found. There isn't enough traffic to smaller hashtags. That's why it's best to use bigger ones and just hope you get lucky. We also put a big pointing GIF over our text. The reason why I do this is because if someone is interested in the title of the post, they will be more likely to pick onto the post and read the text. Remember, Instagram shows your content to people who engage with your post. If I just posted that story, people could read it without clicking onto it. But I want to maximize as many post interactions. Using Instagram interactive stickers to grow fast. One strategy I've found that works really well is using Instagram interactive stickers. If you've ever seen a poll, a quiz, or a story that says, asked me questions. You've seen an interactive sticker. These elements were introduced by Instagram to help users engage with their followers. The best way to increase engagement is by commenting on liking your followers posts. While this is a good strategy, it's very time-consuming. Instead of going out and engaging with your followers, posts, give them an opportunity to engage with you by having a quiz or a pole on your Instagram stories. You can allow your followers to engage with your post. I tried to post a new Instagram quiz every single day to keep interaction. Hi, this not only gives my followers something to look forward to, but it allows them to engage with the account on a daily basis. Guess what happens every time I post. The people that I see engage with my stories are the first ones, like my posts. Organize your stories into highlights. Whenever a potential follower lands on your business profile, you have a short span of time to convince them to follow you. One way to do this is by using the highlights feature on your profile to organize your Instagram stories. Organize your Instagram stories in a way that communicates what your account is about. Since stories have a 24 hour lifespan, highlights can be used to give them a second life and entice others to follow you so they don't miss out on more stories in the future. You story highlights to grow your Instagram followers by creating trailers. That T is what your account is about, organizing your stories into things like countries you visited a travel accounts. 9. Key Instagram Posting Strategies: In this class, we're going to be going through the basics on getting your account categorized within a certain niche. On Instagram. You go on Instagram is to engage your current audience on a regular basis, whilst also growing your number of real followers. Hosting new, interesting and engaging photos will satisfy the first requirement. But to begin growing, you'll find hashtagging your photos extremely important. Hashtagging makes it easy for people searching for specific terms to find your photos. So which hashtags should you use? Just like Twitter and other social sites, users on Instagram, you certain hashtags over others. If you use popular Instagram hashtags within your photos, you're much more likely to reach new users and be discovered. At the time of recording. These were the top 20 hashtags on Instagram. Number one hashtag, love to instill good. Three, photo of the day for fashion. Five, beautiful, six, happy. Seven, cute. Eight, like for like classic. Nine, throwback. Thursday, ten, follow me. 11, pick up the day. 12, follow 1314151617 instead daily, 18, re-post 19 friends and 20 nature. But if you looked at this list and said, none of those apply to my product or brand. You'll likely correct. Using hashtags is one thing. Using the right hashtags is completely different. Popular tags like the ones I've just listed, will likely net you additional engagement and legs. However, they won't lead to increased long-term engagement. New or interesting followers are most importantly, sales. If you want to tag your photos properly, you'll need to find and use the most relevant hashtags. This means doing the most appropriate research to make sure you're using hashtags that not only describe your brand, but being searched or on Instagram to find relevant hashtags, you want to use a free online tool like icon or square or Webster gram to start, for example, searching for the hashtag, hashtag men's fashion, I was able to pull the following list of additional keyword hashtags. You can also find more related hashtags and their popularity if you searched by any of your target keywords directly in the Instagram app. You want to go through this exercise, try and different key words that describe your brand and products, building out your hashtag keyword list as you go. Keep in mind that Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags per post. Additionally, popular words will change over time. So make sure you revisit your hashtag keywords every few months to make sure you're using the best possible terms. The best thing is you can steal hashtag ideas from competitors or similar accounts that have the following you aspire to. But ultimately, you want to create your own groups of hashtag that relate to your specific account. Here is a pro tip. This is a trick I use for one e-commerce business, I do things so, but every products and product category in my stores, I've researched the most popular related Instagram hashtags. I came up with 15 to 20 popular hashtags for each category of products I sell, as well as a base of five to ten popular hashtags that best describe my brand and product offering. Finally, also created a list of popular local specific hashtags that relate to my brand. These are the brand keyword hashtags. I've used hashtag, my brand's name, men's fashion, men's accessories, men's goods, fashion, men's style. Instead fashion, men's wear. These are the product category, keyword hashtags, happy socks, Kogi socks, socks, socks, swag, soccer, socks of the day, SOP game. And obviously there's loads more hashtags there. Location specific keyword hashtags, Toronto, Toronto fashion, Toronto fashion bloggers. All of these groups of keywords, hashtags are stored on a page. In my Notion, this makes it easy and efficient when I'm on-the-go to post a new Instagram image optimized for the most relevant keywords. I can easily open my notes, copy my standard brand, product and location specific hashtags to post with each photo. Some Instagram scheduling tools also let you save caption templates for storing your hashtag groups, which is amazing. Doing the work of researching, organizing, and saving the most applicable and popular hashtags. Operon will save you a ton of time down the road and increase your engagement and help gain new followers. My second tip, if you've been posting to Instagram for a while and feel you've missed out on all these opportunities to build your brand using keyword hashtags. Don't worry. You can still go back and post a comment with your new hashtag, keyword lists, and watch the likes and followers Rollin. Using hashtags in Instagram stories. Hashtagging on Instagram posts is a given, but you should also be using them on your stories like we discussed earlier, for the chance to be seen by followers that just following specific hashtags. You can use hashtag stickers, which can be found in the Instagram stickers when creating a story or just hashtag directly in your captions for a chance to be featured in a hashtag story. Hashtags are one of the most misused tools that Instagram has. If you run a health and wellness Instagram page, you'll see a lot of small accounts with under a thousand followers that use hashtags, hashtag, wealth, health, wellness, happy, etc. The reason why so many accounts use these hashtags is that millions of people search these hashtags daily. The issue is multiple Instagram pages use these same hashtags. When you use hashtag health, you're competing against Instagram pages like WebMD and women's health mag. Each of these pages have been millions of followers and tens of thousands of likes per post. Instagram can only show so many different posts on its top pages, the hashtags. Now how Instagram decides to play? Suppose in the top results for our hashtag is dependent on how many likes, comments, shares, and saves they receive. So if you have a post that only has 30 likes, you're gonna, you're going against a post that has 30 thousand likes. And it's very unlikely that you'll show up as a top result for that hashtag. On top of this in so many other Instagram pages using the same hashtags, you immediately get pushed down the search results. So not only did nobody see your posts because you use too many popular hashtags. It also gets immediately shift down to the bottom of the feed because there's a new post with that hashtag every couple of seconds. Key takeaways from this lesson. Using popular hashtags will help you with getting your content in front of bigger audiences. Remember to make sure that those hashtags are relevant and cater to your content. There are loads of free online tools that you can use to find hashtags. 10. Capture Followers with Shareable Content: In this class, we're gonna be discussing creating shareable Instagram content. The power of authenticity on Instagram for growing your followers is massive. And I predict it will grow even more in the next few years. One of the best ways to reach a larger group of people is by creating authentic, sharable content on Instagram, shared content is one of the best ways to spread your message. Users can share feed posts on their Instagram stories or through direct messages. Whether it's talking about the struggles of owning a business or your step-by-step skin care routine. When you're open with your audience, your followers sense it. When you make your followers feel like friends, they may feel unnatural pole to share your content with their own community of followers. The Instagram algorithm tends to favor posts that get a lot of engagement. When your posts a shared, it will bump the post up on people's feeds. And if a post has enough engagement, it might even end up on the Explore page. Hello new followers. The simple act of sharing can go a long way for your brand or business. So it's worth putting an effort into creating authentic, sharable content. Here's a tip, slot out time to be active on Instagram. On top of replying to comments and DMs. Don't forget about interacting with the accounts that you follow. Those that have similar audiences to yours. There's a high chance their followers will check you out. When you see a post you genuinely like, comment on it. Plus your comments may be pinned. And that is easily seen by hundreds of potential new followers. Engaging with other accounts also lets the Instagram algorithm know you have a relationship with them. This will help your account show up in related as suggested, account suggestions is grammar least Instagram guys. And it's a new way for followers to share and consume helpful recommendations and tips in an easy to digest format. Instagram guides are a great way to create shareable, educational and fun content with your followers. The creative opportunities are endless. You can share guides made up of products, places, or posts. You can share. Gift guide, travel guides, inspirations, tell stories, provide advice or guidance, and so much more. Key takeaways from this lesson. Creating relatable content is the best way of getting engagement. 11. The 50/50 Split: Long captions have always been big and they aren't going anywhere, especially with the new Instagram keyword search. In this class, we're going to be discussing that content is technically split into two. The content and the coffee. Instagram used to be all about the facial rules. A cohesive aesthetic, high-quality photography, and on-brand images were a must. But now audiences are looking to learn more about your brand and generic. In fact, according to influence a research done by for the average caption length has more than doubled since 2016. And in 2020 to our feeds will be filled with an average caption length of 405 characters, which averages out to be 65 to 70 words. Influences were first to actually jump on this trend. Sharing lengthy captions on their posts to give greater insight into their world or to share their insights on current events. Brands are now starting to take advantage of this trend too. Especially when it comes to raising awareness for the causes they care about. When you share more with your audience through Instagram posts, you build a stronger and larger community. Since Instagram is allowing users to search for specific keywords like healthy recipes and gold jewelry. For example, use including keywords in your longer caption may help you get more organic eyes on your content. Although Instagram is a visual platform, writing great Instagram captions plays a great role in helping you get more reach and engagement. As you've already seen, reach and engagement a key factors in attracting free Instagram followers. Here are some key strategies to keep in mind. Put the most important words upfront. If the caption is more than a 125 characters long, users will have to tap More to see the whole thing. Most of the first words to inspire that extra tab, ask a question. This makes it easy for an audience to leave a comment. That engagement will make your account more visible to more people. Try emojis. Emojis can help draw the reader's eye and a more appropriate for most types of accounts on this visual social network. Try different caption lens. Instagram allows long form captions up to, up to 2200 characters. So you can test out some in-depth storytelling if your post warrants it. Ultra-short captions can also be very effective when the visual speak for themselves. Data shows that long captions are more likely to improve engagement. Key takeaways from this lesson. Good content and long captions is king. To get your audience engaged with your content. Asking questions is a good way to get your audience to react and engage with your content. But the most important words upfront in your caption. 12. The Power of Instagram Live: In this class, we're going to conquer nearly every content creators. And the benefits of doing so, going live on Instagram. Video is the future of Instagram. And Instagram Live may be one of the best ways to use video to drive engagement and followers. Instagram Live is an entirely on edited video stream for your followers to tune in and engage with. Meaning. Your audience can submit questions and comments in real time. A ton of brands of hopped on the Instagram Live train, especially with the shift of working from home. The content options are endless, but Instagram lives, you can host weekly shows, gains and tournaments, online webinars, tutorials, and so much more. And now you can even showcase your own products to help drive sales. You should use it for product launches. Fyi, Instagram released Instagram live shop in a new way for brands and creators to sell products during an Instagram live broadcast. This means accounts with access to Instagram checkout, contact their products from their face, bookshop or catalog, and let the audience shot on the spot. Light video is the key to running a successful marketing strategy on any social media platform. With Instagram, you can use Instagram Live to stream videos to your followers and engage them in real time. When your brand starts a live video stream, a ring in cases your profile picture in Instagram stories to tell followers they can check out the stream. Followers also should receive a notification when you start a live video. Once you've finished your live stream, you can upload it to your story for 24 hours. Remember, Instagram Live is interactive. Your followers will probably comment whilst you there. So try to acknowledge their comments and find ways to get them to participate. Some ways to gain more followers when using Instagram Live include influenced the takeovers, hosting an AMA asked me anything or Q&A, teasing a product launch or update, hosting a talk show, going behind the scenes on your operations, sharing a current event, running product tutorials. Key takeaways from this class is basically, if you're not using Instagram Live, you're losing out. That's all I can say. 13. Hypergrowth Techniques to Build a Community : In this class, we're going to be going through ways you can build a community with your followers. By building a community, your followers become loyal and will be more likely to engage with your content. Branded Instagram hashtags are a great way to help spread the word about your business or account. Fan user-generated content, build a community and attract new followers. A branded hashtag is hashtag that is unique to your business. It can be as simple as your company name, tagline or the name of one of your products, events or campaigns. According to a report from visual objects, one of the best ways to best ways to see engagement on your branded hashtag is by incentivizing your customer base. Create means that resonate with your audience. Brands have realized the power of clever Instagram memes, especially when it comes to building brand identity, driving product interests, and getting more followers. In fact, means have become one of the major methods of online communication. With every positive 55% of 13 to 35-year-olds sending them every single week. While most of those will immediately recognize a mean when we see one nailing down, a definition is surprisingly difficult to do in the broadest sense possible. And mean is any piece of media that passes from person to person on the internet. They usually have some sort of cultural relevance. There are some funny, are clever, and they typically feature a combination of text and imagery. This can be a photo or GIF, or even a video. They can still be challenges when it comes to mean creation. Like integrated means into your profile without compromising your aesthetic. But there are ways to do it. Apps like Canva and over have a number of templates that will make your main creation easier. One of the best ways to find and attract new. One of the best ways to find an attractive new following is by seeking out your closest competitors, Instagram accounts and engaging with the audiences. These people have already shown some level of interest in the product you carry simply by following your competitors. So how do you effectively steal your competitors followers? I engaging with them. There are several ways to engage with Instagram users. And the more work you put in, the more followers and repeat engagement you get out of it. The three types of engagement on Instagram are following a user, like in a photo, commenting on a photo. There'll be afraid to use the emoji or two and add some personality to your text. I run it in formal tests with my business account to see how my competitors followers responded to my Instagram marketing advances. I targeted the followers of a close competitor. Since I know many of their followers will be local. I added the city of the company to my profile to generate a greater sense of familiarity between the brand I was working for and the people I was targeting. I began simply by following 100 of my competitors followers. Later, I followed another 100. But I also took the time to like at least one of their Instagram photos. Finally, I found a third group of 100 and light, as well as commented on one photo from each account. Here where the results Fourteen percent followed back 22 per cent light and followed back. 34% liked, commented, and followed back. Although there are many variables and this test was far from scientific, the results were clear. The more work you put in and engage with people from your Instagram page, the more you'll get out of it. Please. Now, whilst it's against Instagram's terms of service, some entrepreneurs use automation to follow the same process above, which is something I don't condone. This is a pretty weird hack, but it works. Be the first to comment a large accounts within your niche. Have you ever looked at a big account in your niche and saw a comment, had hundreds of likes on it. Not by celebrity, but by irregular person. Usually the reason why you'll see comments with very high likes on the post is if they are the first two comments on that post. I-beam, one of the first comments you've shown to everyone who clicks into the comment section of a post. If the comment is a good and substantial one, it will usually get a lot of likes. Dislikes usually mean nothing. It doesn't actually help your Instagram account grow fast. However, it does give you the opportunity to follow people who have already engaged with you. If you start becoming the first to comment on popular Instagram pages and getting a lot of likes on your comment. You can go in and follow everyone who's liked your comment. This will increase the odds that they follow you back. So how do you become the first comments on large accounts? To become the first comment on a large account, you need to set up post notifications for that account. This is really easy to do. All you have to do is to go to a large accounts profile. Click on there following tab, click Notifications and turn on post notifications. Every time they post something to their Instagram, you'll get a notification on your phone telling you that they've posted. Make sure you leave a comment that isn't just an emoji, but actually has some thought behind it. Key takeaways from this lesson. Comment on accounts posts whose audience aligns with yours. Think of it as follow a fishing. Create a hashtag that your audience can use. Try to create a community with your audience. They'll build loyalty then. 14. Creating Unique Quality Content: In this class we're going to be talking about the exact thing that is going to convert your visitors on your Instagram page in two followers. Content is king. Number one, have a great Instagram theme, aesthetic. This is step one. When it comes to building out your Instagram page, your Instagram aesthetic is going to be the first thing people see when coming onto your Instagram page. Having a constant feed that uses the same colors and theme may oftentimes be the deciding factor, whether someone will follow you or not. How many times have you seen a page and saw some posts that are selfies and some infographics. And although there are videos of cats and you have no clue what's going on. So many times. Now, how many of those pages did you follow? Probably not too many. Having a great Instagram theme is one of the easiest things you can take control of today. I can help the overall social proof of your Instagram page. So how do you create a great Instagram page? Well, this will vary depending on what type of Instagram page you have. If you have a business account, your theme Most probably be centered around your product. If you don't create your own content and just repost content of others. This is fairly simple. Your Instagram may not have all of the same colors, but your content will follow the same theme. If your Instagram page hosts motivational quotes, tips, or graphics, you can format your themes similarly to how I've done a few other pages in the past. As you can tell, a few of these pages themes, simple. They only use three colors. Same background every time. People don't follow your business and social media so that they can see sales pitches. They follow your brand because they enjoy your personality and the content that you create yourself. What you want your tone to be, funny, informative, playful, cynical. Your personality should also reflect what you're passionate about. What topics do you address with your Instagram? Comprehend everything you share on your business account should show off your brand personality and beliefs. Think of your business account as a person. Design a personality for the account, and create brand guidelines. So you can stay consistent. Brand guidelines should include notes on tone, style, and values, along with your brand colors and fonts. The next thing is to understand why people share content. People share content for a number of reasons. One, to bring valuable and entertaining content of it. We want to inform a news and help people in our lives. And that's why 94 per cent of people say they share on social media. To, to define ourselves to others. We all have our own personal brand. And the content that we share on social media reflects our identities. So it's no surprise that 68% of people say they share on social media to communicate who they are and what they care about. Great to grow and nourish our relationships. People also share as a means to make and maintain connections. Specifically, the New York Times research revealed that 73% of people Sharon line to meet others were shared interests. 78% share because it enables them to communicate with people they otherwise wouldn't stay in touch with. For plain and simple. To fulfill ourselves. We share Simply because we enjoy it and it makes us feel more connected to the world. Five, to get the word out about brands or causes. We also share content online to show support for causes and its own people about the ideas and principles we believe in. Now, role-plays and emotion in social media sharing. Six principles that costs something to be widely shared, all go viral. Social currency. We share things that make us look good, triggers, easily memorable information means it's top of mind and tip of tongue. Emotion. When we care, we share public built to show, built to grow practical value. News people can use stories. Instagram stories. People are inherent storytellers and all great brands also learn how to tell stories. Information travels under the guise of idle chatter. So the New York Times earlier and his colleague discovered there were two primary factors that contribute to an article becoming a newspaper's most emailed. How positive the article was and how excited it made the reader. These studies into the psychology of sharing aren't just theoretical musing of academics. New media and content companies had taken this research and built businesses around the factors that compel us to share. There's so many companies out there that specialize in this. Let's talk for speed. Speed is a highly trafficked website that also uses reader emotion to spread its content. Buzzfeed has done this, but ages really, really well. I creating content that traps into honest soldier for 90 is related content and quizzes about TV shows that have been long off the air. The publication balance these posts with timely content that talks at our heartstrings and makes us feel good. And cats, there are always cats. Emotionally is a two-sided coin and not everything is hoax and kittens, negative emotion can ignite social sharing just as much as positive emotion. Outrage can cause people to share just as much as a funny video. So it's not surprising that study found that anger is the most viral emotion. Emotion is such a huge part of social media sharing. The key is to hit one end of positive or negative spectrum. Anything that falls in-between gets lost with the rest of the average content. At the end of the day, the psychology of sharing is much simpler than people can anticipate. Status and emotion. Two, driving forces behind sharing doesn't matter which sharing persona you fit. Everyone is motivated by these two factors. Social media sharing and what it means for you. Before you create your next piece of content, ask yourself who the content is four, and if it really satisfies status or emotion, more sharing make someone seems smarter to their friends, doesn't elicit so much happiness that you have to share. Remember, liking something isn't enough. You must strike a chord with your audience that triggers such a strong response. But they have to click Share. Now that we've talked about really good content, how do we actually make it? So one tool that I use, which is an online tool, it is free and you can access it online. And there's also apps for iPhone, iPad, etc. And that app is Canva. Canva is possibly the devil for graphic designers. But you know what? I know a few graphic designers that will basically kill me for recommending this, but at the same time, it's a free tool. Sometimes budgets aren't big. To create. Initially. To create your initial good content, I'd really recommend canvas. So let's actually go through and create your first Instagram post. I'm just going to show you how to use it. So yeah, you can, you can scroll through all of these different templates here and say if there's a certain topic or milestone coming up, you can actually search the templates. I'm going to type in June teens, which basically, which is the celebration of Black Lives Matter. So as you can see, as you scroll through, you'll see a little crown here, and that's the pro subscription. And basically, if you've really get along with Canva, I recommend that you purchase the pro subscription. If not, these templates can actually be edited to a certain degree. So there's no need to worry about that. I wonder if there's a way of I'm just going to scroll through, see what there is. Anything that I really like. Maybe maybe this one. It's, it's pretty simple, um, and of course, it's absolutely love this font. What horizon? Definitely a fun and each download onto my computer for wider campaigns. Um, so for example, you need to do is double-click on the text to change it. And I've just clicked commands that. So this is actually a gradient, as you can see, that they've put on here. So you could see the bottom part of it. Now let's say you want to change the background or you have to do is upload an image and then drag and drop it in. Well, this doesn't seem to be wanting to work for me today. So drag and drop the image in and then you can actually resize it. There we go. Move it around. And yeah, I absolutely love this tool. It's fantastic. Click, Share, download, PNG, but you can also move it straight over to Instagram, personal Instagram business. And there's actually an option to start scheduling through Canva, which I haven't yet used, so I don't I can't really recommend it to you. Yeah, there are plenty more tools online, but this was just a quick overview of Canva and what I've used in the past for social media management clients. Key takeaways from this class established brand guidelines for social media to ensure your content that is created aligns with what you want your brand to be perceived as. Having a theme is a great way to bring in new followers. Know why people share content. Create content that makes people want to share it. 15. Using Instagram Analytics To Optimize Engagement: In this class we're going to be running through one of the most important elements to identify growth. Analysis. Using analytic tools will be this key to your success. And we'll let you know what works, doesn't work and what other routes you can go down with your account? Which of your posts get the most engagement? No. If not, it's really easy to figure out. And all you have to do is go to your homepage and click on insights. From there, click on content interactions. Under content interactions, you will be able to see which posts get the most likes, comments, shares, and saves. What you want to be looking for is, what's the reoccurring themes? Do post with your face in them do better than posts without the post with long captions do better than a post we've shot captions. Is there a certain post that does best when you use a certain hashtag? These are all things you want to be looking at when you start looking the themes in your best-performing posts. Once you find out which posts are doing best for you, you want to double down on those by doubling down. Do more. If your post with your face do better than screenshots. Stop putting screenshots on your Instagram page. It's as simple as that. Which Instagram Metrics matter most to grow your account fast. There are only four metrics when it comes to Instagram. Engagement, likes, comments, shares, and saves. The two metrics that should matter the most to you. Our shares and saves. Instagram values these two the most as they have realized, that the people who share and save content do that much more infrequently them what they like and comment. If people are sharing and saving a post that indicates to Instagram that that is a good piece of content. This goes into Instagram's algorithm on deciding what to show on the Explore page and hashtag top page. Monitor your follower growth closely over time. It's not enough to get more Instagram followers if you're just losing them as fast, keep an eye on the rate at which you're growing, as well as how engaged you're following is. Social Blade is a great free tool for analyzing the growth of you're following or that of your competitors. Showing you the number of followers added and lost over time. And on specific days. With an Instagram business account, you can also get an Instagram analytics dashboard, which offers valuable insight for free that you won't get anywhere else. You can see how many people are checking out your profile, how many people your posts have reached, what your top posts are, and where most of your followers for from. You can use this data to diagnose why you're falling short and where you need to do more. Look for patterns in the posts that were most engaging and try to replicate that in your future content. Did you know it's actually pretty impossible to grow an account straight away. Instagram actually favors accounts that have been active for a longer period of time. Due to spam accounts. Getting a million followers in 30 days from 0 is pretty impossible unless you're David Attenborough. Key takeaways from this class, look for patterns with your content. Does certain pieces do better than others? How can you apply this to new posts? Monitor follower growth over time. Slow growth is how communities are made that actually engage with your content. Shares and saves. Our go into the shares and saves are going to be the metrics like gain you the most growth.