On the 10th of May 2018, I decided to see if I could grow an audience on one of the most visited social media of this time : Instagram. I am a huge fan of this platform and have been cheering every feature their team have been adding since the beginning. Instagram is becoming -if not already- what I see as the best Social Media Network for the marketers. As a user, I will always cherish Twitter above anything but Instagram is home to some really interesting features that can be leveraged and produce amazing results for who manages to build a decently sized audience on it.
The Purpose and means to achieve that
My goal here is to build an audience from scratch on Instagram and be the authority account in the niche that I’ve chosen. I will then build a website around the brand and offer various informational et commercial content. The website will have to be made 100% with the Mobile User in mind since the main traffic source is gonna be Instagram at the beginning. But even then, 45% of the traffic coming to my first website is from Mobile Users and this number rose by 13% in the past 12 months so even though the demographic is different, the consensus in the industry is that users are now using their phone to visit websites. Google even announced a mobile-first index method of ranking. So Mobile-first website.
Anyway, the second thing I chose to stay true to was User Generated Content. Meaning all of my content will be coming from other sources. And because I’m not a thief, I asked every artist I wanted to repost their written permission to do so. This gave me the opportunity to struck conversations with people with huge reach among the audience that I want to target. I must have cold-messaged more than a 100 different people by now, some with accounts reaching more than 30 000 followers. I’m still chasing some people that haven’t answered after a month but I’m glad to say that I only got met with approval and cheers regarding this project, getting even a lot of these big accounts to follow me before I even started posting.
By now, you may have understood that I wanted the content of my account to be 100% User Generated. In the Instagram world, we call this kind of account “feature account“. The goal behind these projects is to give small and big photographers exposure by reposting their most qualitative work and crediting them so your audience can check their accounts if they really like the picture that you posted of said artist. There’s a lot of these kind of accounts hence why I chose to specialise in a specific niche that is not getting as much attention as it could in my opinion.
Setting up the account and Content Production planning
So I chose to cold-message tens of photographers which accounts’ I liked and asked them if they would be okay to be a part of the upcoming launch of my page. Everyone that answered gave their approval and I have yet to encounter someone that was not okay with it, as long as full credits would be given at the time of publication.
And this is how I managed to get 15 people on board in two or three days, meaning that I could plan 9 posts for the launch and 6 days worth of unique content considering that my strategy was to post every day at the very least.
The rest of the setup was just about defining a branded hashtag and writing a concise bio explaining what the purpose of the brand was with a call to action for artists to get featured on the page. I also used a Hashtag Generator Tool to pick the hashtags I will perpetuately associate with my posts to help with reaching new audiences. This set of 30 hashtags accompanies every publication in the comments and although this is probably mainly used by bots, I am a firm believer that it is also being used by some people and plays a role in whether or not your post can be seen in the Explore feed of the users that are not following you. There’s a case to be made on whether or not I should include 30, less, or none and I will gladly try and write something about it once I’m sure it can not damage my growth in a very perceptible way while testing it. Eventually, I also wrote a caption template so the audience can find who has been featured with a call to action for the people interested in being the next artist to be featured.
So between messaging people and setting the whole account up, it took me about six days before I could not hold it anymore and had to see some action. I posted nine publications with their customised caption, hashtag comment, tag and even location.
The location information is a part of an other idea of mine to set my account apart from the competition. I am using the Highlight Stories feature by creating a Highlighted Story for every location featured so new followers could explore the photography scene of the niche I’m featuring in every city that they’re interested in.
How do I get my account to be discovered ?
Now on what my strategy is to be discovered. If you have the time, the best way to do so is manually : Go and like as many posts as you can (Meaning before getting blocked by Instagram) on the recent publications that contains the hashtags your target audience is using. That ensured me a very reactive and decent amount of people checking my account and following on top of giving me the opportunity to discover talented people. I still do it from time to time but this is extremely time-consuming. If you’re starting out from scratch like I did, please do it the first month as it’s way better than my new option, but to keep yourself sane, automation is gonna come in handy.
You guessed it, this a black-hat technique that everyone is using : Automation. I’m using a robot to like the publications that falls under some hashtags that I’m setting prior to letting the robot run. From time to time, I’m also using an other script that is liking the publications of the people that liked a certain publication I’m setting. That allows me to target the audience of my competitors and letting them know that my account is here and that they might be interested in it as well.
If I’d really be into it, I could keep track of all of it and evaluating which hashtags are returning me the more followers or which competitors’ audience is more keen to follow me but I don’t have the patience and skill to set it up yet, but this is definitely something I’m going to look into eventually as I’m learning Python right now.
THE RESULTS YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
After all of that, let’s talk numbers shall we ? The 16th of June 2018 marked the end of the first month of activity for my new account.
I reached 550 followers in a month all while following 130 people (Mainly artists I’ve been in contact with or waiting for an answer).
I also posted 45 different pictures from 43 different people. I’m trying to respect a turnover of one month between featuring the same artist twice but I already know that I’m gonna violate this rule and might want to decrease this to two weeks between two posts. I have enough unique content and permission to post daily for the next two months but some photographers would be over-represented (I have five publications on the ready from the same dude) so I’m trying to avoid that.
I’m still cold-messaging people to grow my backlog of publications but I’m now getting used to get tagged by photographers that spontaneously are submitting their content either by tagging my account or using the branded hashtag I put in my bio. As of right now, 263 different posts contains my hashtag and although they’re mainly low quality publications, I already discovered two accounts thanks to it and I’m sure more talented people will start using it in the future. I also got tagged in 131 publications so I’m pretty happy with it.
And this is pretty much it. I’m on track to reach a 1000 followers before the end of the second month of activity. This article has been very long and will definitely be more concise for its next edition. The thinner update of next month will also allow me to talk more in depth about my future plans for this account. I wish I could say stick around until the next one but as you may have already noticed, there is very little content to be checked over here so maybe just remember to check this adress in a month ? 🙂
Thanks for reading ! You can comment at the bottom if you have any questions or reach out to me on Linkedin !