E294: From the Instagram Marketing subreddit:

"Many years back, I made my first ever Instagram account solely to be a personal one and got to ~200 followers consisting of friends, family, and acquaintances. I then decided to create a fresh account based around fitness to see just how much I could assert myself on social media. I never went viral and never had a single moment where I gained a bunch of followers at once. I grew my account slowly, but constantly. I learned about online coaching a while back and decided to implement that through fitness to start. Once I got that going, I was able to use my Instagram as my main platform for getting online coaching clients and expanded to doing dating coaching as well. Here are the main takeaways for how I got there:

Followers > everything else

Followers are the only thing that matter on Instagram to me. Everything else are vanity metrics. I’ve made posts that got thousands of views, hundreds of likes, and double digit shares, but only a handful of followers. It was clear to me that making content as a small account was not going to be my most consistent and reliable method for getting followers, which leads to the next point.

Follow/unfollow is goated

I hear a lot of controversy about this method, but after trying out a bunch of different ones, this is the one I always fall back to because it’s consistent and reliable. Everyone on Instagram will always appreciate having more followers and if you play the numbers game, a good number of them will return the favor. The main complaint people have on doing this is the ethics of rug pulling after getting followers, but here’s the deal.

If you want to use Instagram for business purposes, then you need to be tactical about it. Although you will definitely be in the ground to start, having a high follower to following ratio is vital to being perceived as an authority figure. And a lot of people on Instagram abandon their accounts over time so not every follower you get will be active anyways. That doesn’t mean you should unfollow every single follower you get through this method, but you should try to keep your following limited to supporters of your content and people you value.

I look for people who actively support creators similar to me as they will be more loyal and active in supporting my content. Numbers wise, most followers will be fans, and a small number of them will be potential clients that can be converted as described in a later point.

Create content for social proof and reach

Even though I’ve been getting most of my followers from follow/unfollow, it’s still crucial for me to post a bunch of content to demonstrate who I am and what I’m about. I mainly use photo posts and reels for my page. I use visuals and copy written captions on photo posts to create relatability and reels to increase visibility to my profile. If you make good reels, they will get pushed out to a lot more non-followers which means more eyeballs on your profile. My profile is a personal portfolio and anyone that takes the time to go through it should know who I am, what I’m about, and what I can provide.

Sell something through Stories and DMs

I make it very clear that I sell coaching on my profile. But I’m also a micro-influencer that’s actively trying to grow. In order to maintain goodwill with my followers while also taking initiative for my business, I promote my services every once in a while through a post or story and then try to convert interested prospects into sales calls in the DMs. Like I said before, don’t focus on the vanity metrics. These instances will receive very low engagement compared to my other content but that’s where the business is and it gets handled in private through DMs.

Cross-promote wherever you can

I am active on numerous other social media platforms and try to cross-promote content whenever I can to build up social proof and visibility to myself and my services. I may get clients that were referred by a piece of content from another platform to my Instagram that gets further social proof of what I can provide and buys into coaching that way.

Maintain good profile health as much as possible

Because I actively do follow/unfollow, I’ve hit the action limit numerous times in the past and have had my account action blocked before. I’ve also tried external apps and automation software but they were unreliable and also made me uneasy about sharing my account information, so I’ve cut them out altogether and run my profile completely by hand. The last thing I want is to lose my Instagram account for no reason as it is a huge driver of business for me, so I do everything I can to make sure I operate within Instagram’s TOS so Instagram won’t punish my account’s ability to get reach and engagement. This includes not buying fake followers, not spamming likes and comments and not boosting posts."

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