In this informal conversation, Eric Siu and Daniel DiPiazza dissect Instagram growth methods. They begin by explaining the "share‑for‑share" (SFS) system popular around 2015, which relied on Kik chat rooms where accounts of similar size coordinated mutual reposts to inflate visibility. Daniel describes the mechanics—DM outreach, scheduling, and even using spreadsheets to track cross‑promotions—while noting the high effort required. Eric shares his experience of using a black‑market service that supplied massive "power likes" from foreign accounts, which triggered Instagram’s algorithmic detection and led to a sharp drop in organic engagement. Both caution against pure black‑hat tactics, recommending a hybrid approach that mimics black‑hat actions (e.g., coordinated sharing) but executed transparently and sustainably. They stress that genuine engagement quality, often driven by audience origin (e.g., YouTube fans vs pure Instagram discoverability), outweighs raw follower counts. The segment ends with a teaser for the next video on becoming omnipresent and differentiating one’s brand, and a call‑to‑action for viewers to subscribe to both channels.
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Alright, so we're back with Dano DiPiazza, and we are gonna talk about Instagram and how you can actually grow. But actually, before we even started recording, we were talking about one of our mutual friends recommending that we both get on Instagram at the same time. And a couple years ago, he recommended a tactic to use, and this tactic is—
Share for shares, okay? I'm gonna explain. What I was saying before we even started rolling, which I think is important, is that the engagement on my account is pretty good, but like, if you look at someone with the same number of followers, but that comes from a different world, like an actor or an actress, they're gonna get way more engagement than I would get on mine, because wherever people find you usually determines the quality of the engagement.
Right.
So like, for instance, if people just only know about you from Instagram, they're sometimes gonna only see you as one of many other people that they follow on Instagram. But if they come from— maybe you come from YouTube, they might have been watching you for 3 years before they followed your Instagram, and now they're gonna be much more engaged with you. Or if they watch you on Game of Thrones, obviously they're gonna like—
100%.
They're way more engaged, even if it's less followers. So it's really not about follower numbers. Engagement is really important. The number looks sexy, but you can play with that number. You can buy followers. There's lots of stuff you can do to make that number look sexy. But basically, back in 2015, the way to do this was you would do share for shares. It's not unlike how you can probably still game Twitter. I mean, you can still do that. It's shout for shout. So someone will post up something. Basically, at the time, they had this app, which I think still exists, called Kik. Do you know about Kik?
Yeah, Kik, yeah. So this is— our mutual friend told us about this.
You know all about this. This is like the Instagram black market. This is like the Instagram hood, okay? And all the accounts had Kik chat rooms. And accounts with similar follower levels would have groups. And they would basically just combine their efforts in a group by saying, hey guys, I'm posting. Can everybody repost this? Can everyone reshare? or individuals would meet each other, 'cause this is just a growing community, and we'd say, hey, I got 1,500 followers, you got 2,500, we're kinda close, let's run posts. I'll run one and I'll do something like, I'll put a post like, the only way to succeed is to try really hard. And then I'll be like, got this awesome quote from @lux.quotes.forever, or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and you just do like you do, and I was posting like, you're laughing 'cause you've totally seen all those. And I would do, I would post like 12 times a day. And Sarah, my wife— sounds so weird to say that.
Yeah.
My wife now, she was like, yo, get off the phone! Why are you still posting? No one wants to see 12 Instagram posts a day. But now, who's paying for all the meals?
Oh!
Exactly. Instagram is. Thank you, guys. So that's share for share. Now I think that, honestly, I think IG growth comes down to— I could say a few things. What do you think?
Well, what I can speak to, I mean, he's clearly made it work, and we did it for our channel. And what I was saying before that was we did the share for shares, we went to the, the kick, the black market and all that. What happened is we had a guy like drive our followers up, and then what he was doing, he was like, oh, I got this power like service. And what happened with the power likes was we're getting a ton of engagement, right? Thousands of likes. I was like, what is going on? But it was all coming from different countries, and it's not hard for an algorithm to detect what's going on. And so what's going on now is whenever we post something, engagement's really low, and we're contemplating starting a new Instagram channel. So I'm just telling you, like, the share for share stuff, if you're doing it, you gotta make sure you're doing it not in a really dark, black hat way. That's my caution.
You got penalized, you got slapped.
I got slapped, yeah.
Well, you know, I think the thing is, I actually do think share for shares will still work. I think the thing is, it's just a lot of effort. It's just a ton of effort. I mean, it's like, because the thing is, you can, The way to do it is you have to actually make friends with people. You have to like, you have to look at your account and say, what type of account do I have? What type of content do I have? Then you have to go onto Instagram, which is a black hole in and of itself, and be like, okay, who's like me who has a similar follower account? And then you have to go and DM them and say like, hey, I'm doing this thing. Do you want to collaborate? And you have to do that a bunch of times, like over a period of, you know, months, hundreds of times you're doing this. And then once you get them to agree to do that, Then you have to schedule it. You have to actually follow through, because if then if you don't post and they post for you, then they're like, "I just posted for you. You know, get to it. We have a deal." So when I was in my prime, when I was doing this, I had a whole count. We should Jeremiah. We should do this again. You should do this for me. That would be great. But I had a spreadsheet, and it would be like I'm doing five or five or ten posts a day. I'd be like slot one, two, three, and I'd be like, okay, here's the quote from founder. Here's the quote from Think Grow Prosper, and I would just basically have slotted what I was posting and who was cross-promoting with me, and it's a big system. It still works because if you think about it, it's just passing traffic back and forth. But it's a little bit time-consuming. You could just buy followers on Fiverr.
What I recommend is you try to do black hat things in a white hat way, so then you're playing the long game, right? 'Cause short-term stuff, look, you're gonna get short-term results and you get filtered, and when you're unaware, like sometimes when I'm just not aware, stuff like that happens, and you played the long game like Daniel, and he's actually got good engagement, he's got an engaged following, and he's created a big business, not just on Instagram, but leveraging other channels as well.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, cool. So, in the next video, the last video, we are gonna talk about being omnipresent, and then we're gonna also talk about differentiating your brand. So, don't miss it, see you in the next video. All right, Daniel, thanks so much for doing this, and for those of you watching, don't forget to watch the next video in the playlist over there.
Watch it over there, it's somewhere over here.
And then?
Subscribe.
Subscribe over there.
Oh, oh, I gotta tell you guys too. Daniel DiPiazza TV. Type it up on YouTube right now after you subscribe to his channel. Yeah, I need you on mine. I need to get to 10K.
