How to Grow on Instagram the Right Way

Today we are going to talk about how to grow on Instagram the right way in 2020 because a lot of the stuff that you've been watching is the wrong way. Well, I'm not necessarily sure about that, but I'm going to give you some right ways, things that I've actually tested myself. And first and foremost, um, we're going to just go down the list here. I actually have a couple of 9 different things for you right now. A lot of people talk about hashtags when it comes to Instagram and I used to think hashtags were whatever. It seems like there's a lot of spamming. But what I found recently was when we started to use hashtags, after we spoke to a couple of people that have huge influence on Instagram, they have, we're talking about a couple hundred thousand, couple million followers or so. What we learned was that you can use an app called Ingrammer. That's ingrammer.com. And they actually have a hashtagging tool that you can use. There's a lot of different hashtagging tools out there. I just like using theirs because there's a lot of different options. There's one column that shows really popular hashtags. You might want to choose just a couple of them because you can pick 30 hashtags. And you know, you have a middle tier so that the really popular is over like a million people that have posted to those hashtags. Middle tier is maybe a couple hundred thousand and then lower tier is under 100,000. So you generally want to have a bigger mix if you're a smaller size. You want to have more of a, you know, small versus medium-sized tags and then you might have some big ones layered in there. And what I found was that when we post to our Instagram, what tends to happen is we might get 50 or 75% of the viewers actually come from the hashtags. So it's about picking the right hashtags at the end of the day. So, and you can go up to 30, right? And what I would recommend afterwards is after you find a couple that work, just copy them. You can copy them to your iOS device, copy them to your note or whatever, and then you can basically just cut and paste from there. It's a lot faster than having to find hashtags every single time. Now the second thing, I got this tip from Chris Do, and I recommend watching his, uh, the YouTube video that I did with him or the interview that I did with him rather on how to grow 10,000 Instagram followers organically. So look, I've tried all this stuff in the past where using pods, using these different follow unfollow techniques, those ways are fairly spammy and they aren't for the long term. But the way Chris Do does it is he has a really big design following. So what he does was is he makes a carousel, he makes a carousel. It's like 1, 1 to maybe 7, 8, carousels where he gives you value on how to do design, how you should do typography. So basically I sat him down and we chatted for about 30, 40 minutes or so and we actually did a video on that on how to grow your Instagram followers. Um, or you can listen on whatever platform you're coming from. So 10,000 Instagram followers per week, that's what he does. And I think he's actually picked up from there. So we started doing carousels on our Instagram, which is @ericossiu. And, uh, from there we've actually seen the engagement start to tick up. Like we're starting to hit our stride with it. Now the third tip is You can actually do guest carousels. And I actually got this tip from, from Chris Do as well. So interesting fact here, if you go to his Instagram, it's thechrissdo, it's D-O, and you can check it out. I actually, our guest carousel is on there where we talk about the latest marketing trends. And at the very end of it, it's a call to action to text us, check out our podcast. And also, um, I gave him the copy, um, to basically say, hey, you know what? Um, my friend Eric Siu, basically came up with the marketing trends, and they have a marketing podcast called Marketing School, which gets over a million downloads a month. So we did all the work for him, and we provided value to his audience. And then from there, we gained about, and by the way, our Instagram's not huge, we have about 6,000 followers or so, we gained about 600. So 10% of our followers came from that one post. So that tells us that there's a big signal there to do more guest carousels, and we're actually getting more people to agree with that, to work with us on that. And I actually think that's gonna take off very quickly. So now is the time to jump on that. I think that's a trend that's very hot right now, depending on when you're watching this. The 4th thing, this kinda goes hand in hand, but if I'm doing guest carousels with someone, I'm collaborating with them. So there's other ways to collaborate too. You can pay someone that's an up-and-comer. A lot of the big YouTube or Instagram influencers, they do pay people to do the shoutout. And the up-and-comers, they might not charge a lot of money. It might be $20, $50 or so. They'll pay for the shoutout. You can do a giveaway of some sort. A lot of these people, let's say you're selling bikinis, you can reach out to a lot of these models and then just sometimes you can just as simple as give them a couple hundred dollars and then also just have them promote the stuff that you have and just give it to them for free. Now a lot of them are getting smarter about that. They realize their, their worth is actually much more than that. So good for them. I think they should realize that, but now is still a time that you can, um, if you want to do that, it might make sense for your business. My friend Noah Kagan, if you follow him on Instagram, Noah Kagan, he actually did a 31-day challenge or contest and each day he was doing all these, um, these giveaways and you can basically enter in your email. You can follow him on Instagram, you can follow him on YouTube. Basically each, each time you, you enter in information or like something, you're going to get an additional entry, right? That's how you can enter in to get more entries for the contest. Depending on the giveaway that he's doing. So contests can still very much work. You just have to execute it well. And there's a lot of different tools out there you can use. Um, you can use KingSumo Giveaways, you can use, I think there's RafflePress, which is owned by my friend Syed. The other thing I'll say is this, I used to in the past before I started to focus a little more on, on, on, on Instagram, I didn't post that much. And when you, when you don't post that much, obviously the algorithm is not going to pay much attention to you because obviously they want more posts, they want more content so they can show more ads because there's an ad-based company. So post frequently. Some people, they're posting, we're talking 1 to 3 times a day and we're trying to get up to that cadence right now. So we realized the more we're posting, the more reach that we're getting. And the other thing I'll say too is you can try the Instagram TV, you can try Instagram, but what I'll say is experiment with different formats. So what I do is I might write a tweet on Twitter and if I think the tweet is worth carrying over, then I'll post it to Instagram as well. And what's interesting is If you look at our numbers in the last year, some of our highest reaching posts, actually the majority of them are coming from the tweet, the tweets. It's largely tweets. And then the second, the second place is the carousels, which I talked about earlier. But what I'm realizing is the tweets don't take, they take me maybe 5 to 15 minutes to write and I just posted to Instagram. A lot of people engage with it and usually sometimes I might just post a carousel that like I might have a tweet storm of 7 tweets. I might just make it a 7 carousel thing and that way I've created 7 tweets and I've also created 7 carousels and I'm also posting it to story. So that's 21 pieces of content in one day. That's what I consider content. And the final thing I'll say around Instagram is doubling down on what works. So it seems like a very duh statement, but there's, there's so much to do with Instagram. There's so much to do with all these different channels. I wonder how many times I said Instagram on this video. There's a lot of different options that you have. I would say if you have a business account, look at your numbers, look at what works, and just double down on that because there's no need to try to reinvent the wheel. Once you start to latch, you find something, latch onto it and just go all in. So let me know what you think I missed in the comments. And if you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe as well. Hit the bell button if you're coming from YouTube and we will see you tomorrow.