5 keys to Unlocking Instagram | Cliff Worley

Okay, so why growth hacking? I talked about it a little bit more earlier in terms of why specifically you would want to growth hack your account. So for me, I was spending hours and hours trying to figure out how to grow Instagram, how to grow Twitter, how to engage with Facebook advertising and not have it eat up all my money when I'm spending it on ads, right? So what you need growth hacking for is to kind of circumvent that and kind of give you that shortcut So that you're not necessarily having to do all of this liking and following and engaging on your own. So it kind of gives you a shortcut throughout the process, right? So what we're going to do today is we're going to actually get into how to do that. How do you actually apply those skill sets? What are the tools that you need to use? Are there specific apps that you can use? What do you do in order to growth hack your accounts, right? And everybody in this room is going to have a different scenario. Some of you guys are here for personal brand, some of you guys are here for your business brands, but ultimately you guys will all walk away with something. So we're going to keep it high level so we can make sure that it's applicable across the board, and we're going to make sure that you guys all end up with some great content and some great advice when you leave. All right, so without further ado, I want to introduce our first guest. Hi, everyone. His name is Cliff Worley. He's going to specifically talk about Instagram, how to hack and grow your Instagram accounts. Cliff's background is he was the Chief Digital Officer for Daymond John, and many of you guys know him from Shark Tank. In addition to that, he is also currently over at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, and he is running community management over there. So if you guys could Please join me in welcoming Cliff Worley to the podium. That would be awesome.

How's everybody doing? Thanks, Sequoia, for putting this on. All right, unlocking Instagram. How many people have an Instagram account? All right. How many people have under 1,000 followers? How about, uh, 5— how about over 5,000? Anybody? All right, all right. Just wanted to see where we are in here. Okay, 5,000. All right, so I'm going to talk about how you growth hack your Instagram account. I've been doing mine for probably the last 2 years, so I'll walk you through how I did that. So for the past 4 years, I was working with Daymond from Shark Tank. I was his Chief Digital Officer. I was working on helping him monetize the Shark Tank companies that he invested in on the show. My job is really in marketing automation. Over the past couple of years, marketing automation has really taken off. So what happens is usually we get a Shark Tank company, they go on air, we really get that one night to monetize them, and then over, you know, you get tons of traffic that night and then that traffic is gone right after. So we have to figure out creative ways to continue to monetize that. So we did a whole bunch of marketing automation with that. That's kind of how I got into growth hacking.

Awesome.

These are my 2 Instagram accounts. This is my personal one, @physicalcliff. Definitely go follow that. It's got 20,000 followers on there. And then I also manage a LoveQuote account. Don't ask me why I got a LoveQuote account, but I do. And that's got 159,000 followers on there. And I'm going to talk to you today about how I grew those 2 accounts using growth hacking. So this is what I plan to cover. Why Instagram is, you know, a good platform to be on. The 5 keys to unlocking the power of Instagram, which I'll give to you, and then how to apply these 5 keys to your account. We'll have a little bit of time for Q&A, I think 10 minutes at the end, so I'll take any questions you guys have. So why Instagram? So I kind of missed the boat on Facebook. I was in college and I was doing what college students do, which is playing games on Facebook with my friends. And over time I realized that if I would have got in early on the platform, then I would probably have a better chance of succeeding, being serious about it. So when Instagram got purchased by Facebook, I was like, this might be the next platform to focus on. So if you remember, Facebook purchased Instagram back in 2012 for $1 billion, and I remember everybody was freaking out, like, why did they pay so much? They had 80 million active users, no revenue. But now in 2017, they're on schedule to do $3 billion, probably more now. They've got 600 million monthly active users as of last month, 300 million daily active users and growing, and as of 2018, they'll probably be worth about $5.3 billion. So good purchase, right? A lot of people come to me and say, you know, like, I'm struggling with my Instagram account. I really find like there's like 3 things that people struggle with when it comes to Instagram, and you'll probably relate to some of this. So the first one is creating content. People just don't know what to post. Creating content is difficult. I've got a couple strategies in here to make it a little bit easier, but that's one of the challenges people have is they just don't know what to post. Second, they might have good content, but they just don't know how to get people to actually like their photos. That's one of the challenges a lot of people face. It says, you know, nobody's liking my stuff. I know I'm posting good stuff. There's just nobody's liking it. And then finally, if you are posting a lot of good things and you're getting good engagement on that content, a lot of people say— I mean, this is the biggest problem— people are like, nobody's following me. I can't get any followers. I don't know how to get them. So what's the solution, right? When I was starting off, I had probably about like 900 followers, and I literally went on Google and I was like, how do you get Instagram followers, right? And I found this real cheap and easy way to do it, which was buying Instagram followers, right? I could buy fake Instagram followers. How many people have bought some fake followers? Don't act like it's only me. All right, fine. So I spent $39 and I got 10,000 followers, fake followers, you know, sent to me in 24 hours. $39, 10,000 came to my account. I was like, oh yeah.

So, you know, I'd go out and tell people, you know, check me out on Instagram.

10,000 followers, people are like, oh my God, you must be famous. And I'm like, yeah, you know. And then I remember, I remember this day, it was a dark stormy day in December 2014, and Instagram deleted all the fake accounts. You guys remember that?

Yeah.

And I was pretty much looking like Akon when I woke up that morning. He actually lost 56% of his following as well. A lot of celebrities got exposed that day. And so I was really like, you know, I don't know what to do. And so I had this aha moment one day. I was like, all right, what's actually working for me right now? And what my process was, like, I'd wake up in the morning, open up my Instagram account, I'd go follow a whole bunch of different people, like a whole bunch of different photos, and then I'd go to work. I'd come home right before bed, grab my phone, look at my Instagram account, and boom, I got some new followers. So I'm like, this is cool, but I can't do this all day long. Like, I, you know, I need something else. But it's working, right? I get to follow targeted people. They follow me back because I figured Instagram is like a reciprocity platform. You do something for somebody else, they do it for you. So my whole goal was like, you know, there's, there's a lot of automation out there. They got email automation where you're not sending a manual email, but I'm like, there's got to be something to where basically I can build a robot to do exactly what I'm doing but just do it all day. And you probably don't know this, but Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, they all have these limits that you can have a certain activity. So like Instagram might say a user account can only like 500 photos per day. So I could do that, but I'd be sitting there all day liking all these photos, and you can follow 600, 700 people a day. But I'm like, there's got to be a way to make a machine that does this, right? So I want something that does the posts, the follows, and the likes. So I was like, that's my goal, and I'm going to teach you guys how you can automate yourself online But first, before you do that, which is very important, and I had to learn this the hard way, is there's really 5 things that you need to do before you automate yourself. So I'm going to give you guys the 5 keys to unlocking Instagram. First one is, a lot of people come to me and they say, well, I want more followers. So the first thing I have to ask them is like, what type of followers do you want? You need to identify your target market because otherwise it kind of messes up the whole equation. If you don't know the type of people that you want to follow you, then like, what are you doing? So like, do you want like You know, if you're like in the fishing industry, you want people from Alaska that are fishermen to follow your account? Is that the type of content you're creating? So really get really specific on those type of followers. So the age, the gender, the geographics, the income, the occupation, and education. And this is, I mean, this is pretty much basic across all the different platforms. But when it comes to growth hacking, you want to be very specific, very, very specific on who you want to come follow your account. The second thing you want to do is you want to get a little bit stalkerish, right? You want to identify what your target market does on Instagram because if you're trying to target them, you've got to figure out what they're actually doing. So like what accounts they're following. So you want to go to like, you know, find somebody that you would want to potentially follow your account and look at the accounts that they're following. It's open as long as their profile is not private. You can go see what accounts they're following. You can see what locations they're checking into. And you can see what hashtags they're using. And this is going to be Very important because when you turn on your growth hacking, you're going to need to come up with a profile of, of these different things to get them to kind of follow you back.