Instagram strategist Cliff Worley answers questions on business profiles, automation tools, and growth tactics. He explains how follow-unfollow cycles work within Instagram's 7,500-following limit, why business profiles can reduce engagement, and how to configure automation to avoid unwanted likes. He also discusses converting a large follower base into paid consultations and courses.
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Thank you so much for your time today. Great information. I'm Rochelle Rankins and my company is Live with Courage Cosmetics. 2 questions. So Instagram, within I guess the last 6 to 8 months, they made a change where you can get business analytics, right, if you change your profile to business. And so I was wondering, how are you taking advantage of that versus some of the paid version apps out there? So that's my first question. And then the second question is, I have followed Instagress and it does work really well, but one of the things that is an opportunity area, sometimes it posts things that it shouldn't, you know, post on. So I wanted to get your perspective on when that happens, how do you, you know, play the Olivia Pope?
All right, so first question. Yeah, I actually ended up changing my— my Facebook person here is probably gonna hate me for saying this, but I changed my profile to a business profile when that happened, and I noticed my engagement went down. I don't know if that was— if it was Was a fluke or not, and so I ended up changing it back and my engagement went up. So, and I don't know if that if Instagram is saying that if you now business account now you got to pay to play. So I'm like, nah, I'm not paying, not paying just yet. So I don't know if that, but it is good because it does give you the ability to have somebody just contact you. And I do remember when I flipped it over, people now can contact me instantly at my email address, at my business location, all that stuff there, which was cool. But my engagement went down a little bit. So it might have just been the timing, but I haven't flipped that back. But I will say the good thing is that they allow you to flip it back. So you can change it and then you can go see the analytics, you can go see what you need to do and then go flip it back. Sorry to Facebook, but you know, you can't. All right, we're talking about hacking. And then the second question, you're absolutely right. I remember I was dating this girl and she was like, I was running Instagram 24 hours. She's like, what are you doing up at 3 AM liking all these photos? And I'm like, I'm asleep. What do you mean I'm asleep? So I had to change it. I had to change it up because you can configure it however you want to configure it.
So I was like, okay, let me Let me operate during normal hours.
Let me not be too greedy. And yes, you do, you could potentially like some photos. I mean, people would send me a picture and say, Cliff, really? Like, you liking this right now? And I'm like, it wasn't me, it was my robot. You know? So that is the downside to it. There is a downside to it, which is why you have to be really careful on what you like and what hashtags you choose to like or people you— accounts you choose to follow. But I guess the other thing is, is once you do see those photos that you did, like on accounts that you like that you didn't want to like, you can just put them on the blacklist and make sure that you don't like those photos. So, you know, it takes some effort, but that's the downside to robots. Any other questions? In the back. Hello, my name is Jaco Wiley. Thank you so much for all the information. So what I was wondering is, I like a lot of the information you gave on how you got from 600 to 11K. How are you seeing your strategies change in jumping from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of followers? Yeah, so the cool thing about it is what I noticed really as I probably went up every 5,000, there's like a psychological thing people have when they say, oh, somebody's got tons of followers, I gotta follow them. then they must be legit. So I think my follow-back rate went way up as my followers went up. So it's kind of like— and I know everybody in here has done that— where you see accounts that's got 100,000, 200,000, you're like, they're legit, right? And so yeah, it's a positive thing as you grow more and more and more and more. Okay. Yep.
At what point do you start unfollowing people? Because you don't want to have more following than followers.
Yep, so there's probably a lot of people out there that hate me because I unfollowed them. It's just part of the game. There's 2 strategies. On Twitter, I think it's good to have a lot of followers— oops, sorry— that you don't unfollow. But on Instagram, I think the limit is you can only follow 7,500. So what I would do, my strategy, I mean, I tried all different kinds of combinations where I'd like follow 500 people, then unfollow 500, follow 1,000, unfollow 1,000.
What's your strategy?
I kind of carry that probably 2,500 because I think the max that I followed and then I unfollowed. Sometimes depending on who I followed, I might— one trick is like if you've unfollowed them manually and then follow them back, let's say somebody you want to continue to follow because there was like a lot of people like that Shark Tank casting director, I didn't want to unfollow him, so I just went and followed his account manually and then Instagram looks at that as You follow that account manually, because you can tell Instagram, only unfollow the people that you follow, like the software. So does that answer your question?
So you just have the software unfollow at a certain point?
Yeah, yeah.
And what's that timing?
Yeah, you can configure it to say like follow 1,000 people, and then once you hit that 1,000, it'll automatically unfollow that 1,000. And it happens all at once, so like you don't have to manually go do it. It didn't used to do that. I used to have to manually go in on Saturday and say, okay, now it's done, let me go do that. But now it's all configured at the same time.
Hi, my name is Danielle. I'm a UX designer. So my question is, what happens after you have this much followers and how do you monetize it?
Yep, so I've done it a couple ways. I think I started off with having a phone call, and mind you, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, right? I'm just like, I'm getting followers, right? Then one day I was like, well, a lot of these followers are clicking that bio link, so let me see if I can like set up a call You know, and I just put a price on it, $300 to talk to me, right? People started buying that. So I started getting on the phone with people and I was having these conversations and I was telling them, you know, like how they can do, you know, basically automate their digital marketing. And through those conversations, people were like, yo, can you just do that for me? So then I'm like, okay, yeah, that's $600 a month. And then all of a sudden I just had this business, right? And so then I was taking all these calls and I was running this manually for all these businesses and I just got tired of it. And then I created a course. So my course now teaches you how to do all this. So now when I have those calls, I'm like, just go buy the course. I don't have the time. And now, yep. So now it's working that way. And I mean, like I said, I didn't know what I was doing, but it's working. Any other questions? Yep. Where do we get that course? The URL is unlockig.com. Unlockig.com. Any other ones? Cool. All right, thank you, everybody. Thank you.
