How do I get followers on Instagram? Experiment #7

I don’t know anything about Instagram.

I have friends who scroll through their feeds and keep tabs with the world before going to bed, but that’s not me. You’re more likely to catch me playing Minecraft when I’m on the ivory throne than checking the gram.

Well, okay. I did once set up an Educircles Instagram account to reserve the name and somehow magically got 316 followers. Not sure how that happened.

But, apparently Instagram’s a thing.

I have clients to use Instagram and I can see on their website that Instagram is leading to sales.

Then again, I have other clients who use Instagram and it doesn’t really seem to appeal to their main audience base.

So, knowing relatively nothing about the social media platform, I decided to see if I can get 50,000 followers.

Here’s what (I think) I know about Instagram:

• It’s owned by Facebook
• You can crosspost between Facebook and Instagram
• Facebook keeps on pushing Instagram ads when I want to purchase Facebook ads for my client
• Instagram is a phone (and tablet) app thing . But there are a few chrome extensions (like this one) that let you post directly from your computer.
• You can go to a website like RiteTag and get instant hashtag suggestions.

And Kim Kardashian has 173 million followers on Instagram.

That’s crazy.

Here’s what I want to know about Instagram

How do you get followers? Aside from…

• being an Instagram model. That’s not me. Yet?
• being a celebrity or reality TV star
• having another platform to promote my new Instagram account

How do Influencers make money on Instagram?

• Aside from sponsorship and doing paid posts
• I don’t think you can put website links in your Instagram posts, so it’s not like YouTube where you could have an affiliate link in the description of a video. I think you can have a link in your profile description, but I’m not sure how many people go there.

Is Instagram even a thing anymore?

• I know that everything is a thing. Apparently, MySpace is still around.
• But haven’t people moved on to TikTok? Is Snapchat still thing? I don’t know. I’m so old. Maybe that’s the last year?

Here’s what I learned about Instagram

My Instagram experiment: How can I get 50,000 followers on Instagram?

I’m not that interesting of a person.

But, my cat who lies around all day is very interesting. And cute. Because he’s a cat. Apparently that’s what the Internet was made for: cat videos.

So, we created an Instagram account for him.

The goal is to get 50,000 followers on his Instagram. And then at that point, we will get a dog.

At least, that’s what I told my kid. She really wants a dog.

Okay fine, we’re going to get a dog eventually anyway. (But don’t tell her!) The 50 K followers is just a smokescreen.

We started this adventure on May 25, 2020 with 0 followers.

Originally, it seemed like we were getting maybe 10 followers a day.

12 days later (on June 6, 2020) we have almost 600 followers.

We’re trying a few different strategies: Not sure what’s going to work yet so just tinkering around right now:

• Follow other accounts that have cute animal pictures and hope they follow us back.
• Follow new accounts. Instagram also has this thing where it shows who is New to Instagram so I’m following cute animal accounts who also are you like us. Who knows, maybe they’ll follow back.
• Follow accounts that already have a lot of followers and leave comment on their pictures. Maybe some of their followers will see our comments and then follow the trail back to our Instagram account and maybe follow us.

This weekend, I’m trying this to follow 2,000 new accounts on Instagram and hope that they’ll follow back to see if I can get 1,000 followers. Wish me luck!