How to reach from 0 to 20k followers on instagram

How to reach from 0 to 20k followers on instagram

Okay, so you now have a brand new account and need to build that initial momentum and get followers on Instagram. 

If you already have a business or a brand with a somewhat established community, then getting that initial following shouldn’t be that big of a challenge. Send out a newsletter to your existing customers, inviting them to follow you on Instagram.

Remember that when you want people to do something, you need to give them an incentive. In this case, a discount for your products to the first 100 followers could work just fine. 

If you don’t have an existing customer/follower community, you can turn to your friends, family or colleagues, and ask them to follow you. This is one of my personal favorites, because you can get the initial follower base quite easily even without posting any content (however, I’d still suggest having at least one post there to begin with), and if you’re one of those people with a large family and friend group, you might just hit that 100 followers quite quickly.

Also, if you have a brand website, you can capture any site visitors by adding an Instagram follow button, to be sure your audience knows where you find you on social!

After you’ve completed this initial step, it’s time to choose a strategy to get followers on Instagram and growing this base to at least a 100 followers.

Create an attractive profile picture, and an engaging and witty bio – don’t be afraid to throw some emojis in there if that’s something that would resonate with your audience.

If you have a link to your homepage, email subscription page, or literally any other brand link that could potentially extend the relationship with your followers, definitely add that as well!

Even if you haven’t properly launched your site yet, it adds credibility to your brand — it shows your audience that you’re serious about your brand to have gone the extra-mile and bought a domain. Ideally, you should have at least a “coming soon” page set-up with a lead capture.

But don’t sweat it — your Instagram page doesn’t necessarily grow faster by having a link in your bio. At this point, it’s more of a nice-to-have to start moving towards monetizing your audience, which you can totally do in the later steps as well.

When writing an Instagram bio, make sure to be very clear on what your account is going to be about. If you’re planning to launch an eCommerce business, then say it. If you’re giving away free marketing advice, let them know. Maybe you’re launching a giveaway for the first 100 followers? They should know about it. Give people an incentive to follow you, even if you don’t have anything up at the moment.

Strategy 1

If you want to take it one step further (and you always should), publish at least one post that looks beautiful and conveys your brand message. This will help you to get followers on Instagram, as it lets potential followers know what you’re about, what kind of posts can they expect from you, and gets them excited about your upcoming brand!

Once you have that initial traction, the following strategy will really give an extra boost to get followers on Instagram. Here’s what you do:

1. Identify some of the bigger accounts(50k+ followers) that are similar to yours or are in the same industry with the same target audience you’re trying to reach. 
2. Check if their followers are real (some great tools for that: Fameaudit, SocialAuditPro)
3. If the majority of their followers are real, open up their follower list and start following these accounts (I personally suggest to follow accounts that have a real human in the profile picture, instead of a logo)
4. Start checking who’s not following you back and unfollow these accounts. There’s plenty of apps for both Android and iOS for this exact purpose — just give it a search.

Ideally, at least 20% of the people that you started following, should follow you back. The more followers you have, the ‘healthier’ your follower to following ratio is, the more attractive your feed looks, and the higher the follow-back percentage is going to be.

Strategy 2

When you have identified these things, search where your potential audience hangs out and start delivering value.

Here’s some ideas what to do:

• Answer relevant YouTube comments
• Help people in relevant Reddit subreddits 
• Answer relevant Quora questions
• Talk with people on relevant Facebook groups
• Post content on relevant forums
• Write articles for blogs that your audience might follow 

These are just some examples of how you could be driving traffic to your profile and working to get followers on Instagram. Like Warren Buffet said, “Never depend on a single income stream”. So why should you only depend on the Instagram ranking algorithm to get followers on Instagram?

Now, this might seem like a lot of work at first. But once you’ve got the hang of it, it becomes relatively easy. Alternatively, you can outsource most of these things. Before you get back to watching Taylor Swift’s latest music video, let me just give you one last method – shoutouts.

You can agree on different ways to make the shoutouts. For example they can be as regular posts, video post shoutouts, or shoutouts in Stories.