On January 8th, I officially started CREATR by opening the Instagram account @Creatrbrand. Today is January 25th and the account currently has 467 followers. This is not exactly meteoric growth, but I’m happy with it. Instagram is an amazing platform and it’s growing rapidly. According to Hootsuite, 500 million people use Instagram every day and 1 billion people use Instagram every month. Also according to Hootsuite, Instagram users will spend an average of 28 minutes per day on the platform and 200 million users visit at least one business profile per day. Instagram now qualifies as a major media company. For comparison, a recent Forbes article notes that according to Nielsen, ABC’s World news Tonight with David Muir was the most watched broadcast evening newscast for the 2018-2019 season with a total audience of 8.609 million viewers. The Rock, AKA Dwayne Johnson, currently has 169 million Instagram followers and his latest post got almost 3 million likes. Enough said.
So, If Instagram is such a key platform, how do you grow your account? How do you attract followers and build an audience. I’ve been all over the web looking for answers to this question and while there are no silver bullets, I think I’m on to some of the key principles to Instagram growth so take notes…
First, you have to carefully consider and decide what your page will be about. Part of the key to Instagram growth is focusing in on a specific audience and then delivering a ton of value. Pick a focused niche.
Second, and somewhat related to the first tip is to really think about what your brand is. What do you stand for? What is the voice of your content? What is the visual style of your content? Generally, CREATR Instagram content is either amazing creative work shared form other accounts or Inspirational and thought provoking quotes that we design. The quotes have a specific style, always on a black background and always with the same font and color gradient fill on key words. I’m trying to establish what the CREATR brand is. Some photographers are also great at posting images that all have similar editing done to them so that although they may be of very different subjects, they feel cohesive and appear to have a single style thread connecting them all.
Third, you need to post incredible content. According to Nathan Chan, CEO of Foundr magazine and Instagram wiz, you should use what he calls the Unicorn strategy. This entails going to other popular pages similar to yours and reviewing their content. before you screen shot something (always giving the author credit of course), consider how many likes and comments each post has received. This essentially gives you a bulletproof means of knowing how well the content will perform when you report it. if you like a creators content and think it will resonate with your audience, look for their absolute best posts and then report it.
Next, you need to ask for the engagement that you want. if you just post a beautiful image or video, don’t expect a ton of comments. if you post a beautiful image and in the description you ask your audience a direct question, you greatly improve the chances that someone will comment. I posted the image below asking if AI will eliminate graphic designers and then said “TRUE OR FALSE?” right in the graphic. This promoted 49 comments, my highest engagement on almost any post.
Another key aspect to think about is your posting frequency. When I first started on Instagram, many people cautioned me about over posting. However, posting at least twice a day, in the morning and the evening, is critical to getting your account in front of more people. I’ve been posting 4-5 times a day with @creatrbrand and I don’t think my audience is getting tired of the content. As long as the content is great, I don’t think posting too much will be an issue. The manual nature of posting on Instagram and the tedious process of adding hastags means that you almost can’t post more than 5 times in a day unless Instagram is your full time job.
I hope these tips are helpful to you and I hope you keep creating on Instagram and other platforms. We live in such an incredible time when you creatives can get their work in front of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people just by understanding and leveraging the power of social media. Keep creating!
Resources:
Sources:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2019/09/25/abcs-world-news-tonight-posts-largest-lead-over-nbc-in-23-years/#50d1fa0d1381