Instagram Promotion Services

Why is your Instagram account growing so slowly? You understand your audience perfectly, regularly post viral content, and know how to use hashtags to your advantage, and yet there are no new followers. What could be going wrong?

The truth is that until you get your account seen, no one will notice your great content. Today I will talk about the techniques I usually apply when promoting Instagram accounts.

Instagram promotion using mass interactions

This method is known as mass liking or mass following. You like, comment and subscribe to somebody else’s followers hoping that they will return the favour. There are two ways to do it:

• Manually, though it’s very hard and time-consuming. Just imagine going through thousands of accounts every day tapping and double tapping the screen. That’s a sure way to rub your thumb sore.
• Using services like Tooligram, One Million Likes and others. They automate your work, but on the other hand, you turn to the dark side of the Force. This type of promotion is against Instagram rules.

There is a general rule for both lazy and hard-working Instagram marketers: if you subscribe, like and comment at the speed of light, you will get banned. So don’t go above the limit of 29 interactions per hour.

In order to convert interactions into followers efficiently you should create a detailed portrait of your target audience and segment it. Split it into groups in which people share behavioural or demographic characteristics, or a place of living. Then find users whose followers fit your description best.

For example, I selected as many as 100 channels to attract followers for one of my clients, a designer furniture factory in Moscow. I reached followers of their direct and indirect competitors: hip Moscow interior designers, creative studios, business accounts, blogs about DIY and interior design, expensive vintage boutiques, etc.

I had to do that manually, and as a result I got this Google Doc with lots of accounts.

I turned to mass liking as a promotion method, as I didn’t want to unfollow useless accounts on a daily basis. I interacted both with people who followed the accounts of competitors and those who liked their posts but didn’t follow the page. In order to avoid promo accounts I told the service not to interact with pages without profile pics, business pages, and accounts that had a link in the bio.

The results didn’t take long to arrive. From the very beginning my client’s Instagram had 40-80 new followers daily. In a month we reached 33300 people, and 1534 of them followed us. The average conversion rate was 4.38% with some channels yielding 14,15%!

Instagram promotion via Facebook

If you are familiar with Facebook ads, you’ll find this technique simple. To create a campaign, link your Instagram account to your Facebook promo page. To do so, go to the Business Manager Settings menu, choose Instagram Accounts tab, and claim the page you need. Then follow the usual steps: choose the goal, the budget and the right audience.

The final stage is to create a mind-blowing caption, and that’s it, you are good to go.

Promotion via Facebook has a wider reach than mass interactions. It’s a very helpful method for promos with a time limit. On the other hand, the cost per follower and per click here heavily depends on the settings and quality of the ad.

In my case, a follower acquired with the help of Facebook ads was 20 times more expensive that the one attracted by mass liking. 0.13 cents versus 0.007 cents. The choice is pretty obvious, I guess.

Contests

Contests with simple rules are ideal for quick promotion of your account. It was very easy to join Nastya’s contest: just post a picture of 2 double cappuccinos, add a hashtag, and tag the cafe to take part in a weekly gift giveaway.

We received 260 positive and neutral mentions of the cafe on Instagram. Every participant got likes from friends, hundreds of likes in some cases. So the total reach was even wider. And the competition attracted a completely new audience to the cafe. Of course it’s impossible to tell exactly how many guests came because of that very contest. However, it’s safe to say that at least half of the participants of the contest followed the page. However, keep in mind that with such contests you risk to attract lots of free riders. That’s why you should always be very clear about the contest terms and announce the contest on platforms with a large concentration of your target audience.

Working with influencers and arranging sponsored posts

Another way to get a wider reach is asking other accounts with similar content or influencers whose followers presumably are your target audience to publish your posts.

There are two ways to do it. You can negotiate privately with influencers or account admins. Choose the account, write a DM, discuss the terms, and voila, your content gets posted.

For example, not long ago I reached out to a young mom blogger and asked her to publish a promotional post about the cafe on her Instagram. And she literally did it just for food. In exchange for publishing our content she received a free meal in the cafe. The results came quickly: the post got 1724 likes and lots of comments, and reached around 20000 people in a day. We were happy, and her child enjoyed the food.

The other way to do it is through marketplaces like Sociate or Plibber. These tools publish your sponsored content on Instagram as well as on other social networks like Facebook, VKontakte, or Twitter. One service for everything, seems convenient. Right? However, the treat comes at a price: marketplaces are not free.

So, what should you choose? If you have an opportunity to negotiate directly with the account owner or manager, do it. If paying extra $3-8 is not a big deal to you, take a closer look at marketplaces.

How to choose the right account to offer sponsored content to

Some people think it’s a piece of cake. Choose any account with a billion followers, put the bait, and the job is done. And then it turns out that lots of money was wasted on just a couple of likes and one follower.

So what should you really do? First, only partner with pages that could be part of your target audience. Consider the interests, needs, demographic characteristics, and location of the page’s followers. Fans of successful businessmen are unlikely to find baby diapers interesting. If it’s possible, study the statistics of the account: reach, traffic, engagement. If the followers don’t interact with the page’s own content (few likes and comments), they won’t bother to change for you. Choose pages with most active audience and check them for bots.

The best time to post

There is no point in posting your content in a third-party account on Friday after 8 p.m., as by this time most people are already out there drinking wine. It’s also important to consider how frequent the page posts are. If new content appears every minute, your moment of glory won’t last long. Choose the time that is in line with the behavior of your target audience. For example, if your promo is targeted at young moms, the best time to post it is when their kids are asleep so that they have time to relax and surf the web. It usually happens at lunchtime or after 9 p.m.

Let’s sum up

There are several ways to promote your Instagram account:

1. Mass interactions with somebody else’s subscribers,
2. Facebook ads,
3. Simple contests,
4. Sponsored posts published by influencers and third-party accounts.

And if you don’t want your new followers to dump you in a week, regularly post interesting content and don’t overwhelm them with endless advertising. A smart content plan will help you here. In order to download it, fill in the form below.