Gaining Instagram followers can be quite challenging, especially in 2019. With more than 1 billion monthly active users (brands, influencers and personal accounts) you need to step up your game in order to grow your account and increase your following
There are many ways how to gain new followers on Instagram. Instagram itself has started to provide us with Instagram Ads with automatic settings you can manage directly on Instagram.
In this tutorial, we’ll be examing three strategies to find out what actually works, if you want to get followers on Instagram. By the end of our experiment, we will find out how many followers can be gained by:
- using the automatic settings on your Instagram Account
- manually creating ads in Ads Manager
- doing it the hard way; organically
Disclaimer: Do bear in mind that the test duration (24 hours) and budget are not typical for validating which method is the most successful one so your results may differ significantly.
Setting up the experiment
For our experiment, we used the Instagram account @slovenskobezfiltrov. This account shares posts of Slovakia’s beautiful nature. This isn’t a new account, but it was a long time since it had been active. The last post made was more than 3 weeks before the test begun.
Initial stage
Number of followers: 1331
The Instagram account used for the experiment was a personal one, so we had to switch it to a business one. Data from prior to converting to business account were not available.
For all campaigns, we’ll be using the same budget of 10€ and we’ll be promoting the same post. Each campaign ran for 24 hours.
Because you cannot measure the number of new followers in Ads Manager (it is possible in the promotion tab via the Instagram app), we decided to create each test in a separate time frame. At the time of the experiments, we did not perform any organic actions such as creating new posts, commenting, liking the pictures etc.
After the 24hour mark, we compared the number of followers before and after each test. Note that this might cause inaccuracy in the results.
Test 1: Gaining Instagram followers via Instagram’s in-app automatic promo (paid)
You can set up this type of promotion from within your Instagram business account. Instagram provides you with automatic settings by default. The campaign has Traffic as its objective and the users are able to land to your profile through the “View Instagram Profile” click-to-action button.
Objective: Traffic
Targeting: 1% Lookalike audience – Instagram Automatic,
Demographics: Slovakia, age: 18-65, men, women
Reach: 6184
Impressions: 8993
CPM: 1,11€
Number of likes: 491
Number of comments: 0
Number of new followers after the test: 19
Test 2: Gaining Instagram followers by setting up a campaign in Ads Manager (paid)
For setting up tests 2 and 3, we used the data from the insights in the business account to refine our targeting. This is why we chose to target users within the age group of 16-34.
Objective: Post Engagement
Targeting: all the people who have interacted with the Instagram account in the last 365 day, 1% Lookalike audience based on all people who have interacted with the Instagram account in the last 180 days,
Demographics: Slovakia, age: 16-34, men, women
Reach: 3558
Impressions: 4396
CPM: 2,27€
Number of likes: 595
Number of comments: 0
Number of new followers after the test: 20
Test 3: Gaining Instagram followers by setting up an interests campaign in Ads Manager (paid)
Since this profile is about photography, I wanted to target relevant interests such as Photography! Here is how I set up the campaign!
Objective: Post Engagement
Targeting: interests Photography – Must Also Match Slovakia,
Demographics: Slovakia, age: 16-34, men, women
Reach: 12600
Impressions: 13220
CPM: 0,76€
Number of likes: 948
Number of comments: 0
Number of new followers after the test: 32
Test 4: Gaining Instagram followers organically (unpaid)
Gaining followers organically posed a challenge as there wasn’t an accurate way to measure the results. In this test, we tried to gain new followers by interacting with other accounts for one day and we gathering the results after 24 hours.
Method: commenting, liking relevant photos of prospective followers, interactions with the followers, posting new photos, etc.
Amount of new followers after the test: 63
Summary
Unfortunately a campaign objective “Gain more followers” does not exist yet. This is why the campaigns cannot be optimized perfectly and the results are very hard to measure.
We tried at least to bring you some
At the end of the testing we had 1465 followers on our business profile @slovenskobezfiltrov. The last test would be just how many followers we can gain on our profile after reading this article.
