Figuring Out Instagram

[Andy Black]

Ooo. A mini-milestone.

My first retag or whatever they're called. Interesting that it's for the caption/post part, and not the image/quote part.

Also... I remember writing this really quickly and thought I might have been too specific about the examples I used. Maybe that's exactly why it appealed though?






Oh, I see my post "reposted" to his "wall". (Argh... I don't know the terminology!).

Interesting, because I thought over the weekend that I should rename my account to be more for freelancers and less about business quotes.

 

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[Andy Black]

Don't know what day I'm on, but 19 posts, 79 followers.


I really don't like Instagram

I've lost the will to live with the inane comments and the platform in general.

I don't want to reply to bots. I don't want to read comments to try and work out which was an auto-comment and which was genuine.


The icing on the cake was what I saw yesterday though.

• The phrase is wrong.
• Double tap (like) if you agree?!?
• WTF is this?

I'm totally over this experiment, but I'm going to keep going till I've reached 100 followers because then there's apparently additional stats we get in our IG business account.

I'm glad I discovered Buffer. It can post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Now that I've created 19 posts, I will start looking at posting on those platforms and seeing whether that's a better use of my time.

Once I get to 100 followers on IG then I'll have a play with some of those bots myself. Not auto-commenting as I see how super annoying it is, but maybe auto-follow/unfollow and auto-like just to see if getting people to view the the posts I have is enough for them to stick around.

Maybe it's a good platform to get in front of consumers, and maybe as a producer I should get my head round it. I just think me and folks who consume on IG don't have much in common? Maybe I'm totally in the wrong vertical and it's overrun by BS. Maybe checking out gardening, recipes, or fishing would help. I'll go do that over the weekend.


On a more positive action taking note...

I changed the font in today's post as it seems the others aren't so easy to read.

 

[LoneWolf21]

Thanks man I should of checked back sooner. I’m on it!

 

[MikeS]

I started an Instagram account for similar purposes about a week ago and it is not that hard to get 30+ follows a day in the beginning.
From what I learned up to this point is that you have to figure out what is the right time to post, do 2-3 posts a day (depends on activity) and to get new followers find pages that are doing similar stuff and start following people that are following these pages. People usually check out profiles of other people or pages that follow them so that is a good way to make them check out your page.
By the way, Instagram has some sort of threshold so you get some sort of "cooldown" for following too many people at once for few minutes, so I recommend following around 10 people at a time and always wait for about a minute before you start following again.

 

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[Late Bloomer]

Maybe it's a good platform to get in front of consumers, and maybe as a producer I should get my head round it. I just think me and folks who consume on IG don't have much in common? Maybe I'm totally in the wrong vertical and it's overrun by BS. Maybe checking out gardening, recipes, or fishing would help. I'll go do that over the weekend.

I'd always seen as it a place for consumers to consume fluff that's fun and entertaining in the moment... not to find inspiration, or ideas that might require some actual thought and work to apply.

You're going to continue with your experiment?

 

[Andy Black]

I'd always seen as it a place for consumers to consume fluff that's fun and entertaining in the moment... not to find inspiration, or ideas that might require some actual thought and work to apply.

I think it is certainly a place for people to get inspiration. Photos of people with lifestyles they'd like, bodies they aspire to have, meals they want to cook, people they'd like to be friends with. I'm just a bit jaded by the big inspirational quotes accounts that post garbage.

You're going to continue with your experiment?

Totally. I'm learning about the platform, and about the consumer mindset that I don't get to see so upclose because I'm B2B.

I'm getting to drop all my quotes somewhere too.

And I'm developing my own processes that suit the way I work. It remains to be seen whether I can generate email signups and sales from that process.

If I can figure out a way to post good content and build a following, without having to be on Instagram 24x7, then that process can be used for other projects, and for clients too.



RECAP:

• My initial targets were to post once a day to get into a rhythm.
• I quickly found IG is over-run by bots, and that I personally don't like being on the platform other than to analyse what other accounts are producing and doing.
• I've discovered Buffer which allows me to buffer up 7 posts so I don't need to post daily, or even login daily (win!).
• Then I learned we get more stats when we get to 100+ followers of our IG business page, so that became an additional goal.
• I've iterated my templates a few times, and then archived older posts and reposted them with the new template and with more focused hashtags.
• I've listed about 100 quotes in a Trello board and have been posting one a day to Buffer.
• I'm posting daily, but would like to post 4 times a day.

UPDATE:

• I've hit 112 followers and can see additional stats. A quick look shows the black and white Mother Theresa post has had the most impressions at 543.
• The number of posts is lower now than previously as I've archived 7 of the coloured ones and Buffered them up to post as black and white ones.
• I've had no email signups, and still haven't installed Google Analytics on our landing page so don't know how many have visited. I'm not so fussed about lower down in the funnel at the moment.

NEXT STEPS:

Recycling Posts:

• It's dawned on me that I can recycle the posts. It's not like everyone who could benefit from the Mother Theresa quote has now seen it.
• If I have 120 core posts then I can post 4 times a day for a month, then recycle them somehow.
• I can post them with different hash-tags each time they're recycled, and maybe with a different image.
• If I get them all loaded up as black and white backgrounds, then I can pay someone to repost them with image backgrounds the next time I recycle them. All the content is there, and I've already an unwritten process whereby I use Canva to create a post, download it, upload to Canva, then copy/paste the previous post's caption plus new hashtags into Buffer. Maybe we can code this up to run from a Google sheet or something?

Rebrand from a Quotes account?

• I'd like to throw in other posts that aren't quotes. Maybe do what I do with my team and clients each Monday where we start a "W/C Mon 07-May-18" thread and ask what we're doing this week to move the needle. Something where I can engage real people.
• I can then direct folks back to the (non-personal-branded) blog I was updating.
• Maybe the opt-in form becomes an opt-in to a $7/mth or $9/mth email list? To follow along on my daily and weekly business learnings, progress, growth, failures, etc? Something quick for me to setup and do, and then see how it goes.

Figure out how to just view comments in my alerts:

• So I can quickly delete, like, and/or reply.
• Maybe there's an app out there?

Auto DM followers?

• Someone auto-messaged me when I followed them.
• It would be interesting to play with this.

Review the additional stats I can get:

• In particular, I see people posting daily stats where their number of followers is detailed. I haven't found that yet. Maybe it's via some other app?
• On cursory inspection, it looks like the quotes with more content in the image-post get more impressions? Maybe I add a bit more into the image and test this?

Start using some bots myself?

• I'd heard it's not wise to use any bots before an account is aged.
• I also wanted to get my hands dirty and "feel" what was going on on the platform.
• I'd be happy to just spend 30 minutes on this a week if I can.
• Using bots to follow/unfollow folks, and to auto-like, seems like a good way of just getting on people's radars. I check back to profiles to see if they're worth following back. I don't follow many tbh, but I can see myself doing it and understand the natural desire to do this based on plain old curiosity.
• Using bots to auto-comment seems like a good way to piss people off. I won't be using them.
• Auto-welcome new followers seems like a great way to start conversations with folks and find out a bit more about them and what they're looking for.
• I'd set myself a wee target of posting for 30 days consecutively (and then getting to 100 followers) before I considered using bots. I don't know how many days I've posted, but it's probably not far off a month now. And I've hit the 100 followers (until a stack of them unfollow ... haha).

 

[Andy Black]

I've moved away from it being a quotes account.
...so changed the name, URL, and website in the bio.

Created a new post for today.

 

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[Caroline888]

I love this thread! I am new on instagram too. I have 125 followers as of today.
I find that the instagram can be a great fun, I love posting pictures and keeping in touch with people. It's just my private account, I do not advertise anything.
I find that people who are posting quotes or advertising their services - have very boring profiles. That's why on instagram I just try to be myself.

 

[GatsbyMag]

I've accumulated 5k followers on Instagram in the past (last Summer). And I have friends with 500k followers.

Instagram is a great platform as a producer to post content because there are so many creative ways you can share a message. However it can be irritating to work with because you realize most people on the platform are just interested in looking at sexy bodies, luxury items (easiest niche to get followers in imo), exotic adventure, celebrities, memes and sugary foods.

Motivation as a niche is over-saturated. It only works if you are building a personal brand where you display pictures of your own luxurious lifestyle and add quotes that make people think it's possible for them to also drive a ferarri if they "double tap". Add some humor and other spammy content and you've got yourself a fast growing page. I suggest checking out Tai Lopez's IG and observing his strategy.

However, I believe there are people on the platform looking for genuinely valuable content. One of my IG accounts shared business advice from my own experiences, I received a lot of real engagement in terms of comments and followers. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to grow the page further and test how many people I could actually convert into email subscribers. I hope you get enough traction to finish where I left off.

 

[Castro]

Instagram is a great platform as a producer to post content because there are so many creative ways you can share a message. However it can be irritating to work with because you realize most people on the platform are just interested in looking at sexy bodies, luxury items (easiest niche to get followers in imo), exotic adventure, celebrities, memes and sugary foods.

Motivation as a niche is over-saturated. It only works if you are building a personal brand where you display pictures of your own luxurious lifestyle and add quotes that make people think it's possible for them to also drive a ferarri if they "double tap". Add some humor and other spammy content and you've got yourself a fast growing page. I suggest checking out Tai Lopez's IG and observing his strategy.

Exactly. There's science behind this as people look to Instagram for instant-gratification. If you can figure out a way to make people's eyes light up when they see your photos, then you've got a page capable of pulling in thousands of followers. The thing is, this might not be your intention.
However, if you can find a way to implement these things into your photos that would be a huge factor in helping you grow.
A suggestion would be to put your quotes over an aesthetic looking background that has something to do with e.g. cars, luxury, adventures, etc.
This is the sad truth, it's what people are really into. Although this isn't the point you're trying to get across, it can help you gain traction on Instagram, and maybe, just maybe, your follower count can grow big enough that there will be a select few who actually see the value in the quotes, rather than the pictures.

As stated above, the motivation niche is over-saturated, but it works. Just note that many people don't go on Instagram wanting to read blocks of text, their sole intention is to see pictures that catch their attention, but if you can find a way to implement such pictures into your post(the hook) then they'll stop and read the text(the value).

 

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[Late Bloomer]

From what you're all saying, it sounds like Instagram is the ultimate Team Consumer site. The online wish book all that most users would like to own and experience... without any work, if Santa would drop it off for them. But walking to the chimney is too much work, just put the gifts right in the lap and unwrap them for me, please.

 

[ThatGuyBemo]

From what you're all saying, it sounds like Instagram is the ultimate Team Consumer site. The online wish book all that most users would like to own and experience... without any work, if Santa would drop it off for them. But walking to the chimney is too much work, just put the gifts right in the lap and unwrap them for me, please.

That’s what makes it an excellent platform for selling.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

 

[Andy Black]

I find that people who are posting quotes or advertising their services - have very boring profiles. That's why on instagram I just try to be myself.

The quotes accounts are so annoying. I don't want to be yet another one, and I'd hope my quotes are more for people in motion than for those sitting on the sofa.

The accounts showcasing their products can be quite interesting I've since found. Some of them have very good imagery and I can see how they're used to sell their products. I'm starting to "get" Instagram now.

Instagram is a great platform as a producer to post content because there are so many creative ways you can share a message. However it can be irritating to work with

Tell me about it!

Motivation as a niche is over-saturated. It only works if you are building a personal brand where you display pictures of your own luxurious lifestyle and add quotes that make people think it's possible for them to also drive a ferarri if they "double tap". Add some humor and other spammy content and you've got yourself a fast growing page.

Yeah, I can see that.

I suggest checking out Tai Lopez's IG and observing his strategy.

Oh gawd... do I have to? From what I've seen of Instagram, Tai is perfectly suited to it. They're made for each other (or more likely he knows his audience and gives them what they crave ... kinda depressing but whatever).

However, I believe there are people on the platform looking for genuinely valuable content. One of my IG accounts shared business advice from my own experiences, I received a lot of real engagement in terms of comments and followers. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to grow the page further and test how many people I could actually convert into email subscribers. I hope you get enough traction to finish where I left off.

This is encouraging. I'll keep plugging away and see how it goes. I still have my 100 quotes to get written down. If IG isn't the place for them, or if I can't figure out how to use IG well enough, then just getting them all in one place so I can get a VA to do something better with them is a good thing.

However, if you can find a way to implement these things into your photos that would be a huge factor in helping you grow.

many people don't go on Instagram wanting to read blocks of text, their sole intention is to see pictures that catch their attention, but if you can find a way to implement such pictures into your post(the hook) then they'll stop and read the text(the value).

100%. I can see that I have to up my game. Except I currently don't want to slow myself down thinking of imagery. Once enough of them are written down with a simple and consistent background (maybe brickwork or something like that) I can get a graphic designer to go through each of them and beautify them for IG, iff I see the point in it. (My bad... iff means "if and only if".)

It could be that a lot of these posts end up on LinkedIn, or some other place.

Playing with a bot this afternoon. Not sure I've configured it right. It worked earlier today doing a few auto-follows. I'm not sure whether it helped. It probably did get a few more followers.

 

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[Late Bloomer]

I love this thread! I am new on instagram too. I have 125 followers as of today.
I find that the instagram can be a great fun, I love posting pictures and keeping in touch with people. It's just my private account, I do not advertise anything.
I find that people who are posting quotes or advertising their services - have very boring profiles. That's why on instagram I just try to be myself.

Caroline, I and some of the other posters here have been pretty hard on Instagram as the spot for couch potatoes. How do you and your friends use it? It is for everyday updates on life, or is there pressure to try put up something spectacular that will make everyone "ooh and ah" and get jealous?

 

[Caroline888]

@Late Bloomer I would say it is both. However it is important to be authentic
...and the quality of pictures and the content is very important.
It must feel "unique" in some way.

 

[Andy Black]

It's Monday and I posted last Tuesday.

I started playing with Twitter over the weekend and much prefer that as a platform to post small text messages. (Makes sense when I say it now eh?)

I left the Instagram bot to work for a week and forgot to Buffer up posts for some of the days in the last week.

It's been following people who follow various names I entered. I totally forgot to do the unfollow part, so that's why I'm following so many now. I've turned that on now so we'll see what that does.

I initially had it auto-liking posts but when I played with this on Twitter I was aghast (never used that word in anger before) at some of the tweets I had liked. I coudn't turn off auto-liking fast enough.

For Twitter I'm posting as me, so I'm not going to use a bot.

For Instagram I'm posting as a generic named account. I'm happy to run tests with that.


Here's a snapshot of the last 7 days in IG:

• The most important metric to me is the 201 profile visits in the last 7 days.
• Previously that was under 20 in the last 7 days.
• I presume a profile visit is a real person, checking out my bio and my previous posts.
• I don't know how many clicked through to the website, and I know no-one signed up to the email list.
• It's time to make a more enticing bio so that folks click through to the website (and setup some way of measuring they've visited - I've still not installed Google Analytics!).
• Once people are clicking through then the next step will be to figure out what I can provide them that's valuable enough for them to give an email address to get it.
• One step at a time...

 

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[Andy Black]

W/C Mon 04-Jun-18 (Week 9)

• I'm barely logging in or posting. Onboarding new clients is more important.
• Have left my bot doing the follow/unfollow thing.
• 196 profile visits in the last 7 days.
• I don't know how many clicked through to the URL in my profile.
• No email signups.
• Could do with having a better CTA in the profile, and some sort of offer in the landing page.

 

[Xeon]

This article will be of interest to you: Instagram Explains How its Algorithm Works in New Briefing

 

[Andy Black]

Found this nice tool: Linktree

 

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[Andy Black]

[UPDATE]

• I've not done anything with Instagram for a week or two.
• I've left my bot following and unfollowing folks.

Stats for the past 7 days:

• I've got an extra 80 followers (up from 590 to 670).
• 263 views of my bio.
• I don't know how many clicked the Linktr.ee URL in my bio (Linktr.ee doesn't tell me).
• 5 people clicked through from my Linktr.ee page to my site.
• That's a Bio-View to Site-Visit rate of under 1.5%.
• 0 email signups (ever! lol...)

Actions taken:

• I've made the bio more enticing.
• Linked direct to the homepage of my blog.

To do:

• Create a simple squeeze page to send people to, rather than a blog homepage with a wishy washy signup form on the right.

Other learnings:

• You can put carriage returns into your bio using IG on your desktop, but have to refresh on your mobile to see them. (?!?!)
• You can have up to 150 characters in your bio.
• This is handy to count characters: Character Counter / Letter Count / Characters Calculator
• Found another nice looking tool: Sell on Instagram: Create a Shoppable Feed Using Linkin.bio

 

[Andy Black]

Woohoo. One in a row.

Got my first email signup. Not sure if it was from people coming from Instagram mind.

Haven’t lifted a finger since the last update, so all those actions are still outstanding.

Current stats from the IG interface:

• 27 posts
• 732 followers
• 462 following
• 200 profile views in the last 7 days

 

[jcvlds]

Woohoo. One in a row.

Got my first email signup. Not sure if it was from people coming from Instagram mind.

Haven’t lifted a finger since the last update, so all those actions are still outstanding.

Current stats from the IG interface:

• 27 posts
• 732 followers
• 462 following
• 200 profile views in the last 7 days

Nice Andy! Congrats on the email signup


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

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[jcvlds]

Hey @Andy Black just a heads up that Instagram as of a couple minutes ago is temporarily blocking accounts that have a LinkTree link on their bio. Some tweets about it have confirmed this and I took it off my account and was granted access again.

Reasons unknown. And I don't know what will happen if IG will allow it again or not.. but if not.. a good example of building a business completely reliant on another platform.. no Control

 

[Andy Black]

Hey @Andy Black just a heads up that Instagram as of a couple minutes ago is temporarily blocking accounts that have a LinkTree link on their bio. Some tweets about it have confirmed this and I took it off my account and was granted access again.

Reasons unknown. And I don't know what will happen if IG will allow it again or not.. but if not.. a good example of building a business completely reliant on another platform.. no Control

Thanks. I switched from Linktr.ee to linking directly to my blog homepage a while back, because I want control of the landing page (even though I've not setup a squeezepage yet).

 

[Andy Black]

(Messaged to someone asking how I was getting on with my IG experiment.)

I literally haven’t logged into IG in a week because I’ve had no WiFi connection while on holiday in Spain. I know I've had no email signups as I'd get an email notification if I did.

I haven’t quite figured out the ideal post type for IG. I probably need to use better imagery, although with my black background I suppose I’m going against the grain and that could be a consistent brand thing.

I don’t engage in comments anymore. Too many fake ones. I may even turn off comments on the account. I totally don’t mind being contrarian with testing.

And I know Gary Vee recently Tweeted that if your sole strategy is follow/unfollow then it makes you a clown, but I don’t want to consume on IG anymore. Waaay too much drivel. It’s my least favourite platform. Twitter has more intelligent conversations on the platform.

I don’t want to put my face or name to my IG account. I’m not interested in building a personal brand in the freelance/entrepreneur space.


Current stats from the IG interface:

• 27 posts
• 836 followers
• 368 following
• 182 profile views in the last 7 days

That's a pretty consistent number of profile views in the last 7 days. A squeeze page is needed to convince people to enter their email addresses. Still not enough of a priority to do though.


EDIT: I did have a second email signup a couple of weeks ago. I had a short email conversation with them. Pretty cool really.

 

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[surfer92]

Great thread Andy.
I started a new instagram account on friday to test out some of the tools mentioned above.
I really enjoy using "Buffer" to have posts made in advance.
Have you thought about promoting your posts to send people to your website?

 

[Andy Black]

Great thread Andy.
I started a new instagram account on friday to test out some of the tools mentioned above.
I really enjoy using "Buffer" to have posts made in advance.
Have you thought about promoting your posts to send people to your website?

Yeah, buffer is great.

I’m not going to promote posts on Instagram to send people to a squeeze page. Not before I’ve done it using paid search first.

I don’t think too much of the consumers on Instagram and can’t imagine business owners spending time on it other than to use it as a marketing channel.

 

[Andy Black]

[UPDATE]

I literally forgot I had this running in the background.

Current stats:


No email signups for ages, but then I'm sending people to a blog where I removed the email signup form.

I've just linked to my Substack newsletter that I built in my Paid Email Newsletters progress thread

 

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[Frosting]

Hi Andy, I enjoyed reading this thread - are you still using Insta?

 

[Andy Black]

Hi Andy, I enjoyed reading this thread - are you still using Insta?

Thanks for reading @CreatingValue. Glad you enjoyed it and I hope there were some breadcrumbs.

I’m just letting my bot do it’s thing. I’m at about 1,300 unengaged followers. I should setup auto-DMs for people who follow, but I’m not that fussed. My bio leads to my paid email newsletter at the moment. It should really lead to a free email course or something first.

I don’t mind paying $20/mth for my tool because I can see how having a proper content marketing strategy and then adding a bot on top of it would be powerful.

The freelancing, make money, entrepreneurship space on Instagram makes my skin crawl. So much spam and 3rd level gurus as Lex would call them.

I will use what I’ve learned for a few clients/prospects and see if I can help grow their wedding venue business etc.