Are you finally ready to learn a full-proof strategy to
gain free organic Instagram followers? Hopefully, you've read through our articles and already have everything set up and ready to go. If you haven't, please refer to our previous articles, especially the
"Hacking Your Instagram Growth"series. Today, I'll show you one of the strategies we've used. That's right, this is something that is proven to work, and if you implement it as written (or you can add your tweaks and twists), the results are guaranteed.
Unlike our previous tips and guides, this strategy is an active strategy and involves you actively engaging with other users on Instagram. I'd like to note that this is the first part of a two-part series about this strategy as we have a lot to cover and I don't want to leave out anything important. I'm sure by now you're excited and can't wait to learn more, so let's get right into it.
The Strategy
First, I'll start with what the actual strategy is. It's pretty simple, you engage with targeted accounts and their followers and by doing so bring them to your account. If you've already set up your account as I told you in previous articles, you should be getting follow-backs, likes and comments once people start coming to your profile. Furthermore, you'll start appearing as suggested content to the followers of those accounts, and the whole thing will spiral out of control until you're the next Kim Kardashian. Joking aside, the strategy is this simple and can bring fantastic results and free organic Instagram followers. The main obstacle is finding the right accounts to target and avoiding the bad ones.
Now, while choosing the right accounts to target is important, it's also important how you interact with said accounts. You want to come off as genuinely interested in the user's posts, and I'll talk about that in the next article. This article will focus solely on finding the right sources to target. The next one will be focused on filtering the accounts you get from sources and putting it all to work.
To find people to interact with, we're going to have to find a quality source account. A source account is an account with a large number of followers who are interested in a certain niche(the niche the source account is in). Somebody has already done the hard work for you and gained those followers, now it's up to you to choose the best accounts to reel them in. The good thing about this strategy is that you already know that those people are interested in the niche. Otherwise they wouldn't be following the source account. As you can imagine, the key here is finding good source accounts and filtering their followers to maximize the chance of them following you.
Targeting: Crucial to Gain Free Organic Instagram Followers
To start with, we'll need good source accounts. You will have to spend time on this as this is the most important step to making our strategy work. Lack of effort on this step can seriously hurt your follow-back ratio and make you waste time interacting with the wrong accounts, so don't half-ass it. Through numerous trials and tests, we've figured out a few things all good sources have in common. If you stick by these rules, you're guaranteed a decent follow-back ratio. However, after becoming more experienced, you should split test and see which sources work best for you and try to find more of them.
Source account size
The first and easiest filter we can apply is follower count. It's important that the source has a decent amount of followers so that you can filter those followers later. However, too many followers and the account can become irrelevant to your niche. When an account is very popular, people follow it for various reasons, which can be totally unrelated to you and your account. A nice middle ground is finding sources which have between 50.000 and 250.000 followers. You can go a bit higher if you want to, but I wouldn't go any less than 50.000.
Source account engagement rate
Another important metric to keep in mind is the engagement rate of the source accounts. As you probably know, some people buy Instagram followers for their accounts. This is wrong and will hurt the account for which the followers are bought, but people still keep on doing it. They used to do that so they can sell the account for a higher price or so they can charge higher rates for shout-outs. However, these days, I'm not sure how many people get fooled by the follower count alone, but you won't be one of them, that's for sure. That's one of the reasons to watch for the engagement rate of source accounts.
Another reason is that you want highly engaged and passionate followers. Why? Because those are the people that follow other niche accounts and are very passionate about the niche. You can already see how that benefits you. With Instagram's new updates, engagement rates have plummeted, so what was once considered low is now probably average. Also, keep in mind that meme/comedy accounts have a naturally higher engagement rate since people tag their friends and everyone enjoys a good laugh.
As a general rule of thumb, an account with over ten engagement ratio is considered good by. You can easily calculate this by using an average engagement(likes + comments) from the last ten posts and dividing it by the number of followers of the account. Multiply it by 100, and you'll get the engagement ratio I speak of.
Source account language
While there isn't an option to check language, you can easily check the bio, account name and post captions. It's important that your source accounts use the same language as you, as using a different language can hurt your chances of getting a follow. Be sure to check the post captions, as sometimes everything is in English (name, username, bio), but the post captions are in another language.
Summary
We've talked about our strategy and how to find good sources to interact with. Stay tuned for Part 2 where we'll go over filtering the accounts, and I'll show you how to implement this strategy and gain free organic Instagram followers every day.
