Who thought getting followers was easy?
Okay, here’s a bit of honesty, I always thought that getting followers would be easy. I remember when I first started out on Instagram probably 9 years ago. Using tags such as “follow4follow” and “shoutout” used to get you thousands of followers, but this trick is long outdated. To get followers now, you have to actually engage, who knew?
When signing up to do this project I thought it was going to super easy, assuming that these tricks still worked, but unfortunately, I had to begin putting in the hard yards. To use one of my favourite 21st century quotes: “When you thought it would be easy peezey lemon squeezy but it’s actually difficult difficult lemon difficult.” Gaining followers is not easy and keeping followers is even harder!
To get followers, you have to follow a multitude of accounts, and engage with a range of people in your selected niche. So, for my Instagram I’ve been following other fitness focused accounts or yoga driven users. I go onto influencers pages and then go through their followers and look at those who I am aiming to target. It takes time. It takes effort. Hashtags don’t do the trick anymore.
We all know that Instagram is a social site, so to keep the followers that I gain I have to message and comment and like the content that is being published. This is not a five second task, it means scrolling through your own feed and the explore page to engage with a global social community.
Does everyone respond to you? No, definitely not. Do you find some bot focused accounts? Yes, you certainly do. Instagram has millions of users, and fitness is one of the most growing niches on the site. We now have to find new ways to engage with audiences, and keep followers interested in your content.
I’m having to strategize how not to be another fitness account, to find my niche, and to evoke interest. How am I going to do this you ask? Well keep following my Instagram experiment to find out as I continue to solve the algorithm to becoming an influencer.