Instagram Journey | Weekly Updates

[JoshWhite951753]

Hi Drake,

thank you so much.
That was super helpful and detailed.

Could you elaborate on this "I measure them by average likes and the total post count of the hashtag."
Any ratio, size intuition? Meaning, do you do something like ex: my account size is 1k, I choose hashtags that are around 1kx10 to x20. Then for likes, is it better a fast growing tag (10likes/hour) vs slow (0-1like/hour).

Thanks

Hey!
Nice to hear that you like my journey

First of all I would consider splitting the follow/unfollow in circles. (example: You are going to follow till you are following 2k account and then you are going to unfollow the account until you are at 500 following) Everytime I did both actions on the same day I got problems with actions block / shadowbans. Maybe do a two-week routine where you follow 100-150 people each day for two weeks and the same for unfollow the next two weeks.

Posting 12 times per day is fine at the start. People need to see your account, but in my experience I would try to lower that number at around 1k followers.

For my daily routine I do the following (currently on hold, because I got a shadowban again):
I would check one hashtag that I like the most, ex: #mountains. I would check this hashtag every few hours and go to the "recent" tab, there I am liking pictures where the person would notice my like (example: Post is only 7 minutes but got 0-2 likes. The person is definitely going to see that you liked their picture because the engagement is low. If it got more likes than "minutes ago" I would skip the post.) Also I did follow 5-10 people each hour, but since my account got multiple action blocks / shadowbans it gets another one pretty fast. That's why my account is on hold again, and I am not going to do it in the future. My new plan is to focus on shoutouts entirely now, because my account got to a decent size already.

In my bio I got the following information:
My account name are keywords, related to the account. After that I got this three lines in my bio:

1. A call to action for following. -> Why should they follow you (ex: "Follow for daily pictures of ....")
2. Call to action again. -> Remember them to activate the post notification
3. The last one is a simple -> "Tag us for a feature!"

I personally would not go for f4f l4f, because the people would not really engage with your future content.

My call to actions are in my bio, but I got follow and a "tag us" cta in my caption as well.

My current hashtag research tool is doing everything manually. Look up #mountains, scroll down a little bit and you will find smaller hashtags that you can potentionally rank for!
I measure them by average likes and the total post count of the hashtag.

For shoutouts I got call to actions in my bio+caption. I also try to post a story every other day that encourages my followers to tag me in their posts and in return I will repost them to my story. After my shadowban disappeared I want to dm 5 people each day, this is going to be my new method of growing after follow / unfollow. I do not tag anyone in my posts, except the original photographer if I "steal" their posts from explore!

At some point people will invite you to an "engagement group", you should NOT join them. They will most likely hurt your growth in the long term. BUT you can profit of them Go to the profile that send you the invite and look at their comments, it will most likely be a pretty high number. This are the people in the engagement group, go check the profiles and look for some that are similar to your profile, if they do follow / unfollow: Just go to their followers and follow them, they already got tricked by follow / unfollow once! They might do it again if you follow them. I got a follow back ratio of more than 50% with this method! And you will never run out of people to follow, since the engagement groups are pretty big.

I do unfollow by sorting earliest, but I would skip people that always engage with your content. I got several people that follow me since my first week and always comment / like / reply to my stories. These people are the most important and you don't want to lose them due to you unfollowing them!

Likes / comment can help you grow pretty easily, for likes I am always choosing posts with a low amount of likes. They will notice and maybe follow you. I am only commenting on posts if the person tagged me, I would go for a nice comment related to the post and at the end of my comment I would add "Thanks for tagging me!". People who see the post and read the comment, they might check you because they wonder why the account tagged you in the first place.

If you want to know anything else, let me know!

 

[DrakeNekron]

Yesterday I mentioned that I want to update the growth of the account daily on this thread. I decided against that, because I don't want to flood this thread with to much comments. I am still going to keep track of the growth, but I am updating it in my Wednesday post. Since I am writing a comment now anyway:

The new account is currently at 41 Followers after day 1!

Hi Drake,

thank you so much.
That was super helpful and detailed.

Could you elaborate on this "I measure them by average likes and the total post count of the hashtag."
Any ratio, size intuition? Meaning, do you do something like ex: my account size is 1k, I choose hashtags that are around 1kx10 to x20. Then for likes, is it better a fast growing tag (10likes/hour) vs slow (0-1like/hour).

Thanks

Hey
For the hashtags research I look at my average likes and take a guess at how many I could reach with only my followers. (For example: I was able to reach around 150 likes everytime with no hashtag reach)
Because this number is pretty small and the hashtags with a big post count are most likely not reachable, I am going to look for hashtags with a small post count (<1.000.000 but over 50k, something like 200k-400k was optimal for me).
Then I am looking at the top 9 and calculate the average number of likes (use excel and the functions in excel).

I am looking for the following average number of likes or a little more/less:

• 15 small hashtags (150 +-10%)
• 10 medium hashtags (200 +-10%)
• 5 big hashtags (just use any big one you can find, you only need to rank once at one of the really big ones to get the snowball rolling)

What I would consider:

• maybe use less than 30 hashtags, in my experience my post ranked better if I use 20 for example (just scale the numbers above)
• use some hashtags that are pretty general, in my case #photography, #nature_photography, etc. and some that are really related to the content, #mountain_photography, #seaside, #forest, etc. that will help Instagram to rank your account into a certain niche and the posts into the hashtags

If you have more questions let me know!

 

[DrakeNekron]

Wednesday Update
Hey guys! I am back with another Wednesday update.

first account = account I mentioned first in the journey
second account = the account I created last week

Since my first account got shadowbanned last week, nothing really happened. I gained some followers and lost some, but over the course of the whole week I was able to gain around 100 new followers without any hashtag reach!
Like I said, I wanted to create a second account. Just in case the first account gets problems with recovering from the shadowban. The second account is now growing with follow / unfollow, but much lower stats to avoid getting action blocked/shadowbanned. I also encourage my new followers on the first account to check my second account as well.

The following actions are for account one:

• 1 post each day
• 10-15 dms (Thanking them for following + check my second account)
• shoutouts in exchange for tagging me on their post/story (I will link their post)

The following action are for account two:

• 3 posts each day
• currently at 10 follows each hour (for 10-12 hours each day, resulting in around 100 people that I follow)
• I want to comment on popular posts, but did not include that at the current time

Stats for account one:

• 3941 followers
• 3051 following
• around 200 likes on the posts, without hashtag reach

Stats for account two:
I wanted to update the growth each day, here are the stats:

• Day 0 12 Followers
• Day 1 35 Followers
  
• Day 2 53 Followers
  
• Day 3 75 Followers
  
• Day 4 98 Followers
  
• Day 5 129 Followers

The likes are around 30 for most posts.

The next posts with hashtags on account one is going to be: Friday next week!
Let's see if the ban disappeared till then.

If you have any questions, let me know!

 

[Kuem]

Wednesday Update
Hey guys! I am back with another Wednesday update.

first account = account I mentioned first in the journey
second account = the account I created last week

Since my first account got shadowbanned last week, nothing really happened. I gained some followers and lost some, but over the course of the whole week I was able to gain around 100 new followers without any hashtag reach!
Like I said, I wanted to create a second account. Just in case the first account gets problems with recovering from the shadowban. The second account is now growing with follow / unfollow, but much lower stats to avoid getting action blocked/shadowbanned. I also encourage my new followers on the first account to check my second account as well.

The following actions are for account one:

• 1 post each day
• 10-15 dms (Thanking them for following + check my second account)
• shoutouts in exchange for tagging me on their post/story (I will link their post)

The following action are for account two:

• 3 posts each day
• currently at 10 follows each hour (for 10-12 hours each day, resulting in around 100 people that I follow)
• I want to comment on popular posts, but did not include that at the current time

Stats for account one:

• 3941 followers
• 3051 following
• around 200 likes on the posts, without hashtag reach

Stats for account two:
I wanted to update the growth each day, here are the stats:

• Day 0 12 Followers
• Day 1 35 Followers
  
• Day 2 53 Followers
  
• Day 3 75 Followers
  
• Day 4 98 Followers
  
• Day 5 129 Followers

The likes are around 30 for most posts.

The next posts with hashtags on account one is going to be: Friday next week!
Let's see if the ban disappeared till then.

If you have any questions, let me know!

yo we both hosting a journey good luck

 

[DrakeNekron]

Short Update
My second account is growing pretty nice and got no blocks so far. Also the reach is increasing and my hashtags start to work on the account too.
I am almost at 300 followers on the second account and I reached 4k on my first account.

Next friday we are going to see if my first account recovered properly from the shadowban. I know that everything will work out fine in the end and I know that I will reach my goals if I continue with this journey!
So far I got a lot of fun running the two accounts and it's motivating me to keep pushing and learning about the Instagram game.

If you want to know anything related to my journey, let me know!

 

[Matta28]

Great work!

 

[DrakeNekron]

Wednesday Update
Hey guys!
This week the posts of my first account got a decent reach from "location tags". This never happen before (I always got around 30 impressions from locations), but this time a good amount of posts got 100+ impressions and the best performing post got around 400 impressions from the location tag! I am currently reposting quality content from the explore page on both account and I guess this is the reason.
I will start to use hashtags on Friday again. The shadowban should be gone till then, because I did not perform any action other than posting content!

The second account is still doing the same action as previously mentioned. 3 posts / 1-3 stories / 10follows/h / some engagement on other accounts.
Currently I need three days to reach 100 followers, which results in a gain of 200+ followers each week on my second account. My first account is currently only gaining around 150, because I am not reaching new people since I am not using hashtags.
To this day I got no action blocks on my second account, which is pretty nice. I believe I found the "sweet spot" for my account.

The current stats for my main account are:

• 4069 followers (reached 4k )
• 3049 following (I am not risking another shadowban/action block for now)
• 180-250 likes on my last posts, pretty low due to no hashtag use
• I get tagged on more and more posts, which results in a steady growth -> 10-20 posts each day

Stats for my second account:

• 350 followers
• 1023 following
• Got around 1/3 of people following back, which is ok, but I want to increase this in the next week!
• I can reach around 70 likes on average

Followers updated each day on second account: (last day was Day 5 with 129)

• Day 6 153
• Day 7 184
• Day 8 217
• Day 9 254
• Day 10 277
• Day 11 318
• Day 12 341
• Currently on day 13 of the account with 350 followers in the morning

I hope that I can build a momentum on my second account to reach around 500 followers each week.

And these are my next goals:

• get the hashtags working on my main account + shadowban disappearing (I know I can really influence this)
• scale the growth on the second account to 500 each week. For this to work I want to look for better account for f/uf, create viral stories, get more people to tag me on their posts!

If you have any questions let me know!

 

[Gr33nSn0w]

Hey! I just started my Instagram account 1 month ago and I wanted to share my plans for the future progression with the account, numbers and current problems.

In the last month I tried to understand the platform / app and did some research on my niche. Then I created my account in the nature photography / travel niche and my plan was to start posting 9-12 posts each day + some stories with questions/polls. I am growing with follow/unfollow.

I settled for the following daily stats(9-12h/day):

• 30follows / h
• 1post / h
• liking the last 10-20 posts in my feed and leaving comments on bigger accounts

Problems:

• I did pretty bad research on my hashtags
• Solution: Started to look for better hashtags

• because I didn't know any better (never really used Instagram) I got action blocked pretty fast...
• Solution: Warming up the account and start with lower numbers on everything (except posts, I still posted 9-12 times a day)

What I am doing currently:

• I lowered the stats to: 14follows/h ; 25unfollows/h ; 3posts/day ; some engagement with the posts in my feed
• reducing the amount of posts each day resulted in a better reach (staying at 3posts/day for now), but it was useful in the beginning!
• hashtag research (again)

Current Problems:

• I can't seem to get the right hashtags...
• Solution: Currently trying different ones

The current stats after one month are:

• 1750 followers
• 2035 following

• reach per post is around 600-800 with 150-200 likes. (I believe I can push my reach with other hashtags, but got some problems to find the right ones)
• around 40-100 new followers each day for the past week.

I want to dedicate the Wednesday to my Instagram account, because I got nothing to do on Wednesdays. I will try to answer questions + update the post each week!

Good luck! Looks very promising. What's your main income from this?

 

[DrakeNekron]

Good luck! Looks very promising. What's your main income from this?

Currently got no income from this!

Later I want to do shoutouts and paid promotions with sponsors.
I plan on starting at around 10k followers with the first shoutouts!

 

[Gr33nSn0w]

Currently got no income from this!

Later I want to do shoutouts and paid promotions with sponsors.
I plan on starting at around 10k followers with the first shoutouts!

sounds good. 10k followers sounds about to right to start with that

 

[AAW]

Are you using IG app itself to f/u? if yes then how are you able to unfollow people without losing your mind with the double unfollow that IG implementing these days? I don't get it, why when clicking unfollow button I get another screen asking about the unfollow and you have to click that to unfollow, thus is pretty stupid! LOL.

 

[DrakeNekron]

Are you using IG app itself to f/u? if yes then how are you able to unfollow people without losing your mind with the double unfollow that IG implementing these days? I don't get it, why when clicking unfollow button I get another screen asking about the unfollow and you have to click that to unfollow, thus is pretty stupid! LOL.

Yeah I am using the app. It's pretty tedious, but after all it doesn't take more than a minute.
I am unfollowing around 10 people each hour, obviously its still pretty annoying but atleast I am not risking to much!

 

[AAW]

Yeah I am using the app. It's pretty tedious, but after all it doesn't take more than a minute.
I am unfollowing around 10 people each hour, obviously its still pretty annoying but atleast I am not risking to much!

so you are unfollowing 10 people per hour an how many people in general are you unfollowing and following per day? I’m actually unfollowing 20-30 at once then follow same number immediately and total around 70 f/u per day not much. My goal is to get people notice what we are offering not to get high numbers of followers.
I’m going to follow your journey as we both are doing it on the app itself not jarvee or ...
I’m going to re-read your journey again as I’m confused about your hashtag group and how you do it.

 

[AAW]

Also I forgot to mention that with my last IG post I changed some hashtags and off I saw increase in views! I was using almost same hashtags for like 3 month! This is interesting. I also started posting comments to some of the stupid ads that IG put on my page when the ads have 30+ comments as I figured people will read these comments and check you out like I get free exposure without doing an ad LOL. But of course I made my comment to look like a comment not an ad: like: wow thank you for posting this and this... what a great concept that we can use for our clients .... this will create some interests so people would think what clients and services or products these people sell ... let me check

 

[DrakeNekron]

so you are unfollowing 10 people per hour an how many people in general are you unfollowing and following per day? I’m actually unfollowing 20-30 at once then follow same number immediately and total around 70 f/u per day not much. My goal is to get people notice what we are offering not to get high numbers of followers.
I’m going to follow your journey as we both are doing it on the app itself not jarvee or ...
I’m going to re-read your journey again as I’m confused about your hashtag group and how you do it.

Currently doing 10 follows each hour for 10-12 hours each day, so a total of 100-120 followers. I am only following or unfollowing, but never at the same time because I experienced several actionblocks while doing that.
For now I am following. The maximum amount of people I could follow are 7500 meaning I will start the unfollow cycle after reaching 7500.

For the hashtags I am just using multiple groups of around 25 hashtags.
I am currently using two groups for my second account:

• research around 25 hashtags, put them in group one
• research around 25 other hashtags, put them in group two
• change the hashtag group every three days

More groups = more info (for example can I rank on hashtag #mountains?)

 

[AAW]

Currently doing 10 follows each hour for 10-12 hours each day, so a total of 100-120 followers. I am only following or unfollowing, but never at the same time because I experienced several actionblocks while doing that.
For now I am following. The maximum amount of people I could follow are 7500 meaning I will start the unfollow cycle after reaching 7500.

)

So why not f/u at the same time instead of getting 7500 follow and then unfollow all and waste time unfollowing? you can see the followers by date on the app, so filter it to older dates and unfollow these after may be 5-10 days? thats what I do, if someone don't follow you in few days they won't ever do, they only have 1-2 days to really notice you and follow back why are you giving them tons of time. 120 follow is pretty high as far as my limited experience, or what I have heard from top guys I know.

 

[DrakeNekron]

So why not f/u at the same time instead of getting 7500 follow and then unfollow all and waste time unfollowing? you can see the followers by date on the app, so filter it to older dates and unfollow these after may be 5-10 days? thats what I do, if someone don't follow you in few days they won't ever do, they only have 1-2 days to really notice you and follow back why are you giving them tons of time. 120 follow is pretty high as far as my limited experience, or what I have heard from top guys I know.

I experiences action blocks everytime I did follow+unfollow at the same time. Thats why I choose to split the actions. 120 seems fine for me, I got no actions block on the second account, if this changes I will update in this thread!
I could probably follow till I reach like 2.5k and then start the unfollow cycle, but I haven't tested this yet.

 

[DrakeNekron]

Short Update
The hashtags on account one are working again. I am now proceeding with my plan as previously mentioned.
I will try to do more shoutouts with other accounts similar to mine and I am stopping follow/unfollow!

The second account is close to 500 followers and is doing well!

If you have any questions, let me know!

 

[DrakeNekron]

Wednesday Update
First of all, my main account recovered from the shadowban. I stopped all actions except posting once a day and answering dms/comments while the shadowban was present, after two weeks the ban disappeared!
The reach is still a little lower than before, but it will get back to the old reach in some days. I am using two hashtag groups for both of my accounts, I change them every 3 days and use the other group for three days again.

My main account is still sharing posts I was tagged in, in the story. I get tagged in over 10 posts each day from different people. My second account gets tagged a little less, but I am not sharing posts on my story yet.
The second account is reposting 1-3 videos on the story each day, it's not much but I can consistently get 2 extra follows because of the story.

I mentioned that my second account is following 10 people each hour for 10-12 hours each day. So far I got no action block and the account gets a decent growth. For my main account I stopped all of these actions because I didn't want to risk another action block/shadowban.
The main account currently gains around 20 new followers each day through organic reach, which is pretty low but I look at my analytics:
I gain 40-50 new followers each day, but 20-30 are unfollowing, this means that the people from f/uf are obviously unfollowing and that's fine. I am fine with that because I am still gaining more than I am losing and basically my "fake followers" that I gained with f/uf slowly start to fade away and I gain more and more organic followers each day that are replacing people from f/uf!
This will also increase my engagement in the long run, since the people followed me on their own interest!

Main account:

• 4214 followers
• 3048 following
• somewhere between 150-250 likes, depending on the hashtags (sometimes the hashtags reach is pretty low, but I believe I figured that out now)

Second account: (last time we were at day 12 with 341 followers)

• Day 13 385
• Day 14 424
  
• Day 15 467
  
• Day 16 522
  
• Day 17 574
  
• Day 18 607
  
• Day 19 655
• Currently in the morning of day 20 at 672 followers

The current weekly growth is around 300, my goal is around 500. I just followed my organic followers from my main account with my second account, since they might be interested in my second account as well and the follow back rate got a bit better than before.

For the next week I have no special plans, I just want to get back to my old reach on my main account and reach 1k followers on my second account till the next Wednesday Update!

 

[AAW]

Wednesday Update
I just followed my organic followers from my main account with my second account, since they might be interested in my second account as well and the follow back rate got a bit better than before.

thanks for the update, how do you know your new organic followers on main account? Is there special app are you using to follow them on the other account? Do you all of this on the actual IG app? How do you decide which people to unfollow