how to grow Instagram userbase?

Hello BHW.

Background:
We make t-shirts, we sew them from scratch, then embroider with images of dogs (designed by a very talented girl). Every month, based on sales results, we give funds to charity, we support a shelter for animals.

The people's web:
Mostly the story is shared by a word of mouth. It all started just with friends as buyers. The quality is very good and the drawings are nice. So within some time, we understood there is a demand, people like it and want it. If so, we should give what they want.

Going digital:
We started an IG account, hired a photographer and made outstanding pics. We have near 400 subs, we only follow 2 people. We get near 10% of likes, barely comments. People DM us to ask the price and how to order. This is it.

What I know about IG:
I can follow people hoping they will see the account and will follow back, same with comments.

What I don't know:
How many people can I follow, or how many comments can I put, to not be banned. What is more important I do not know how to use stories to gain extra attention. What bot should I use and for what? Do I need a bot in the first place? How do I automate this?

Help I need from you:
What should I do to make this grow? What services or solution should I use? I only know Jarvee, never tried. Any suggestions are appreciated, ideas either.

As is:
I have a job and not that much free time, all this I do as a hobby, for now, I invest my personal funds (July ended up -$400 for me, I have unsold inventory). I understand I need to transform, otherwise, I will stop doing what I do.

I appreciate your involvement and help.

P.S. A few pics of our t-shirts attached.

Need to follow 80-90 each day once you will have 1k followers focus on the content quality I mean to publish the viral post. Slowly your followers increase also you use some telegram group for engagement so initially within 30 minutes your post boost into the Instagram algorithm. After 5k followers publish more content means 6 to 8 post a day. You will reach 3k followers a day if you will able to viral post so much each day. With this method I have grew beauty page to 35k targeted followers within a month.

PS: I don't know its work in the dog niche or not. So test this method first.
As far as automation tool is concerned now a day everyone facing problem to grew followers base via auto piolet mode.

summi said:

Slowly your followers increase also you use some telegram group for engagement so initially within 30 minutes your post boost into the Instagram algorithm.

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could you please say a few words about telegram groups and how should I deal with it?

Is there a particular tag or #__ in the comments you would use to generally get it out to as many people as possible?

More followers...

Advertising Manager said:

Is there a particular tag or #__ in the comments you would use to generally get it out to as many people as possible?

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thx for the note. will think about it

Domi01 said:

More followers...

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it is obvious =) but how?

Might depend on the post/pic content but there must be a small handful that will really boost it

1. Quality posts, respond to the comments on time, share that too in your other social media channels.
2. Try to follow some target audience's accounts on daily basis. they will visit your page and gradually followers will start increasing.
3. Freebies or discounts or referral programs also works good (like share this post on your story and tag 10 friends to get some X% discount or some X lucky random winner will get this this and this. or refer this page to you x friends and get the discount etc.)
4. You can also try some adwords in initial phase (note but must have a good amount of options for visitors)

Thanks, these make sense. I guess there's no easy way to do it, meaning a one click solution without a lot of work. I don't mind but hate getting sucked into social media for long periods

rax69 said:

1. Quality posts, respond to the comments on time, share that too in your other social media channels. ​

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First of all, thank you for your suggestions. It means a lot.
Yesterday I started following people. I have chosen a photographer, I open people who have liked his post and simply follow them. I followed 62 people and only 2 followed back. Strange thing, I got another 6 follows from random people after 6 hours from that. Never happened before.
The question is, when I make a post in IG, can I use chare to FB button, or it is better to make a separate post in FB. I do not have any people in FB, I don't know how to grow it.

they are probably bots going around following people so don't worry too much about them. focus on the real people.

for facebook you need an account with many friends and then invite people to like your page.

good luck. the t-shirts look cool

So true on the Instagram bots. There was a time when I had about 30 people follow me in a few day period (week max) who all very similar if not identical accounts. And all were pics of mostly Asian women modeling in lingerie. I blocked all of them because I had a friend who had her account hacked around that time so was a little paranoid.

On the FB posts I could be wrong but I think it might be better to post a slightly different post. Even if it's the same content in the pic just a bit different. But I'm not great on the FB posts.

moneydateboy said:

First of all, thank you for your suggestions. It means a lot.
Yesterday I started following people. I have chosen a photographer, I open people who have liked his post and simply follow them. I followed 62 people and only 2 followed back. Strange thing, I got another 6 follows from random people after 6 hours from that. Never happened before.
The question is, when I make a post in IG, can I use chare to FB button, or it is better to make a separate post in FB. I do not have any people in FB, I don't know how to grow it.

Click to expand...

So, the return is coming to you. Sounds good. See, either you go on fb, insta or any other social media. As I earlier said, this is all about continuous engagement with the people. Sometimes this is not about selling products, it must correlate to selling idea.
Try to share your content by connecting it with current scenarios, use hashtags, tag people in it (but not extensively, either people will start unfollowing or blocking).
Put some Founder note kinda paper in your every order by mentioned your social media handler, so that people can follow you and can share that images by tagging you on their timelines.

And for you query related to connect with fb, this depends, I can't directly guide you before analysing.

See, 10000's of ways to be active in your targeted audience, just explore other brands how are they doing. This is all about observation and do practicing. 1000 ways to fail but 10 will definitely work.

Best of luck.

Gary V talks a lot about increasing your loyal follower base. Basically it boils down to investing 6-9 hours of your daily time on commenting other people's work and engaging with authors with similar interests.

MIght be worth taking a look at something like HootSuite (I'm still looking for something to schedule my Instagram posts from a PC without having alerts on my phone) so when you have free time, you can schedule your posts for the week.

This way, while you're at work, your social media pages still have content being posted automatically (once scheduled).

Having successfully grown & monetized multiple IG accounts to lots of followers, here are my top tips for gaining followers fast:

~ Networking is a really good way to get followers. Find other accounts similar to yours with large amounts of followers and ask them to do shout out for shout outs. If you're able to do one of these every day or two with different accounts you can really super charge your followers fast with people who are genuinely interested in your account.

~ Make sure to do hashtag research and see which hashtags relevant to your account are trending and try to use them in each post you make. Periodically check the top trending posts for popular hashtags in your niche, and open the comment section. Love all the top level comments. This will send a notification to everyone and possibly get them to follow you.

~ Finally, the good old fashioned follow/unfollow method is still around because it works. Find large accounts in your niche and open their latest post. Open the list of people who liked the post and follow those people. Reason it's better to follow these people rather than just going and following the accounts followers is they are proven post engagers and are more likely to enage with your content too. Try not to use 3rd party to automate this as you will eventually get banned. Commit 30 mins to doing this each day and after a few weeks you will see results. Follow no more than 50 people every half hour.