- Aug 23, 2016
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Everything you need for Instagram growth in 2020 - Method, guides and tips
As you guys may already know, growing an Instagram account in 2020 has never been more difficult because of strict action limitations. Since things have changed a lot in the last year, here are some of my favourite growth methods, techniques and tips on Instagram for 2020.
BASICS
- Try different things, image posts, video posts, instagram Reels.
- Post valuable instagram stories every day or every few days.
- Analyze when your best time to post is, this can be found out by making your account a professional or a creator one and seeing when your followers are most active or simply tracking your post time history yourself.
- Engage with other users in your niche, whether it's popular influencer or pages, or ones the same size or smaller than yours, engage by commenting, liking and Dming.
Growth: FOLLOW/UNFOLLOW
This is the easiest growth method out there, and yes it does still work. Although, the days where you were able to follow/unfollow 1000 users per day and gaining 5000 followers per month are over. This doesn’t mean you can’t grow your account with this method, you just need the right approach.
Automation doesn't work very well in 2020, this is why I highly recommend doing the work manually. You will not get action blocked doing follow/unfollow and liking manually as long as you follow the limits and keep it safe.
Here are safe limits you should use when doing manual follow/unfollow:
Follow limit 3500 per month.
Unfollow limit 3500 per month.
This gets you a limit of total actions of 7000 per month. If you go over 7000 per month, you would be starting to put your account at risk of getting a block, compromised and so on. Distribute these actions as evenly as possible throughout the month.
You have 2 options to run your actions: Follow/unfollow the same day or only follow for days and then only unfollow.
1) Follow around 120 users per day, unfollow 120 users the same day.
2) Follow 250 users per day for 15 days, Unfollow 250 users per day for 15 days.
The result will be the same after 30 days.
Warm up a new account when doing manual follow/unfollow?
Many people will tell you that you need to warm up your account, I think they're wrong.
All you need is Clean IP and a clean device with no track history of blocks and bans and you will not run into any issues early on or later as long as you follow the limits. This applies when you do the manual method, it is different when using automation tools like Jarvee.
Personally, I haven't used Jarvee or any Public automation tool in a while because Instagram has been cracking down on all public automation bots and will continue to do so. I don't recommend you use them in 2020 because you will most likely run into issues, blocks that can possibly lead to your account getting shadow-banned shortly after.
What is a shadow-ban?
A shadow-ban is when your account is under the radar by Instagram, they detected unusual activities from your account and decided to stop showing your posts to your followers significantly. It can be deadly for your account, and it will take months to recover from a shadow-ban.
Growth: MOTHER/CHILD METHOD
The mother/child method is the most effective method to grow on Instagram in 2020, you can grow thousands of followers per month with this method. You can decide to do it yourself (difficult in 2020) or hire someone to do it for you (very costly) but if you are someone who wants to grow your account significantly and have good budget, it is totally worth it. No other current method on Instagram come close to mother/child, I'm thinking of IG ads or the Giveways method (I will not get into these 2 in this thread, because in my opinion are not worth it). IG ads are usually not worth it for personal brands, because they will cost too much for the results they provide. Also, it is proven that when you run IG ads, your posts engagement will decrease. The giveaways method; doesn't bring quality followers, followers that aren't niche related and it brings a lot of followers who will unfollow later on(This is just my opinion, take this with a grain of salt).
The mother/child method is the most effective method to grow on Instagram in 2020, you can grow thousands of followers per month with this method. You can decide to do it yourself (difficult in 2020) or hire someone to do it for you (very costly) but if you are someone who wants to grow your account significantly and have good budget, it is totally worth it. No other current method on Instagram come close to mother/child, I'm thinking of IG ads or the Giveways method (I will not get into these 2 in this thread, because in my opinion are not worth it). IG ads are usually not worth it for personal brands, because they will cost too much for the results they provide. Also, it is proven that when you run IG ads, your posts engagement will decrease. The giveaways method; doesn't bring quality followers, followers that aren't niche related and it brings a lot of followers who will unfollow later on(This is just my opinion, take this with a grain of salt).
What is the Mother/child method?
"Mother" being your "Main" account, the account you want to grow on Instagram.
"Childs" being Instagram accounts you create to redirect people to the "mother/main".
Step 1: Adding the "Main account" to the bio and tagged+mentioned in the "Child" accounts posts
For the first step you will want to add the Main account in the bio of all your child accounts, although you don't want to do it all the same day. I highly recommend you use "Spin Syntax" for all your Child accounts bios because you want all your child accounts bios to be at least a little bit different so that they can't be linked together. When doing this method, you always have to remember and do everything so that your Child accounts can not be linked together; different posts on each child accounts, different post captions, different bios and different DM's. This is called the "Levenshtein Distance"; it's a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences, you can read more about it by clicking on the link.
Step 2: Follow/Unfollow, liking posts of users in your targeted audience on all your Child accounts
The second step being running follow/unfollow and liking posts of users you are targeting, users that are in the niche of your "Main" account. Doing this you want to make sure you use the same follow limits as the "Follow/unfollow method mentioned above".
Step 3: Direct messaging every New Followers of your Childs
Here is an example of message you can send to the new followers of your child accounts, a message that will make the childs followers want to follow the main account, you have to make it as tempting as possible. You have to be creative with it to optimize the followers to main ratio. You don't want to only say "thanks for the follow, also follow the main account @xxx" you need to try your best to bring some kind of value to the other person, or tell them why the should follow the Main account.
Here is a basic example:
Quality VS Quantity
Always remember, quality over quantity. It is much more sustainable to run 50 Child accounts bringing 10 followers to the main daily, then running 100 Child accounts bringing 5 followers to the main daily. It is a must that you optimize every Child accounts you have to minimize the amount of Child accounts you have to handle to achieve your target growth.
Sources
You will have to analyze many sources in your niche to eventually find the best ones to use. It's a critical part of the Childs method, having performing account sources, and well-filtered accounts to follow will increase you followers to main/per child ratio notably.
It has become quite hard to perform this method with Jarvee, but it is still possible when you do it safely and inbound of the limits. The best way would be having a custom tool for this method but it can be extremely costly and difficult to hire a programmer to build such tool. Again, if you have high budget for IG growth, you can hire someone who will perform the method for your account.
HASHTAGS
How to find the best hashtags for your account?
When choosing the best hashtags you will have to do a lot of testing until you find hashtag combinations that work well for your account. Top hashtags are usually ones you don't want to use, you want to go for the medium-sized ones in Your Niche. (See pictures) After you choose an hashtag, you want to click on a post that has been getting a lot of engagement for the size of their account. This means the post has hit explore page, partly because of their hashtags, and some of the hashtags used are most likely great hashtags to use at the moment for your account as well.
You then repeat this process until you have around 100 hashtags from different pages of the top hashtag page. Make sure you don't have duplicates, use a "remove duplicate website" to remove duplicates here is a website you can use that will remove your duplicates. (https://www.tracemyip.org/tools/remove-duplicate-words-in-text/)(not affiliated)
Once you have 100 unique hashtags, test different variations of the 100 hashtags together for a few days, see if some of your posts get more engagement then others to find out winning combinations. You should use in between 20-30 hashtags on every posts.
A question that comes up often regarding hashtags is whether you should put the hashtags in the Caption or the Comment section.
In my opinion, it’s better to put them in the caption and it has been proven to get you a better chance of reaching the hashtags top page and explore page when done so. Although It is cleaner to put them in the comment section and can also work as well. Many people will claim that putting them in the comments doesn’t work, but it does work, does it work equally as putting them in the caption? It is for you to do the testing.
POSTING VIRAL CONTENT
This section only applies to niche Instagram pages, not for personal brands.
It is very easy to use, simply go on a Instagram page and click download top posts as seen here:
I have used this exact tool before and it works very well to find the most engaged posts of every pages, aka viral content.
CAPTIONS
Posts captions are quite simple, but also very important and you have to be creative with them. In your posts captions, you want to write something that will make people comment on your post as much as possible. Here I’m not talking about “Dope Or Not”, “Yes or No?” like many Instagram pages do, you have to be more creative and have people engage more on a personal level and highly relevant to your niche and subject.
Here is a great example of what I am talking about, a controversial caption is a great way to have your followers engage with your posts, here you can see the caption question "Ferrari or Lamborghini?" which will make people comment their choice and argue which one is best in the comment and boost your engagement and possibilities of reaching the explore page. High post engagement(likes and comments) = more chances your post has to hit the explore page.
HAVING A CLEAN USERNAME, GOOD BIO AND PROFILE PICTURE
If you plan on growing an Niche Instagram page, your Instagram handle can help you a lot with it. When you have a “clean username” on Instagram your account gets recommended and is seen by more people when at the top of the search bar. Although, these usernames can be very costly and in the thousands of dollars so your alternative is to find the best one available while keeping it clean. Always try to keep your username as short as possible with no symbols and related to your niche. Also having a good and clean bio, without overdoing it, here is a great example of good username/bio/profile picture for the dog niche account(not affiliated)
The username is great because it has the word puppy with something random "wee" but it goes very well together, especially for the puppies niche and
the bio is well-made and simple. You should try to do something like this for your niche page.
This is all I have for you guys today, I hope you found this thread helpful. All the information provided in this thread are from my 5 years of experience on instagram and I hope it can help at least a few people out!
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