Instagram Journey | Weekly Updates

FOLLOWING!

Hey I am doing the exact same thing that you're doing. I am only about 3 days on my journey. Nothing special.

I have few questions tho:
-What niche is your IG account on?
-How do you group hashtags? Are you perhaps using a tool for easy grouping? Or you're just manually typing it in or writing it down?

I have few more questions but this will do for now. Good luck on your journey!

xraymundo said:

FOLLOWING!

Hey I am doing the exact same thing that you're doing. I am only about 3 days on my journey. Nothing special.

I have few questions tho:
-What niche is your IG account on?
-How do you group hashtags? Are you perhaps using a tool for easy grouping? Or you're just manually typing it in or writing it down?

I have few more questions but this will do for now. Good luck on your journey!

Click to expand...

1.
My niche is photography (nature/travel)

2.
I will write a small caption first and then paste the other stuff from notes. Just use a note app, I basically got my basic caption inside there (call to actions + some info).
I suggest serveral smaller hashtag groups, with some hashtags that would always fit your picture (in my example nature, photography, etc.) and some post specific hashtags (for example: mountains, forest, beach, etc. depending on the picture).

Just let me know your other questions, I will be happy to answer them!

Nice journey. Looking forward for more updates!

Wow! Your journey is amazing.

Short Update
As you know, I have been shadowbanned for the last two weeks. I just wanted to let you know that my shadowbann disappeared and my hashtags are working again.
During my shadowbann I was able to gain around 30 new followers daily, lets see how the following days are going to perform!

Currently there are more and more people tagging me in their posts and I am "rewarding" them with a shoutout on my story (which results in more people tagging me, because they want to get featured as well!).

What I did during the shadowbann:

• one quality post every day, without hashtags (use location tags to gain some extra traffic + post it with "new post" stickers on your story)
• no follow / unfollow activity (I don't plan to do it again, first I want to see if my organic traffic can reach similar numbers)

If you have any questions let me know! The next update is following on Wednesday!

Wednesday Update
Since my last update all of my posts appeared on the hashtags again, one of them got back to the old level of engagement. It reached around 1,5k people and got 300 likes, the other posts however got some reach from hashtags but didn't perform as well. I don't know why but I will try to figure that out and test different things.

What I am currently doing:
I am just liking posts on related hashtags, around 15 likes per hour. I completely stopped follow / unfollow and I believe that I am at a range where one of my next posts will reach the explore page (got some views from explore in the last two weeks when I was shadowbanned). Similar posts within my niche reach the explore page with around 300 likes and maybe one of my posts will get featured as well, we will see.

Stats:

• 3603 followers
• 2925 following (will reduce that later, but want to give the account some time to settle)
• between 180 and 300+ likes, depending on the hashtags

Hi. Cool journey; thanks for posting. What sort of posts are you doing, please? Are you taking your own photos and posting them or what?

oneiros said:

Hi. Cool journey; thanks for posting. What sort of posts are you doing, please? Are you taking your own photos and posting them or what?

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There are two options:
1. I will download some free stock photos
or
2. I repost something from Instagram

I am currently not planing to do my own photos, since I can't offer the quality that I want to provide to my followers.

It will take a little more time to grow this account, I don't expect anything crazy, but my goal is 100k followers within the next 3 years.
And that should be possible!

Good luck on your journey op, following.
I have read somewhere that posting a lot of content actually increases your eng., have you tried that op ?

Nic00B said:

Good luck on your journey op, following.
I have read somewhere that posting a lot of content actually increases your eng., have you tried that op ?

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Sure! I tried to post 12/9/6/3/1 times per day so far!
The results were:

• 12 (or more): To many posts, most of the post were never shown to my engaging audience
• 9: Better than 12 posts, but I wanted to try if posting even less results in a higher amount of likes/comments
• 6: Was fine, but I messed up a lot of my posting schedule (I wanted to post less in the morning and more at around 3pm, but almost always forgot some posts in between) -> not regular, like every hour for example. Didn't fit me
• 3: Would be a good amount. I wanted to post at 9/10am, 3pm and 6/7pm, which was in conflict with my lessons at university (got no mobile data)
• 1: Currently doing that, because of the university stuff. I decided to create better, but less content and the feedback is pretty nice.

After all I could obviously reach more people if I would post multiple times a day, but my average engagement would be lower per post. Since I am currently at home due to the corona virus, I was thinking of doing 3 posts per day. I will let you know on my Wednesday update!

DrakeNekron said:

Sure! I tried to post 12/9/6/3/1 times per day so far!
The results were:

• 12 (or more): To many posts, most of the post were never shown to my engaging audience
• 9: Better than 12 posts, but I wanted to try if posting even less results in a higher amount of likes/comments
• 6: Was fine, but I messed up a lot of my posting schedule (I wanted to post less in the morning and more at around 3pm, but almost always forgot some posts in between) -> not regular, like every hour for example. Didn't fit me
• 3: Would be a good amount. I wanted to post at 9/10am, 3pm and 6/7pm, which was in conflict with my lessons at university (got no mobile data)
• 1: Currently doing that, because of the university stuff. I decided to create better, but less content and the feedback is pretty nice.

After all I could obviously reach more people if I would post multiple times a day, but my average engagement would be lower per post. Since I am currently at home due to the corona virus, I was thinking of doing 3 posts per day. I will let you know on my Wednesday update!

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What about posting 8 times per day ? Have you given it a try ? I don't know your niche, so i don't know if it will work for you or not, but i have seen a lot of meme accounts which MOST of them post 8 times x day after y time(after 6-7pm usually)
Give it a try, maybe 8 is the lucky number for the alg after all.

Nic00B said:

What about posting 8 times per day ? Have you given it a try ? I don't know your niche, so i don't know if it will work for you or not, but i have seen a lot of meme accounts which MOST of them post 8 times x day after y time(after 6-7pm usually)
Give it a try, maybe 8 is the lucky number for the alg after all.

Click to expand...

Everything after 3 posts feels to spammy for my feeling. I believe that it's fine and even useful for meme pages or at the start of my account, but my page slowly starts to build more and more organic growth.
My niche is nature photography / travel and for me the sweet spot was 1-3 posts each day.
Currently trying to figure out if I should post 1/2/3 times per day!

Wednesday Update
I decided to stay at one post per day, it gets the most engagement. I could probably upload up to three time per day, but I would rather have one post get all the attention than three posts with less engagement.
Today I am going to look at my hashtags again, I tried different hashtags groups + different amount of hashtags on my last posts. I am trying to analyze the post performance, measured on their likes+comments, after that I am going to create a new group based on the results.

Using between 15-20 hashtags got me the best results so far.

What I am planing for the next week:

• I want to start follow / unfollow again, but this time a little different:

1. Go to my last post and look at the likes -> follow people who liked the post, but do not follow me
2. Starting at 5 follows each hour for around 12 hours each day, going to increase the amount each day to a maximum of 10 follows each hour (don't want to over do it)

• Like some pictures on smaller hashtags, not on a fixed base amount (maybe 3-4 times a day)
• Stay at one post per day

I told you I was doing shoutouts for people who tagged me and I got great results. Sometimes I got some "big accounts" tagging me in their posts (66k was the biggest one I guess) and I notice a small increase of follows on these days.

Currently my organic growth is between 20-40 new follows each day. I want to increase this number to 50-100 new follows each day with follow / unfollow again.
Since last week I gained around 200 follows, I want to get back to 500/week. I guess I will be back to this number pretty soon.

Current stats:

• 3830 follows
• 2985 following (I am just following now, I don't want to get shadowbanned again, so I want to separate these actions)
• Averaging 247 likes / 7 comments (Almost back to my pre shadowbann stats!)

If you have any questions let me know, I will be happy to answer them!

Short Update
I believe I got a shadowban again... So, what I am going to do is:

• Stop follow / unfollow / likes for two weeks again
• Doing more story shoutouts again

I am also creating a new account just incase this one is not recovering well. I got a better username for the second account + my knowledge I gained so far. The goal is to get a backup account, I will set everything up today.
The second account is going to:

• follow some people, but stay under 10 per hour
• post 3 times per day
• have a good amount of interaction

Lets see how this goes!

Hi Drake,

Enjoying reading about your journey

I am trying to grow my account as well :

-around 150 follows and 150 unfollows
-like comments
-post 12 times per day
-use 30 hashtags per post (a diff gr per day)
-Stats: 800 Followers / 700 Following (avg: 10-20 followers/day and 3-9 unfollows)


Any suggestions?


Would you mind also go more in detail of you daily routine?
-What info did you put in your bio? Anything like f4f or l4l?
-What are your call-to-actions? Do you simply add them to your caption?
-What is your hashtag research method? Ex: #mountains and look at the suggestions 1 by 1?
-How did you make/let people want/know you do shoutouts? Ex: If no one asks, you simply tag a famous photographer? How does that bring or even alert his followers of your post?
-Do you follow from a follower’s suggestion list? And do you unfollow by sorting earliest?
-You likes/comments on other posts routine; do you simply go into #mountains and like the top posts and leave a comment in each? (dumd newbie here, but how does that help)

Thanks

JoshWhite951753 said:

Hi Drake,

Enjoying reading about your journey

I am trying to grow my account as well :

-around 150 follows and 150 unfollows
-like comments
-post 12 times per day
-use 30 hashtags per post (a diff gr per day)
-Stats: 800 Followers / 700 Following (avg: 10-20 followers/day and 3-9 unfollows)


Any suggestions?


Would you mind also go more in detail of you daily routine?
-What info did you put in your bio? Anything like f4f or l4l?
-What are your call-to-actions? Do you simply add them to your caption?
-What is your hashtag research method? Ex: #mountains and look at the suggestions 1 by 1?
-How did you make/let people want/know you do shoutouts? Ex: If no one asks, you simply tag a famous photographer? How does that bring or even alert his followers of your post?
-Do you follow from a follower’s suggestion list? And do you unfollow by sorting earliest?
-You likes/comments on other posts routine; do you simply go into #mountains and like the top posts and leave a comment in each? (dumd newbie here, but how does that help)

Thanks

Click to expand...

1. Don't you think posting 12 times a day is a bit much and would affect your overall engagement rate.

2. Try mixing up the hashtags every week, you could get shadow banned if you keep using the same hashtags for 30 days straight.

3. Do you plan on achieving the action manually or using a bot. P.S. growing the account manually is safer long term than botting.

My goal is to grow manually (thinking long term).
I'm thinking about posting 1-3 times now and daily fresh hashtags
Maybe that will do something...
Many of you reach the thousands in like a few months...I feel like that's so far away lol

SeunTheFirst said:

1. Don't you think posting 12 times a day is a bit much and would affect your overall engagement rate.

2. Try mixing up the hashtags every week, you could get shadow banned if you keep using the same hashtags for 30 days straight.

3. Do you plan on achieving the action manually or using a bot. P.S. growing the account manually is safer long term than botting.

Click to expand...

JoshWhite951753 said:

Hi Drake,

Enjoying reading about your journey

I am trying to grow my account as well :

-around 150 follows and 150 unfollows
-like comments
-post 12 times per day
-use 30 hashtags per post (a diff gr per day)
-Stats: 800 Followers / 700 Following (avg: 10-20 followers/day and 3-9 unfollows)


Any suggestions?


Would you mind also go more in detail of you daily routine?
-What info did you put in your bio? Anything like f4f or l4l?
-What are your call-to-actions? Do you simply add them to your caption?
-What is your hashtag research method? Ex: #mountains and look at the suggestions 1 by 1?
-How did you make/let people want/know you do shoutouts? Ex: If no one asks, you simply tag a famous photographer? How does that bring or even alert his followers of your post?
-Do you follow from a follower’s suggestion list? And do you unfollow by sorting earliest?
-You likes/comments on other posts routine; do you simply go into #mountains and like the top posts and leave a comment in each? (dumd newbie here, but how does that help)

Thanks

Click to expand...

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!

Short Update
My main account is on hold now, I am pausing any action except posting once a day without hashtags.

I want to update the growth of the second account daily. I will start with day zero for the setup and the first posts.

Account Two:
Day Zero -> 12 Followers

I am updating the number every time before I go to sleep. Currently its morning, so you can expect an update later today!

okay cool let's follow