Instagram Journey | Weekly Updates

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DrakeNekron

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Joined
Jan 31, 2020
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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! :)
 
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Interesting to follow! Good luck! Which bot do you use to follow and follow people? Because most public bots don't work well anymore.
 
Frozenhands said:
Interesting to follow! Good luck! Which bot do you use to follow and follow people? Because most public bots don't work well anymore.
Click to expand...
I just do it manually. Got the account I follow people of at the top of my search history and just go to their followers. For unfollowing I just sort my following for earliest and start to get through the list, if I don't recognize them I will unfollow them.
 
im pretty new to this, my question is will there be a backlash if you try to monetize your account with just those 2k followers?
 
nothinsnew said:
im pretty new to this, my question is will there be a backlash if you try to monetize your account with just those 2k followers?
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I am new to this aswell! I don't plan to monetize the account soon, what I want to do is selling shout-outs once I am bigger. Maybe I will try some kind of shop, but not in the near future.
 
Short Update:
Currently trying some new hashtags, seems like they do a lot better than my old ones. My last 3 posts reached the same amount of accounts as my previous top posts.

I did get a small action block shortly after creating this thread, but it didn't really affect anything. I just stopped follow/unfollow for a day and lowered the actions a little bit the day after.

My current stats:
  • 1866 followers
  • 2101 following
I am just going to follow a bunch of people for the next few days and stop unfollowing. I plan to start unfollowing again at Wednesday next week.

Goal:
  • reach 2000 followers till Monday morning
 
Another Update:
I will probably reach 2k followers tonight! So far I have tried 2 out of my 4 new hashtag groups and one of them did really well, the other one however got some disappointing results.
Tonight I will post a video, since all of my other video posts reached the explore page (only a few views, but still). My plan is to use the hashtags which provided a higher reach combined with a video post to see if I can push the reach even more.

Next few days:
  • I want to test the other hashtag groups
  • fix the hashtag group that provided bad results
  • try video posts with hashtags that were useful

Current stats:
  • 1978 followers
  • 2225 following
 
Wednesday Update
I dedicated the past week to try my new hashtag groups. I created 4 groups and tried them on 3 posts each to get some data for comparison. Out of my 4 hashtag groups, 1 performed really well and the other 3 did okay, but nothing above average. I am still happy with the results, because I got some more hashtag variety in there (was using the same every time before creating the new groups). I spent more time researching the group which performed well, so it makes sense that it was the best one. Today I want to put some more time into the other hashtag groups to make them work as well.
After trying the different groups I just used the best one multiple times for the rest of the week to boost my engagement a little bit (worked pretty good).

What I am currently doing:
  • 3 posts / day
  • 15 follows / h for 12 hours (180 per day)
  • replying to every comment

What I want to do:
  • put more time into the "bad" hashtag groups
  • try them on multiple posts again
  • update my profile bio and put some more call to actions in there (I want to add something like "Turn on the post notification" "Tag us for a repost")
  • write better captions (use more questions to boost the comments)
  • in the last days I tried to reply to every comment with a quality answer (not just emojis)
  • start with unfollowing again, I stopped because of an action block but I want to continue again. I will do 20 unfollows / h for 12 hours (240 per day)
Current stats:
  • 2326 follows
  • 2666 following
  • averaging 228 likes / 5 comments (comments should increase, since I started to reply to most of them)
  • engagement rate 9.33%
  • 50-112 follows for the past week each day (+80 for most days)
Goal:
  • optimize the 3 hashtag groups
  • I want to reach 2500 follows till Monday, but will most likely reach it much sooner
  • decrease my follow/following ration (with current stats my following should go down at 60 per day)
If you have any questions let me know :) I will answer them all!
 
Wednesday Update
Overall my posts performed pretty well this week, in the last 7 days only one post got less than 200 likes (posted yesterday, still growing) and around half of them are between 250 and 350. I am still using my "best" hashtag group to funnel some more likes/engagement to my posts, because I can't get the other hashtag groups to work as well (posts with the other groups still perform ok reaching 50% of people who aren't following me!, but the best groups gets around 70%).
Also, I got an action block again, but I am still able to post, so I am just going to stop follow / unfollow for today.
This week I want to try a new tactic, it's basically shoutout for shoutout. I want to "bait" them into linking me on their post/story, in return I am going to link their post in my story if it's within my niche. I just hope for some extra exposure and maybe get a small bonus of organic reach. For this to work I will post a story once a day which tells them to mention me.

Current Stats:
  • 2979 follows
  • 2168 following
  • averaging 264 likes / 5 comments (I slacked on responding to the comments)
Goal:
  • Start with follow / unfollow again after the action block
  • take a look into facebook studio for scheduling posts
  • try shoutout for shoutout / story mentions
  • respond to more comments
Questions:
  1. Does facebook studio include auto posting or only scheduling?
  2. What would you respond to comments containing only emojis or stuff like "amazing!" / "great shot!"?
 
I'm amazed at your followback ratio, just started my instagram account 3 days ago and I'm going rather slow but steady, 25% followback ratio with zero people unfollowed yet (I'll give them 2 more days).

What amazes me the most is that you follow big account's followers, to me following people who recently liked a post of the big account seems like a better strategy.

Regardless, I' m going to up my following game I guess ^^
 
I basically look for accounts within my niche and around 2-5k followers who did follow / unfollow to gain their followers. Their followers most likely came through f/uf and they might follow you as well (I mean they already got "tricked" once, why not a second time ;) ). I got pretty good result using this method and after following around 500 I will look for the next account!

I just comment / like big account to gain some extra exposure, but got some pretty bad results from following their followers, because most of them didn't get tricked by follow unfollow.

My organic growth is between 20-40 people each day (just guessing).
 
Wednesday Update
Hey guys, I am back with another update! First if all I want say that this week was kinda rough, my hashtag reach dropped to zero and I don't really understand why. I guess this is the point where most people would stop, so I am going to try even harder.

What I did since my hashtags dropped to zero reach:
  • I decided to post less content, but I upped the quality of the content
  • more shoutout for shoutout with other people
  • keeping my motivation up, because I can see the future of my account
To create better posts I did the following:
  • carousel posts instead of single pictures
  • better captions + answering the comments (asking questions to keep conversations going)
  • fewer posts -> almost a 50% increase of follower reached
After I changed my content quality it was still possible to obtain the same number of likes as previously (even tho I reached zero people who are not following me), which basically means nobody besides me can notice a difference.
Because I still don't know why my reach went to zero, I choose to use less than 10 hashtags per post and I hope that the reach will come back to normal after 2 weeks. (at the 5th day now so maybe like 9 more days and it will be back to normal? I will keep you updated!)

Probably the worst out of everything is that my follow gain took a massive hit. I reached a little less than 400 new followers this week, which is not too bad, but without reaching new people it's obviously harder to grow ;)

Current stats:
  • 3342 followers
  • 2912 following (I stopped unfollowing, because I almost got all my action blocks from unfollowing)
  • average 260 likes / 5 comments (similar to my previous stats, happy that I am able to hold them with reaching only my followers)
What I learned so far:
After all, if everything should go wrong with this account (I don't think this will happen). I learned how to avoid action blocks, create quality content, when to post and how much, and many other useful stuff around Instagram. I believe that I would be able to recreate the account and reach the same amount of people in a much shorter time, with fewer problems.

So far I am happy about this journey!
 
DrakeNekron said:
Wednesday Update
Hey guys, I am back with another update! First if all I want say that this week was kinda rough, my hashtag reach dropped to zero and I don't really understand why. I guess this is the point where most people would stop, so I am going to try even harder.

What I did since my hashtags dropped to zero reach:
  • I decided to post less content, but I upped the quality of the content
  • more shoutout for shoutout with other people
  • keeping my motivation up, because I can see the future of my account
To create better posts I did the following:
  • carousel posts instead of single pictures
  • better captions + answering the comments (asking questions to keep conversations going)
  • fewer posts -> almost a 50% increase of follower reached
After I changed my content quality it was still possible to obtain the same number of likes as previously (even tho I reached zero people who are not following me), which basically means nobody besides me can notice a difference.
Because I still don't know why my reach went to zero, I choose to use less than 10 hashtags per post and I hope that the reach will come back to normal after 2 weeks. (at the 5th day now so maybe like 9 more days and it will be back to normal? I will keep you updated!)

Probably the worst out of everything is that my follow gain took a massive hit. I reached a little less than 400 new followers this week, which is not too bad, but without reaching new people it's obviously harder to grow ;)

Current stats:
  • 3342 followers
  • 2912 following (I stopped unfollowing, because I almost got all my action blocks from unfollowing)
  • average 260 likes / 5 comments (similar to my previous stats, happy that I am able to hold them with reaching only my followers)
What I learned so far:
After all, if everything should go wrong with this account (I don't think this will happen). I learned how to avoid action blocks, create quality content, when to post and how much, and many other useful stuff around Instagram. I believe that I would be able to recreate the account and reach the same amount of people in a much shorter time, with fewer problems.

So far I am happy about this journey!
Click to expand...

It happened to me too. People call it the shadowban. If you use the same hashtags too often or if they caught you using shady tactics (f/uf), you might havve received one. I'm sti not "unbanned" 3 months later. Now I've given up on my account...
 
Stifl said:
It happened to me too. People call it the shadowban. If you use the same hashtags too often or if they caught you using shady tactics (f/uf), you might havve received one. I'm sti not "unbanned" 3 months later. Now I've given up on my account...
Click to expand...

I will probably stay away from f/uf for now and use only a few / no hashtags for the next two weeks. Maybe it will work and if not I still learned a lot with the account!
 
Wednesday Update
I didn't use any form of follow/unfollow this week, because I believe that I got a shadowbanned. To reduce the potential time of the ban I decided to keep everything at the minimum.

What I did this week:
  • one post each day with quality content
  • mentioning people on my story, if they mentioned me in their post and it was related to my niche
  • watched some stories
I did not use any hashtags this week, I will try them again on Sunday (should be two weeks since the ban).

Current stats:
  • 3474 follows
  • 2929 following
  • average likes around 220 (it's less compared to last week, but if the hashtags start to work again it should be fine)
  • more and more people are mentioning me on their posts
Lets see how the following week is going to perform and if my hashtags will be back to normal!
 
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