How I got 2,000 Instagram Followers with this Controversial Method
I was failing on IG until I used this method
Click here for proof.
Here’s the thing,
Instagram is so saturated nowadays that it’s incredibly hard to gain a following right from the start. People tend not to follow accounts that don’t have a lot of followers, that’s just how it is.
When I first started my Instagram theme page, I expected a ton of growth. My content was great, I was using great hashtags, and I posted three times a day! After 3 weeks however, I only had 15 followers.
A theme page is just an instagram account that reposts (and credits) other people’s posts.
I looked into methods of growing faster and that’s when I found it, the infamous “Follow/Unfollow” method. I’m not going to lie, I was skeptical at first. While some people claimed it worked, many others complained about getting shadow-banned and blocked for weeks. After watching a couple videos to understand what it was, I began my experiment.
Follow/Unfollow is when you follow people who have an interest in the type of content you produce. Many times, those people will follow you back and thus grow your audience. After a while (typically after you reach 1k-2k followers) you unfollow everybody.
The results? Well, after nearly one year of practicing the method of follow/unfollow, I can say one thing: it definitely works.
However, this method needs to be correctly used or else you just don’t get results. If you’re interested in trying this out, here is the exact strategy I used to perform Follow/Unfollow successfully.
Breakdown
- Identify your target audience
- Start following them
- Start unfollowing them
Identify Your Target Audience
This was the step that I found most relevant to actually getting follows from people. If you don’t correctly identify what type of people like your content, you’re not gonna benefit from this strategy.
Luckily, this is not hard.
For example, let’s take my IG page, urbancries. This account is a theme page that reposts urban photography from artists around the world.
How would I identify my target audience for this page? I would simply go on the search tab and search up something like “urban photography”.
I would check out the results until I found a page that matched the vibe I was going for.
At this point, we know his followers would most likely also like our content so step 1 is done!
Start Following Your Target Audience
This is where it gets a little complicated. Here are the things you need to keep in mind:
1. You want to follow only his active followers
Think about it. When you post something on your personal IG account, do all of your followers like the post? No! The followers who do like the post are the active followers while the ones who don’t like the post are inactive followers.
So how can you tell if a follower is an active follower or not? Here’s the 2 step plan to figure that out!
- Find the page’s most recent post (I recommend ~3–7 hrs old)
- Click on the post’s likes.
The people who have liked that post are the active followers.
2. To avoid being banned, follow no more than ~50 people an hour and ~300 people a day.
You can now begin to follow accounts.
I’ve gotten banned before and I was following 70–80 people per hour regularly. To stay safe, follow around 50 people per hour.
In addition, if your account is new (created in the last 2 months), you don’t want to start following 50 accounts/hr immediately. It’s important to build up to it to avoid getting blocked.
Here’s what I did:
Day 1 // follow 10 people
Day 2 // follow 50 people, 10 per hr
Day 3 // follow 200 people, 20 per hour
Day 4 // follow 300 people, 50 per hour
IMPORTANT: Instagram limits your total daily “actions”. A follow is an action, a comment is an action, a like is an action. When following people, make sure you’re not commenting or liking much as this could get you blocked.
3. Stop Following People When You Hit 1k-2k
Once you hit 1,000–2,000 followers, Instagram will start featuring your content on their explore page as long as you get good engagement from your followers.
Once your content begins to get featured on the explore page, your chances of going viral jump 10x and you don’t need follow/unfollow anymore.
Start Unfollowing Your Target Audience
When I hit 1,000 followers, I’ve usually followed anywhere from 2,500–4,000 accounts. Following such a large number of people is ugly — which is why unfollowing is part of this method.
WARNING: Don’t unfollow people the moment you hit 1k followers. If you bulk follow and unfollow people in close periods, IG will sense this and block your account.
I typically wait anywhere from 7–14 days to begin unfollowing. If you got a warning from Instagram, wait the full 14 days. Otherwise, you can begin unfollowing after a week.
While you can follow up to 300 people per day without getting blocked, you can’t unfollow the same amount of people. Instagram is much more sensitive to unfollowing actions and will ban you.
Here’s my exact unfollowing strategy:
1. Unfollow ~20 people/hr max
This should allow you to unfollow about 150 people per day (and 1,000 per week). Just like the following strategy, start smaller to “warm up” your account and build up to the 20 unfollows/hr.
2. That’s it!
At this point, you’re in the last stage of the Follow/Unfollow strategy. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should now have 1k–2k active followers ready to consume your content!
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