What's The Best Way To Grow an Organic Following on Instagram?

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In this episode, I answer a listener question which is:

Hi, Skye, thanks for the opportunity to speak on this podcast. The question I had was regarding digital marketing, and I noticed that you've got quite a few followers on your Instagram on I would love to know, what's the best way to grow an organic following on Instagram and get those numbers higher than what you have at the moment. I'd really like some feedback on that.

Skye Khilji

This next one comes from my lovely sister Jade, who is over in Brisbane, Australia.

 

Jade Varley

Hi, Skye, thanks for the opportunity to speak on this podcast. The question I had was regarding digital marketing, and I noticed that you've got quite a few followers on your Instagram on I would love to know, what's the best way to grow an organic following on Instagram and get those numbers higher than what you have at the moment. I'd really like some feedback on that.

Skye Khilji

I think this comes back to the answer that I just gave to Miriam about Instagram. If we're talking about social media generally, I mean, the first thing is, you have to create value.

People are busier than ever, we get thousands upon thousands of messages per day. And we have to ignore most of them to be able to deal with the barrage of you know, stuff that's just incoming, there's too much input. So we have to create it. value. And you know, that is always about empathy. What problems or challenges is that person having in their life? And how can you help them overcome that?

So one great, great thing that I learned is called the jobs to be done framework. And it says that people hire a product or a service to get the job done. And we think that it's really complex, all of this business stuff, but there's really only two things people look for when they're figuring out how to get something done. And that is, how do I minimize the time to do it?

And how do I minimize the likelihood of getting something wrong or doing something wrong? So what you need to look at, let's just say in your case, Jade, you're a business coach, and somebody's trying to grow their business, what I would do is I would put content out, that shows them, hey, here's how you can do this in less time.

And here's how you can avoid making mistakes when doing this. And you know, that can come into many, many different topics. And that's for you to figure out what resonates with your audience. Some of the tips I gave earlier in this episode, about finding out what resonates with the audience will make sense. But then really is about minimizing the time minimizing the likelihood. The other thing with growing your social account is that you have to post consistently.

So I was lucky on my personal. I had a social media team working for me, who did that every day they connected with people, they would comment and post for me because we were trying to build my personal brand at that point.

Now I actually run my personal account myself now and free the wage slave. I'm growing myself, so it's a little bit slower. But here's what I would tell you about growing a social account, there's probably two things that I would recommend. So the first thing is you need to establish a baseline of followers or likes as quickly as possible.

When we come to a page and we see that not many people like it, we just assume that it's not very good and we move on. So in Facebook, you can boost a post and you set the objective to page likes. I did an ad probably about a month ago. I spent only about $17. And I got 1500 likes in five days.

Now people come to my page, they like it because they can see that other people like it is social proof. We are herd animals still to a large degree. In Instagram, you could do the same thing where you run an ad.

And again, I did about $10 and got a good amount of new followers, I think about 40 new followers in three or four days. And the objective of Instagram is profile views. So when you do that, you build your baseline.

Now, it's important that your, you know page creates value for people that it looks good. There's helpful content that's rooted in empathy. So that when they come, you know, they see good stuff, and they're more likely to follow you.

But really, those two things just you know, build a like campaign or a follow up campaign to seed your audience is how I would call it you're planting seeds. The second thing I would tell you, is to collaborate with people who already have bigger audiences than you. So how do you do that?

Well in the UK Here's an example. There's a page called made you think 101 shout out made you think. And they've got about 90,000 followers. Now back when they had about 30, or 40,000. I just started to comment on their posts.

And I did it in a way where I would forward the conversation. So when somebody has an account with a lot of followers, or any account, what they want is engagement, because that looks good to Instagram and it helps grow their account.

So I create engagement by asking questions that other people will jump in and answer. And by asking questions in a way that makes the account owner look like a hero or an authority, they love that. I would also dm them with recommendations he'd post you know, I'm looking for someone who can do this or books and I'd be the first person in there. Dude, go there, do this. check this book out.

This is going to help here's some links complete value creation never asked him for a thing in return. And it was just genuine giving in all honesty, it wasn't part of some cynical strategy to get something back When you give just for the sake of giving the world has a wonderful way of giving back to you.

So the big turning point, we've made you think one on one and that account is he posted asking, does anybody know where I can get healthy meals? And what I did was I called Mike Argyou a good friend of mine who has a question in this episode, actually. And he had a meal delivery business doing kind of fitness meals.

And I called him and said, Look, there's a guy I know he's got a page with 40,000 followers. If you provide meals to him, he'll give you free promo. Mike said, Yeah, I'm down for it. So then I messaged made you think, and said to him, Look, I've got a guy, I get my meals from him. He's a good dude. He's gonna deliver them. And he'll give them to you every week.

Just give him some promo. And they did that and that went on for some time. So I created value in both their lives by getting one of them free advertising and the other one free meals. And I didn't ask for anything in return. What happened was made you think constantly would go to my account, pick up a post posted Feel free to his audience. And he do that regularly without me asking other people we're paying for promo at this point five $600 per post.

I was getting that for free. So his entire audience, we're now seeing me as an authority in some regards, because it wasn't just like a promo post where he posts said he doesn't really say much. He'd really kind of add some stuff into the caption to show that he respected me in a way. And that made a big difference. They got a lot of followers and some of them are listening to this episode now because of that. So find people you can collaborate with, and add value and try and add value offline in the real world, not just online. T

his podcast is another example of that. The people that I interview become big fans of my account, and they repost everything and share everything. So just remember his digital business happens person to person in the real world.

So use technology use those tools connect with people add value. You know when I do an episode of a podcast with somebody I'm making them look important and making them look like an authority. I'm giving them content, they can repost and they can reuse, I'm solving a big problem for those people. And in return, they feel gratitude, that law of reciprocity, they want to reciprocate for the love that I've shown them.

And they do that in a way that just helps me achieve what I want to do. In short, when you help people do and get what they want, they'll help you get what you want. That's really what it's about. So let's just take things back to a non digital approach and just start being good humans and collaborating and sharing and showing love.