How to Grow Your Instagram from 100 to 10K in One Year

Today’s first breakout session is How to Grow Your Instagram from 100 to 10K in One Year with Tauni Everett. She has been blogging since 2006. My Instagram account is pretty underwhelming, so I’m hoping she can help me. This is not the place to be if you think your content is 100% awesome and you don’t need to change, because what can she teach you? She’s also going to be talking to us as if we were brands.

How to Grow Your Instagram from 100 to 10K in One Year

What does growth look like on Instagram?

Organic growth right now is about 1.8%, which is super slow. But Tauni has grown three accounts from zero to 20K+ since January. She has us looking at a terrible photo she shared that apparently lost her 200 new followers in two hours. Average engagement across Instagram is 2.8%.

Beautiful photos and content are the two most important things.

How do you benchmark?

Tauni uses a spreadsheet but isn’t super focused on the numbers.

Iconosquare.com will give you the very specific amount of followers you want and benchmark you over time.

Instagram has its own version of “Twitter jail.” You can’t follow too many people or like too many photos  (350) in an eight hour period.

Profile Development

Don’t just use your Twitter bio for your Instagram bio. Have a good, clear profile photo. (I break her “no sunglasses” rule.) Tell people who you are and what you do. Don’t try to be funny to be cool though. Link to your own site. My own Instagram profile hasn’t changed since I set it up, and I think I do mine pretty well.

Writer. Editor. Blogger. Mom. Wife. Geek. Gamer. See also: Depression, Anxiety, Aspie, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Picky Eater, Terrible Photographer. WELLinTHIShouse.com

You should include your location, too. Not your home address, but your city, so brands and marketers can find you for location based campaigns they want to run.

What to Share

We tend to share two things: This is what I’m doing right now, and this is what I just blogged about and you should go read it. She says that people don’t like food photos. (I have not seen this. I get engagement from my food photos.)

Tauni doesn’t post in the moment. She puts photos through multiple filters and edits before she posts them, which can take offers.

“Don’t go off-brand. Except for when you do.”

It may seem really inauthentic (and it kind of does) but she will take photos of products at the grocery store, edit them, and latergram them (without saying so) and asking “Should I buy this?” to make sponsors happy.

Tauni likes white backgrounds. She says all of your pictures should be bright, take your photos of your kids in natural light, and your brightness/backgrounds should be consistent. Dark pictures don’t get as much engagement.

There are some iPhone apps she likes for photo editing, but I have an Android, so I didn’t catch any of the names. FaceTune is one I caught, and it looks like something I’d really like to try out to make my backgrounds and my selfies look better.

There’s a lot of things she’s saying about how people don’t want you to be authentic, that they always want to see the pretty things. I’m having a problem with this, and I’ll come right out and say I didn’t type it all out because I can’t stand behind that particular advice. (Sorry, Tauni! And sorry to readers who would have appreciated this information.)

Watermarks and overlays will drive down your engagement. You have to acknowledge that people are probably going to share your photos without permission.

Posting Frequency

Don’t post a million times a day. The average larger Instagram account posts 2-3 times per day. She’s kind of scolding us about posting 10 photos on Instagram from the Disney party last night. “Share 2 or 3 of your best photos on Instagram, but share the rest on Twitter or Facebook.”

Likes account for 91% of engagement on Instagram, so don’t feel bad if you’re getting few comments.

Don’t both with Instagram video. Put your videos on Facebook.

Brands

Brands are looking. Brands do care. You can make a lot of money working with brands on Instagram if you have a good following. Tauni can get $500 per Instagram post. (Truth. I’ve had brands liking my photos, and I only have 462 followers at the moment. You can change that.)

Hashtags

Hashtags can generate a lot of likes. They can also add a few followers, but they aren’t necessarily the followers you want for engagement. If you want a quick boost, for a sponsor post or whatever, adding hashtags can do the trick.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.


By Christina Gleason

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.

6 thoughts on “How to Grow Your Instagram from 100 to 10K in One Year with Tauni Everett #TypeACon 2015”
  1. Wow – a lot of her advice is counter intuitive to what I’ve been doing (food pics if it’s a good one, get a lot of engagement for me – or at least a lot of likes). Same goes with my knitting pictures and I do hashtag but I put them in the comments (because it’s still searchable) and that way I don’t fill up the actual post with hashtags. And I agree, being authentic is important unless I’m trying to be “pretty” on purpose. I learned a lot from a friend who’s also a photographer and it’s possible to be pretty and authentic at the same time.

    I also go back and and edit my posts if I find a grammar or spelling error and I do it when they post to Facebook too. I only post my instagram pics to my personal profile and not my page on Facebook. Rarely do my posts have anything to do with what I’m blogging unless I say that it’s upcoming.

    You know, now that I think about it, I probably would’ve hated this session LOL.

    1. I think that I wasn’t able to share the message I was trying to get across as well as I would have liked. Food photos are killer on IG. I post them all the time.

      I actually agree with everything you said in your comment 🙂

  2. Hey Christina,

    I’ve loved seeing some of your live blogs from Type A. It’s a great resource and I think it’s wonderful that you’re willing to share. I don’t think you ever have to apologize for adding your opinion. After all, that’s all any of us are sharing, right? What’s worked for us, what we believe to be true? The beauty of attending these types of conferences is to connect and hash out our thoughts and ideas!

    Having said that, I disappointed that I wasn’t able to share my information accurately. In my rush to share information, I probably didn’t provide the full picture.

    The comments I made are those coming from the perspective of viewing my feed as a personal brand page. When operating as a brand, I sincerely believe you have to be a lot more thoughtful about what you share and when. I have a personal account, where I post personal items. On my personal account, I don’t follow the same guidelines, because…it’s personal. I am not operating it for the following, but for personal gratification. I don’t post there much, but if you want to check it out my handle is @tauni

    While I have a fair number of friends who love me so much they will like anything I post, random strangers are really are there for the pretty photos and special interest. I joked about being authentic (which, in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have done), but I don’t think being strategic and thoughtful about the photos you post means you’re not authentic. I think it means you care about the image you’re portraying. I agree with the commenter above that said you can be pretty and authentic at the same time.

    When I go into a store to share a photo of something, it’s actually NEVER been for a brand or to keep a brand happy. I do it because my followers like to engage with real life decisions and it’s great for engagement. I almost always make a decision to purchase or not on the spot.

    In regards to food photos, I meant that people don’t necessarily want to see a dark cloudy photo of what you’re eating. Again, mostly trying to portray that immediate photos taken in a dark restaurant aren’t going to garner the same following and engagement as a well-styled (or at least bright) food photo. Food photos account for some of the highest engagement on Instagram.

    1. Hi Tauni,

      Thanks for taking the time to comment! The Reddit for Bloggers session I spoke in felt like we were in a rush to try to convey All The Info, too, so I get how wires seemed to get crossed. I’m not a very good photographer, so I’m going to try looking into the apps you mentioned and see if I can make things look a bit brighter!

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