How effective is instagram promotion

What is Instagram Promotion: Guide - Definition

Instagram promotion is a specific type of Instagram marketing, which implies converting regular Instagram posts and Stories into paid ones. These publications have higher outreach and engagement and work great for boosting your brand awareness and visibility.

If you want to zero in on uplifting brand awareness, Instagram promotion is a must-have for your business. This social network accumulates over 1 billion active users every month, and 90% of them follow at least one business account.

Another reason to make use of Instagram promotion is the opportunity to build close relationships with your customers. Instagram users actively engage with brands online – the average engagement rate on this social network is 1.6% per post. For comparison, on Facebook and Twitter, these rates are 0.09% and 0.048%.

Better yet, Instagram promotion can stimulate sales growth. 77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand if they follow it on social media — 65% buy from a brand after seeing it on Instagram.

According to this data, paid promotion on Instagram is worth investing in, especially if your goal is to increase brand awareness and your engagement rate. Your brand’s sales and ROI may benefit from your Instagram presence, as well. To help you make the most of Instagram promotion, let’s explore how this feature works.

How Does Instagram Promotion Work?

Instagram post promotion
Instagram Stories and Highlights promotion
Promotions button on your profile

Instagram promotion option allows you to convert regular posts, Stories, Highlights, or Stories Archives into sponsored ones. This change brings a handful of benefits, such as the opportunity to reach a broader audience, make your content more visible, and add clickable calls to action (CTA).

That is why you should distinguish two types of paid content:

Instagram promotion – you promote your own content. It's marked as Sponsored. In this article, we describe this type.
Influencer marketing – you collaborate with influencers to create and post content in their profiles promoting your goods and services. It's marked as a Paid partnership. Read more about influencer marketing.

Promoted posts get sponsored labels and CTAs. You may choose to nudge the post viewers to visit your Instagram profile, direct message you, or visit your landing page. In the latter case, Instagram lets you choose from pre-written calls to action, such as Learn More, Shop Now, Contact Us, and more. The publication may appear in the users’ newsfeeds, Stories, and Explore sections.

Here is an example of a typical promoted post on Instagram. The aim of the promotion here is to encourage viewers to visit an Instagram profile.

A preview of a promoted post on Instagram

Paid promotion of Instagram content is available only for business profiles. This type of account has other advantages over personal ones: they show the real-time performance of your posts, statistics on your followers, and so on. To set up a business profile for Instagram, follow our step-by-step guide.

Another point to consider is that you need Facebook Ads to launch and manage Instagram campaigns. To access it, link a Facebook account to your Instagram profile or follow Facebook’s guide on creating Instagram ads.

Now we’ll delve deeper into converting organic content to sponsored content. Let’s unpack the process for regular posts, Stories, Highlights, and the

Promotion button on your profile.

Instagram post promotion

To start a post promotion, go to your Instagram profile and choose the publication you’d like to promote. Tap the Promote button, which will open the settings of your promotional campaign.

The Instagram post with a Promote button

To get off the ground, choose the destination for the post viewers; it may be your profile, website, or direct messages. Base the decision on your goals. If you’d like to grow your Instagram follower base, opt for driving people to your profile. To nudge the audience down the sales funnel, go for your website or direct messages.

In the second step, you need to pick an audience. If you choose the auto settings, Instagram will show your post to people similar to your current followers. To pinpoint the most promising prospects, set the criteria manually. Knowing your customer profile will come in handy to leverage better results. Follow our guide on creating a buyer persona for your business.

In the final stages, Instagram lets you set up a daily budget and the duration of the promotion (from 1 to 30 days) and shows you an overview of your campaign. Here is how the whole process of setting up a promotional campaign for your post will look:

The Instagram promotion setup process

Instagram Stories and Highlights promotion

Setting up a promotional campaign for Stories and Highlights resembles the post promotion process, except for the initial steps. To get the ball rolling, you need to choose a Story or Highlight, tap the side menu, and opt for the Promote command.

Instagram Story promotion

Consider that the Instagram promotion feature doesn’t support tappable elements. Thus, you can’t take advantage of polls, questions, quizzes, countdowns, and other interactive elements in Stories and Highlights. However, promoting this type of content is worthwhile – 500 million people watch Stories every day. It’s a whopping audience to reach.

Promotions button on your profile

This way of promoting your content on Instagram has a huge benefit compared with previous ones. It allows you to streamline the process by offering top-performing posts for promotion. This option is a way out when you are puzzled over which piece of content to promote.

We’ve unveiled the mechanics and facilities of Instagram promotion. Now it’s time to learn how to implement it into your marketing strategy. Read on to learn more about the best practices, tips, and ideas to adopt.

How to Promote Your Page on Instagram: Ideas, Examples, and Tips

Combine paid promotion with unpaid tricks
Promote your top-performing content
Employ Stories and Highlights
Choose content carefully
Make sure your content is mobile-friendly

Instagram promotion is a simple yet powerful tool that can take your social media marketing to the next level. However, allocating your budget is not enough to reach your goals with sponsored content. To make it do the trick, you need to use smart tactics. We’ve picked several tips and ideas that you can stick to and achieve your business objectives.

Combine paid promotion with unpaid tricks

To achieve sustainable results, promoting specific posts is not enough. Take a complex approach and employ paid and organic tactics. Start by creating an Instagram promotion plan – follow our guide on crafting an Instagram marketing strategy.

Couple paid promotional activities with influencer marketing. This move will bump up your outreach, engagement, and ROI – on average, brands earn $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

Another point to consider is adding locations to your promoted posts and tag other accounts. According to Adweek, simply tagging users in your posts can boost engagement by 56%. Adding locations can drive a 79% increase for this indicator.

Promote your top-performing content

The number one best practice to adopt is making use of your best-performing content. You may want to bring out a completely new promotional campaign and create fresh content for it. However, reusing your current pieces of content may save you tons of time and effort.

To optimize Instagram promotion, brush through the organic posts on your page, and find the most engaging ones. Paid advertising can inject new life into these publications and provide a great response from a wider audience.

The non-profit United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) applied this tactic for its fundraising campaign promotion. The association posted a video with Liam Neeson and other celebrities on its account to raise money for Yemen. The post got over 11,000 views and over 1,800 likes. The organization decided to reuse this content for paid advertising. As a result, the promoted post got over 200,000 views and roughly 6,500 likes.

The promoted content from (WFP)

Employ Stories and Highlights

Instagram’s promotion feature allows adding calls to action to regular posts. This peculiarity can make Stories and Highlights the first thing to go out of the window as they vanish 24 hours after publication. However, it’s better to employ the power of this format.

Stories are a rapidly growing type of content – they are growing 15x faster than feed-based sharing. Better yet, they work well for promoting businesses as 62% of people said they’ve become more interested in brands or products after seeing it in Stories.

Choose content carefully

Instagram users are fastidious when it comes to the content they consume. There are thousands of tips and tricks for promoting content on Instagram. Here are the main tactics you can stick to:

Make your promoted content look organic. Ad-like creatives with huge logos or calls to action repel Instagram users. 78% of followers unfollow brands if they post too much promotional content. Posts you promote should blend perfectly with other content in a viewers' newsfeed. To express your brand personality, use recognizable traits, such as your signature color.
Post faces to drive engagement. According to Georgia Tech, Instagram posts with faces get 38% more likes and 32% more comments. So, change the game and use photos with a model or brand representative.
Make the most of UGC. User-generated content can work wonders for your Instagram marketing. It drives a 4.5% higher conversion rate, boosts engagement, and improves cost-per-click metrics. Play around with using UGC for your promotional posts. Remember to tag the authors – Instagram requires you to respect intellectual property rights.

The high-end fashion store, Tsum, employs two of the tactics listed above. The company went for an organic-looking photograph of a glamorous woman. The image does not contain huge taglines or dazzling branding, except the logo on the eyeshadow palette in the model's hands.

Tsum’s promoted post

Make sure your content is mobile-friendly

If you drive audiences from promotional posts to your website, this tip is for you. Optimizing your landing pages seems obvious, as 91% of users access social networks from mobile devices. However, websites that work incorrectly on mobile devices are common.

Make sure your ad and landing page have the same design, address the same audience, use the same call to action and copywriting style. The harmonized landing page and ad lead to a 39% increase in conversion. To get even better results, follow our guide on increasing your landing page conversion rate.

The tips and tactics listed above will help you make the most of your Instagram promotion. However, the main piece of advice is to remember to budget your paid promotion expenditures. Let’s try to predict the promotion cost for your business.

To start discussing your Instagram promotion budget, let’s take a once-over of the network’s terms and conditions. According to the rules, you need to choose the total sum you want to spend on post promotion. Then you set a promotion duration, and the social network automatically decides how much money it can write off every day. You can never go out of the limits of your total budget.

The process is clear-cut, but you may still struggle to figure out the budget you need for leveraging your Instagram promotion goals. To clarify this issue, consider addressing the cost-per-click (CPC) indicator.

According to AdEspresso, the average CPC for Instagram ads hovers between $0.50 and $1.00. For highly competitive industries, such as apparel, the cost can reach up to $3.00 per click.

To broaden the perspective, take a look at the landscape photographer’s experience. The person spent $50 on promoting an Instagram post and reached over 32,500 people, and got 43 profile visits. Thus, the cost per click was a little over $1, which more or less matches the indicator provided by AdEspresso.

Instagram promotion is a great way to make your brand more visible online and get new leads. To make full use of it, take care of your lead-nurturing process, and employ various marketing channels. Email marketing, chatbots, push notifications, and SMS can come in handy to convert your prospects into paying customers. Register with SendPulse to implement these channels into your marketing strategy at an easy rate.

Last Updated: 29.09.2022

I Spent 50 Dollars on Instagram and This Is What Happened

Home Originals Business

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For those of us trying to expand our social media presence, Instagram has been the king for quite some time. So what happens when you put a little money into promoting yourself on Instagram? I tried it and here are the results.

There are tons of tips, tricks, and rules out there for people trying to up their follower count. You can even pay for followers, but by now you should know that doesn’t actually produce results and can even hurt your account. However, there are legitimate ways to promote yourself within the platform.

Some of you might be a little skeptical about spending money to advertise online, especially on social media. Honestly I am too, and I had no idea what the results of this experiment would be before trying it out. If you’re trying to brand yourself like a business than it is an completely justifiable expense, however it’s not that simple in my case. Unlike someone trying to sell a service such as shooting portraits, weddings, headshots, etc; as a landscape photographer in my current position im simply just trying to gain followers. The campaign or promotion that I created might not be exactly the same as yours, but it should still be a good indicator of what $50 can get you.

Choosing a Photo

A tree standing alone in Yosemite Valley

This was the image I chose to promote. A very simple image, certainly not one of the most eye-catching photos in my portfolio, but I wanted to use something that would be considered average (maybe a 3, using Fstoppers rating system). This seemed like the fairest way to go about running this test. That being said, if you were to promote your Instagram I do suggest choosing one of your best photos.

I chose to promote a newly-uploaded photo (less than 5 minutes old) and only run the promotion for 1 day. My thinking was that the first day you post a photo is its most important and likely to be when it gets seen. Instagram prioritizes photos that have a lot of engagement early on. Also, the predicted amount of people reached doesn’t seem to change if you spread out the promotion over more days, so why not skyrocket the engagement right when the photo is fresh.

Manual audience created for promotion

I created my own target audience: all ages, located in US/Europe, with interest in landscape photography, Photoshop, Lightroom, REI, and a few others. You can set this up however you like for whatever you think would be your best demographic. My estimated reach was listed at 41k-110k.

Results

The Numbers

These are the results of the campaign. 6700 likes to the photo, 4 comments, and I gained 40 followers. Followers are the main goal for me, specifically real and active followers. This is one of the benefits of paying to boost a photo, rather than paying a service to find followers.The followers you gain through a photo campaign are much more likely be active humans. That said, this was likely still not worth it for me. My follower acquisition cost was a little over $1.00 which might be affordable to some, but since I am not selling any services, it is financially unsustainable for me.

There are other factors to keep in mind when running a campaign like this. The quality of your content is important. Your profile feed needs to be appealing as well. Mine certainly isn’t the creme de la creme but it’s decent. I did run this exact same campaign a few weeks prior using a photo that stands out more, the one I wrote about in a recent article.

Exact same campaign a few weeks earlier using a different photo

The results from that campaign were even less impressive. I wanted to try again just in case the first time was a fluke. This also gave me two trials to report using different types of photos. The results for both promotions were less than I expected. If I wanted to gain 20,000 followers it would cost roughly $25,000. Obviously this stat is a bit misleading considering I would hopefully continue to grow and produce without any campaigning, but strictly looking at the data it puts the cost per follower into perspective.

Conclusion

This type of promotion was likely not worth it for what I’m trying to accomplish which is to gain followers. For someone that might simply want more eyes on their services, this might be great. If a campaign like this is reaching 32,000+ people and you book 2-3 shoots from those views, that result is likely well worth the cost. Once again, because my goal is to gain followers it’s not sustainable.

I’m planning to do a follow up to this trial by spending $50 on influencer marketing so look for that article in the coming future. For now I’d love to hear what you think about my little experiment. Have you paid to boost a photo on Instagram? Did I waste $100? If you could quantify it, how much would you pay per “real” follower?

If you're passionate about taking your photography to the next level but aren't sure where to dive in, check out the Well-Rounded Photographer tutorial where you can learn eight different genres of photography in one place. If you purchase it now, or any of our other tutorials, you can save a 15% by using "ARTICLE" at checkout.

Topics:

Business

Fstoppers Originals

Landscapes

Social Media

Alex Armitage has traveled the world to photograph and film some of the most beautiful places it has to offer. No matter the location, perfecting it's presentation to those absent in the moment is always the goal; hopefully to transmute the feeling of being there into a visual medium.

Promoting Instagram in 2022 - Marketing on vc.ru

Good afternoon! Lyudmila is in touch, a marketer at Altcraft. Instagram already has 1.3 billion users, photo and video content service is one of the top social networks in the world and continues to grow. Instagram brings money to brands and bloggers - it is the most effective platform for influencer marketing in 2020-2021. Bloggers earn up to $10,000 from one advertising post. Brands increase the audience, increase loyalty and sales - 90% of Instagram users are subscribed to commercial accounts.

47 326 views

Instagram is a rapidly changing social network with unpredictable algorithms. There is huge competition here, but the question of how to promote Instagram for brands and bloggers remains relevant. We tell you what will work and what will not work in 2022: how to promote a blog on Instagram using free and paid promotion methods.

Before the start of promotion

It is useless to start development without strategy and account preparation. Therefore, first:

Set up an Instagram profile so that the user immediately understands what your account is about and what you offer.

What's important:

A name that matches the theme of the account.
Description in the profile header: USP, benefits, name (if the account is an individual).
Location, if you run an offline business or work in a specific area.
Link to the site or your other materials.
Page navigation in live stories: prices, location, FAQs and other information.

Clean your account from inactive subscribers if the profile has been maintained for a long time. Subscribers who do not respond to your content in any way are bad for promotion.

Example. Instagram sees: only 10 out of 1000 subscribers watch your content. The social network understands that the content is uninteresting and stops showing it. Subscribers by themselves are not an indicator of the success of an account, it is important to involve the audience.

Switch to a business account to get statistics and analyze audience reactions to content.
Prepare a development strategy. Any promotion is a plan and regularity. One-time actions will not bring results. Define goals - why do you need promotion on Instagram, what do you want to get: subscribers, sales, advertisers, or something else. Prepare a content plan with regular posts, stories and Reels.

Free promotion methods

Reels

Reels is a short video format (15-30 seconds) that Instagram launched worldwide in the summer of 2021. The social network also promised to promote the video format. Therefore, now Reels is the most effective way to promote your account for free. Social media gives Reels an outside reach. If stories and posts work for an existing audience (although posts also sometimes get into recommendations), then Reels has more opportunities. Getting a million views for an account with a couple of thousand subscribers is real.

Another advantage of Reels for promotion is the lifetime. Stories disappear after 24 hours, the post is shown for a couple of days, and Reels “spins” even after a while. Also, one video in Reels can “pull” others along with it: the social network sees that a particular video is interesting to the audience and shows the previously created ones.

Examples of Reels

Commenting

Don't confuse this method with spam comments for everyone. Popular, but meaningless, remains automatic commenting. With this method, there are situations when the inscription “what a beautiful photo” appears under the mourning post with a candle, or there are off-topic comments. You shouldn't do that.

Unsuccessful automatic commenting

How to gain followers on Instagram through comments:

Comment thoughtfully and to the point. Communicate in a friendly and honest way - try to make friends, and not advertise yourself.
Chat in the comments under the posts of personal accounts of ordinary users, bloggers and brands. A user with a small number of followers is more likely to notice you and visit your page. Major bloggers and brands are unlikely to subscribe, but other subscribers will see an interesting comment.

Hashtags

Promotion with the help of hashtags is a legal promotion method that is unlikely to give huge coverage, but it will still attract some part of the audience. Instagram has a separate search for hashtags and a subscription to them.

Which hashtags to set for promotion:

Thematic, which relate to your field, and localized, if you are tied to some territory.
The topic of the hashtag should match the topic of the post and photo, then Instagram better understands what your post is about and shows it to the right audience.
Do not choose high-frequency hashtags from 500 thousand. The more often a hashtag is used, the less likely your post will be seen.
Check the relevance of hashtags. If they were last used two years ago, they don't work.

An example of thematic hashtags

How many hashtags should I put? There is no single answer. Instagram allows you to add up to 30. But such a “canvas” does not always work. Irrelevant hashtags will reduce reach and minimize the effect of relevant ones. Therefore, experiment and do not copy the same hashtags from post to post - this is inefficient. Another social network may think that you are a robot and block your account.

Cross promo

This method will not fit the query "How to promote instagram from scratch". An account for cross-promotion or mutual PR should already have an audience.

What we do next:

We are looking for an account with a similar or related theme and with approximately the same number of subscribers.
We exchange content, for example, we make guest posts, live broadcasts or joint marathons.

An example of a successful cross-promo is a sportswear brand account launching a marathon of fast workouts with a fitness trainer.

Promotion on other platforms

If you are actively running another channel (Youtube, Yandex.Zen and others), invite the audience to subscribe to your Instagram.

Important! Users should understand why they need another account of yours. It is unlikely that subscribers are interested in watching the same content. Work with different formats and themes.

An example of such a promotion method from a blogger with a promoted Youtube channel with expert information. The girl offers to subscribe to her Instagram, where she shares her personal.

Instagram promotion on the blogger's Youtube channel

User Content

Works for brands and individuals who want to promote their account.

An option for a brand is to invite users to post a photo with their product and a special hashtag. Then the brand reposts these publications to its page.

For personal accounts, tag brands. Then there is a chance that the Instagram page will be reposted to the brand account. It turns out win-win - the user gets more coverage, and the brand gets more content.

Location

Adding locations to the account description and posts to Instagram promotion is an additional way. This is especially true for local businesses and events. Just put a location and wait for thousands of subscribers will not work.

Paid promotion methods

Targeted advertising

Instagram's official advertising is an opportunity to reach an audience with specific interests. If the algorithms themselves decide who to show your Reels or post to, then in advertising you set the audience yourself. Instagram offers to advertise in the feed, stories and Reels.

Examples of targeted advertising on Instagram: in the feed and in stories

Advertising is set up on Instagram itself or through the Facebook advertising account (if the account is linked to the page). For advertising on Instagram, goals are available: visiting an account, a website and increasing engagement - more messages. The audience can be selected automatically or configured, but the criteria are limited.

Setting up an advertising campaign on Instagram

There are more opportunities to designate an audience in the Facebook advertising account.

Possible goals of an advertising campaign in the Facebook advertising account

The downside of advertising on the social network is an impressive list of restrictions that are constantly changing. For violation of the rules, advertising is stopped, and sometimes the account is blocked without explanation.

Advertising with influencers

Influence marketing remains trending in 2022 as the blogging market grows. Therefore, Instagram promotion through opinion leaders is still relevant. Advertising among bloggers, famous personalities and experts is more trustworthy and is perceived as a recommendation of a familiar person. Advertising options for influencers: native (does not look like advertising) or direct.

Advertising with bloggers

How not to promote on Instagram

If to the question: “How to promote an account on Instagram”, someone offers cheating and giveaways, then run. Gray methods of promotion will not only not be useful, but will also destroy your account. Read about them and forget.

Giveaway

Giveaways are influencer contests in which you need to subscribe to the page and all giveaway sponsors in order to participate in the prize draw. Subscription is a prerequisite for the draw. This is how sponsors gain a new audience, but after the draw:

users unsubscribe because their interest is a prize, not a sponsor's page;
Instagram algorithms see a large number of unsubscribes and reduce profile reach;
it is difficult to save such an account.

Even during a giveaway, the gathered audience is ballast. Prize users are not involved in the content. For Instagram algorithms, this is a sign of irrelevant content.

Cheat bots and comments

Instead of live subscribers, you get fake accounts - bots that create the appearance, but in fact "drown" the account. For algorithms, the more subscribers, the more engagement should be. If the subscribers are bots, there is no activity from them. Instagram sees an uninteresting account and does not show it not only in recommendations, but also to subscribers. The social network also fights against bots and suspicious activity, bans accounts that are engaged in cheating.

Activity chats

They create the illusion of involvement, show social networks and other subscribers interest in the account. These are groups where users gather who like, comment on posts and watch each other's stories. The main disadvantage of the method is an irrelevant audience. If this method is still possible in an account from scratch, then after growth it will most likely harm - you will not see real involvement and interest in the content, so you will not understand how to improve it.

Mass following and mass liking

The essence of the methods is subscribing to multiple accounts that can be the target audience or/and likes to posts by different people. The goal is to draw attention to your account: the user will replace your activity and subscribe in response. But the methods are no longer relevant: users do not respond, but Instagram punishes for such promotion. The social network has a limit of subscriptions, unsubscribes, likes, comments, marks, and even the number of publications. For suspicious activity, the user receives a ban. If you resort to the help of automated third-party services, the risks of losing your account forever increase.

Summary

Start promoting your Instagram account by creating a strategy and profile packaging: a clear description and location designation.

The most promising free way to promote Instagram is to shoot Reels. Combine it with other methods: commenting, cross-promotion with accounts of similar subjects, use user-generated content and advertise your Instagram on other platforms.

Put thematic hashtags under publications and geolocations if the account is tied to a territory - these are additional free promotion methods.

To reach a larger audience, launch targeted ads or reach out to influencers who will remain a popular paid promotion channel in 2022.

Do not use gray methods of promotion: giveaways, activity chats, promotion, mass following and mass liking. Promote legal methods - this is a reliable and proven way.

4 myths about promotion on Instagram

Blogger Oksana Zheleznova shares with Netology an overview of methods of promotion on Instagram that no longer work, and suggests alternatives.

Social networks have their own life cycles and peaks of popularity. Over the past year, close attention of bloggers, SMM-specialists and their clients has been turned to Instagram, which has suddenly turned from a photo-sharing application, and for many even an “unknown animal” into a popular blogging platform. Not having an Instagram account has become somehow undignified.

Business media are full of examples of successful cases, and Instagram smelled a "gold mine". Demand creates supply, and soon after the first articles by SMM experts, schools teaching promotion on Instagram appeared, the most famous being Instashkola and Best Insta School.

However, in digital marketing, a new coup quickly becomes mainstream, becomes annoying to the public, becomes annoying, and abruptly loses its effectiveness (more on this in the example of banners in Andrew Chen's essay The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs). So don't be surprised if the return on using a tool suggested in a clever article or a training program from one of the aforementioned schools turns out to be rather weak, if not completely zero.

In mid-April, I conducted a survey on my Instagram account about what annoys my subscribers in the behavior of users of this social network. The results were surprising, because some of the answers contradict what SMM specialists have been teaching just the other day. And if users are annoyed, they unsubscribe.

So, let's dispel the myths about "working" tools that no longer work and think about possible alternatives. It doesn’t matter what the purpose of the account is communication and expansion of connections, building a personal brand, selling goods or services directly through the account, or attracting additional traffic to the site, the detonators of subscriber dissatisfaction are the same.

Myth #1: SFS, lighttimes and giveaways are great for getting followers

SFS - Shout Out for Shout Out, account mention exchange. Giveway - drawing a gift for a repost with a mention of the account.

As it really is: This is a hotbed of irritants. Users are infuriated by the mechanics of SFS and the behavior of those who conduct them. This is how you don't have to do it.

Mask the desire to attract new subscribers with phrases like "to get to know readers better." Do not take readers for fools, they immediately feel false and if they are silent about it in the comments, this does not mean that they have been deceived.

Make a collage of 4-9 photos with a caption tap&follow or "click and enjoy". It upsets both the participant and the reader when the blogger who started the SFS did not bother to give a written justification of what is good in these profiles and why make additional movements with gyri and fingers to go into them.

Posting the results for a couple of hours and immediately demolishing it looks impolite to both the participants and the subscribers who may not have had time to look at a potentially interesting profile this second.

Organize circular giveaways, SFS and liketimes when you need to subscribe to several profiles and tag 2-3 friends in the comments.

Run lotteries with the promise of dubious gifts for advertising a profile like a standard postcard.

Well, okay, you say, but they continue to participate. Yes, continue those who recently came to Instagram and have not yet “played enough” or those who, according to the principle “all means are good in war”, use every chance to draw attention to their account.

Alternative way: Mutual advertising with bloggers broadcasting to the same target audience. To overcome the fear of talking to people directly, try starting with those who have a smaller audience than you. Tell a sincere story about your relationship with the account holder, even if it is limited to only virtual space, and ask him to do the same.

Come up with your own mechanics for spreading information about your profile: arrange marathons, joint projects, offer yourself as an author to a popular public. Yes, it takes more effort and time, but it looks organic and works. An interesting case “How I tried to become an Instagram star” was published in early February by The Village.

Myth #2: The visual uniformity of the account is the key to success

Instagram bloggers love the word “atmospheric”, which means the unity of the color palette, object, shape, color, plot. Beginners are offered to process photos with the same filter.

As it really is: “Sleek” accounts, where the entire gallery is in the same style and without much semantic load, are annoying. Users vote for "live" photos and the element of surprise when viewing the feed.

When newbies hear advice from social media professionals to “process photos with the same filter”, they seriously choose one of the free VSCO filters and overlay all photos indiscriminately. It turns out complete bullshit. Professional photographers keep the color palette in mind and select the filter based on the characteristics of the object and shooting conditions.

Alternate way: Talk to famous photographers or at least view their portfolios. You will see that individuality and recognition develop over time and appear not only in a single color palette, but also in details that are hardly noticeable to the layman.

After half a year of photography classes under the guidance of an experienced teacher, I discovered that my "handwriting" is the architectural composition of photographs, symmetry, clear axes and horizon lines. If you have a commercial account and are hiring a photographer, ask them to come up with a visual concept for your company.

Myth #3: In Instagram, the image is important, but the caption plays a secondary role and no one reads long text Even infuriating selfies are perceived more positively if they are accompanied by a caption with meaning. And spelling, stylistic or punctuation errors, the use of catchphrases at random and far-fetched questions to provoke a semblance of discussion will ruin the impression of even the most highly artistic photo.

Alternative route: Improve your copywriting skills or hire a specialist. If a beautiful photo has an inspiring caption, you will be pleased with the effect. If the photos leave a lot to be desired so far, the text will save the post.

Myth #4: You need to post often so that you are never forgotten about. They are annoyed by empty posts like the standard cup of coffee and wishes for a good morning/afternoon/Friday/weekend. Googled pictures are infuriating to “inflate” the content.

Alternative path: The number of subscriptions is growing, users do not have time to read all the posts and periodically delete profiles of dubious informational value. In order not to "fly out" from the feed of subscribers, adhere to the principle "less is better".

A post a day is enough, and if you have nothing to say one day, then keep silent and then make up for it with really outstanding content. Let users themselves be afraid to miss something interesting from you.

What does it mean

Any replicated marketing ploy is a revealed secret.