← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
How To Grow On Instagram In 2025 | Complete Guide - 822
00:37:05
In today’s episode, Brock Johnson provides a complete guide on how to grow on Instagram in 2025. He will walk you through effective strategies to gain more followers, boost views, and increase engagement. This episode covers everything you need to...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Brock Johnson
It's time to buckle up. If you clicked on this, it's because you want to learn the complete guide to Growing on Instagram in 2025. And I'm about to show you the exact three step formula for growing on Instagram. Now, today's episode is going to be for beginner to intermediate level Instagrammers. If you're someone who has already surpassed, let's say 50,000 followers and you have a good idea of how to grow, your growth has been pretty consistent, then you probably don't need to listen to today's episode. But I would still encourage you to stick around because there are going to be some strategies that I share towards the end around posting that should hopefully help you kind of tip the scales back in your favor or swing the pendulum back in the right direction if you have been kind of stagnant or plateaued in your growth in recent months. Before we even get into this three step formula, let me share with you a little bit of credibility and background as to who I am. My name is Brock Johnson and I have been an Instagram coach for about seven or eight years now. I got my start teaching people how to market specifically using Instagram stories. And since then I've grown my audience to over 700,000 followers on Instagram. And we have coached over 40,000 people through our Insta Club Hub where we have an average growth rate of 16,000 followers per year. To say that another way, our average engaged student grows by about 16,000 followers per year. I tell you that not to brag, boast or gloat, but just to give you the facts. And that is what we are all about at the Insta Club Hub. Giving you the facts that actually matter. Giving you the strategies that are proven to be most effective. Because as you hear today, there are really only three steps to growing on Instagram. Sure, there are a million different strategies and little techniques and hacks and things that might work for a month or two and then be gone for a month or two. But the reality is it's actually really simple to grow on Instagram. Now, simple doesn't mean easy. And so as we go through today, I want you to keep in the back of your mind that none of this is going to be overnight, none of this is going to be instant, instantaneous. I think we have a common misconception, many of us who use social media, that growth is supposed to be fast. But I heard this analogy recently and I loved it, so I had to share it. In nature, we have a term for things that grow super fast and uncontrollably. And it's called weeds. Weeds are often gross or invasive or dangerous, and there's a reason why weeds are quickly plucked. On the other end of the spectrum, though, you have something that takes a really, really long time to grow. Something like the redwood forest in California that took hundreds of years to grow to the massive size that it is today. And people plan entire vacations just to go visit those trees. So the next time you're concerned about not growing fast enough, I want you to remind yourself that you would much rather be a redwood that took years to grow than a weed that popped up overnight. So with all of that said, let's hop into the three step formula. Step number one, and this is in sequential order. This is not just like three things to do at any random time. Step number one is the thing that you need to make sure that you have down pat first. It is your foundation. It is is how you're going to grow and have success long term. Not just with a following or a community, but building an actual business or a brand. Or if you're a content creator who wants paid endorsements and sponsorships, this is absolutely step one. And step one is to pick your niche. Now, here at Build you'd Tribe and within the Insta Club hub, we teach niche in two parts. Part of your niche is the who. Who are you specifically going to be speaking to on your Instagram? Who is your target audience, your target demographic, your target follower? And it recommendable. It is advantageous to get as specific as possible. And it's recommendable for a few reasons. Number one, if you're posting for everyone, or you're posting for all women, or you're posting for anyone in the United States, it's such a broad audience that no one's going to find your account and be like, oh my gosh, I love this person. This person was meant for me. You're just kind of bland and basic. You don't stand out. You're never going to grow at the same rate as if you were to niche down. Also, another benefit of really getting super specific with that target audience is eventually, once you get into the business side of things and you're creating products and services and offers and you're selling things to that audience, you don't have to convince them that your product is right for them. They know that your product is right for them and they're willing to pay whatever it is that you set your price point at. And they're not going to argue you. They're not going to ask for refunds, you're not going to have to work really hard to make a sale because they're going to know that whatever it is that you have created was perfect for them because from the start you knew who they were. I have gone so far with my own Instagram and this is what we teach our Insta Clubbers as well. That you should go so far as to have one singular person in mind when you're creating each of your posts. But before we do, we need to get crystal clear as to the who. Think about their age, think about their religious background, think about their marital status, do they have kids? What is their health status? What are their goals? What are their challenges? What are their struggles? The more crystal clear you can get on that, the better. And that's just half of your niche. The other half is the what. So of course, what are you going to be talking to them about? It's great to know. Okay, I'm talking to 35 year old moms of two or more children in the Midwest, but what are you going to be talking to them about? Right? What is that thing that you're going to be posting about? Oftentimes this is where people start. When you say niche, I'll ask someone what's your niche? And they'll say, oh, it's fitness. That's a good start. Oh my niche is real estate. That's a good start. These things are the first step, but these should not be our last step when we're niching down. So rather than just sticking with your industry, I want you to get more specific than that. I want you to see if you can niche down further and see if there's a specific area. Rather than just helping women over the age of 35 with two or more children in the Midwest with fitness. What if you were helping them by giving 30 minute or less at home workouts or low intensity gym exercises or an easy way to break through the weight loss plateau that they've hit in recent years? When you get that specific with the problem and someone clicks on your account, they're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to follow this person right away. That is the advantage of having a niche. Now some common challenges that I see people run into within this world of niche is number one, they're worried about the right niche versus the wrong niche. While there are definitely better and worse niches, and you might call it better or worse for numerous reasons, maybe you want a niche with more people in it, but someone else might Want a niche with less people. Maybe you want a niche that has more spending power, more capital. Right? They have more money, disposable income, you could say. But then there's also the niche that maybe is underserved and more deserving. So there are ultimately better and worse niches. But I don't want you to stress out over that. Ultimately, the great thing about a niche is that you can change it down the line later on. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but we're going to talk about posting. And when I talk about posting and consistency, I think that you should stick with your niche for at least 100 days before deciding to change. If after 100 days, it's just not lighting you up, it's not making you feel energized, you're not excited to talk about it, you are constantly running out of ideas, you feel like an imposter in this niche. You feel like, oh my gosh, no one's listening to me. No one cares. I don't really care that much anymore if after 100 days, you're at that point, change, pivot, you can rebrand, you can start a new account, you can start over. We have plenty of episodes here on Build you'd tribe about starting over and whether or not you should start over on Instagram, which, by the way, if you are thinking about starting over, like, you are changing your niche completely and you're like, should I start over or not? Probably yes. That's a big one. If you change from, I don't know, giving tips for bakers to all of a sudden beginner rock climber gear reviews like completely different niches. You should probably start a new account, but that's neither here nor there. And again, we will link up the episode in the show notes about should you start over or not? But the great thing about a niche is while it is very important and while it is your foundation to the house, you can pick up and move your house at any point. You can change locations, you can move to a new lot, move to a new city at any time. And so the foundation is absolutely crucial before we move on to step two. But I don't want it to be something that stresses you out. I don't want it to be something that inhibits you from ever moving on. Ultimately, just pick something. If you want to narrow it down to three or four things, then throw a dart against the wall. That works too. But ultimately you just have to pick something. And if you do decide to start over in the future, you won't be starting over from zero because you'll have all of this knowledge and expertise and experience that you've gained, and you can apply that to your starting over account. All right? So your target market, your target audience, your niche, your specialty, your expertise, whatever it is you want to call it, that is step number one. And the last thing that I'll say about niche before we move on is your experience matters a lot more than your expertise. Oftentimes people will say, brock, I don't feel credible because I don't have a degree, or I don't feel qualified, or I don't have this expertise, or I don't have these certifications. You don't need any of that. You just need your own experience. To tell you about my own experience, when I first got started as an Instagram coach, I mentioned this earlier. My specific what was Instagram stories? Marketing. So I was helping people market their business and grow their account using Instagram stories. I didn't have even a college degree at that point. I was still in college when I started that business. And I didn't have a massive following myself. I maybe had 20 or 30,000 followers when I got started as an Instagram coach. But what I did have was experience. And this is the other thing that's really surprising for a lot of people. A lot of my experience wasn't even on Instagram. I had grown my business initially with Snapchat Stories, and so I took what I learned at Snapchat and from Snapchat Stories and applied it to Instagram Stories. And that was the experience that I had when I got started. Now, over time, I've developed my expertise. Over time, my experience has grown. I've broadened my scale, right? I have broadened my niche, which is something that you can do over time. But when you're first getting started, I want you to think about what experiences do you have? What unique problems have you solved? What groups do you feel called to serve or to help or to create content for or about? And that should hopefully help inform what your niche is going to be. So that's step number one. Step number two for growing on Instagram. Let's take that niche and actually apply it to Instagram. Step number two is optimizing your Instagram profile. And I think oftentimes, within the world of social media, we overcomplicate things, right? We're thinking about algorithms and best practices and hacks and strategies and settings and all this stuff. When ultimately, let's think about social media, just like we would the real world, the physical world. Right. And so if you're building a business or a brand on social media, on Instagram, let's think about how you would build a brand or a business or a store in the real world. Let's talk about that store. You need a sign centered above the store that's well lit and none of the letters have gone out. Like the lights are still on. We need to make sure that there are things to look at in the store before the store opens. Right. We can't say grand opening and everyone comes in and it's just an empty room. Right. We need to have a cash register set up. We need to have the product on display. We need to have the people walking around the store with the goals or intentions for them. They have to have been trained. Right. Fortunately, not all of that is going to be necessary for starting on Instagram, but the same general principles you want to have applied. So what is that storefront with the lights turned on that it makes sense when you drive by it? Right. There's like a, a store in where I live in Park City, Utah that says I love Moo. What's I love Moo? Is it like a cow store? Is it like a apparel store that sells cow related merch? Is it a milkshake store? Is it an ice cream shop? Like what is I love Moo? I don't know. But if right next to it there is a place called the Burger joint, I know that they're probably selling burgers in there. If there's a place called, you know, Bohemian Apparel next to it, I know they're selling bohemian clothing. So step number one, within this, optimize your profile. Step number one, the first step to setting up your Instagram profile correctly is to simply pick a username that is easy to read and or understand. And if it's a business Instagram account, somehow in the username it hints at or articulates your niche. So there's kind of three different approaches you can take for a username. One is if you're a personal brand, like my Instagram is, right. If you check out my Instagram, I'm in every video I'm teaching things relating to growing on Instagram. But it's my personal brand. Well then my name is my personal brand and that is my username. So Brock11Johnson is my username. If you have a non personal brand, you have a business brand, then you're probably going to want to use your business name as the username. For example, our Insta ClubHub business has an Instagram, which is NSTA ClubHub. Makes sense. Now, it's possible that. Let's say I was getting started on Instagram today and Brock Johnson was taken. So I could do Brock Johnson Coach Brock johnson.insta Brock johnson.tips. i could do something like that. That includes a keyword or that includes something relating to my niche in the username. Those are the first two approaches. The third approach is to basically get a little bit more creative and mix in some keywords into your username that ultimately will improve your searchability. We'll come back to this topic of searchability, though. But generally speaking, you need a username. You don't want it to be too long. And by too long, I'm going to say, you know, 30 plus characters. I don't even know if you can go that long. But you want to try to make it as short as possible while not having any ambiguity. You want, you know, if there's a name for it to be easily readable. You know, even if my name was like Brock Johnson, I would actually probably prefer Brock Dot Johnson or Brock underscore Johnson, rather than just having Brock Johnson all as one word, because then it's a little bit harder to read, right? And so using a period or an underscore is a great way to break up your name and make it more readable. And also just make sure that it's available, because with Instagram being around for over a decade now, a lot of usernames are already taken. So that's the first thing to think about. The second thing to think about is you want to make sure your storefront looks visually appealing, right? Like the window dressing matches what's inside the store. If I walk by, I love Moo, and there's just like a cow inside of a heart. I still don't know what that store is about, right? But if I walk by, I love Moo, and it's got, like, a bunch of different ice cream on the windows or a bunch of, you know, photos of ice cream. Then I'm like, oh, okay, I Love Moo is an ice cream shop. The translation of that to your Instagram is your profile picture. For your profile picture, there's basically two options that I will have you choose between. Option number one is your company's logo, and that is if you have a business brand. Now, if you are someone who's deciding between personal brand versus business brand, I can tell you that, generally speaking, personal brands will grow faster than business brands. But there's nothing necessarily wrong with having a business Instagram account, just like we have Insta Clubhub and I have Brock Levin Johnson, there's options to have both, there's benefits to both, but generally speaking, personal brand a little bit more recommendable, but not a huge deal there. If you have a business brand and you're going to use your logo, just make sure it's a logo that was formatted to be a profile picture. Like Google would never use G O O G L E as their profile picture. Right? They use just the little like rainbow G icon because that is much more recognizable when it's zoomed out super duper small and tiny, you can still make out what it is. So if you are going to use your logo, just make sure that you don't have, you know, like the tagline in size 9 font at the bottom or any extra words. And as people have like you know, established in 2017 or Birmingham, Alabama, like all this extra text, try to simplify your logo so that it's really just an icon or something that's easily recognizable. If you are using a personal brand, I would recommend having your face as the profile picture. A mistake that I see a lot of people making is they're just simply too far away from the camera. Your profile picture should be a super close up selfie, like collarbones or neck just to slightly above your head. Like basically the circle is just completely filled by your face. That way it stands out. When people are scrolling through Instagram, they're seeing these tiny little itty bitty profile pictures all day long. And so there's a reason that mine has this big cartoonish grin and this yellow background. It's because I know that stands out and I know that grabs attention. So an attention grabbing profile picture is the second step towards optimizing your profile. The third step towards optimizing your profile is the biggest mistake people make when setting up their Instagram account and it is the name line. Now most of you just picked a username and you had to think really hard about like, you know, what's creative, what's original, what hasn't already been taken. You have your username and then you get to the next line that says name and you're like, oh, okay, I'll just write my first and last here and you press save. But here's the thing, anything that you put on that nameline is a searchable keyword. So if my username said Brock11Johnson and my name said Brock Johnson, then the only way that you could search for and find me was if you googled or if you looked up on Instagram Brock Johnson. Which is very, very unlikely, especially if you're just getting started. Especially if you're just day one starting a brand new account. So instead, on your name line, what I recommend doing is your first name a hyphen, and then add some keywords that are kind of like a title for yourself or a title for your brand or business. For example, on my name line it says Instagram Growth Coach. I didn't put my name on that line. That's not totally necessary. A lot of people do like to include their name on that line for various reasons. But the essential thing that you need to have on your nameline is a keyword or keywords that describe your account. And that would be searchable. Key part there is that they need to be searchable. I have seen people put their nicknames on that line like fitfab, Funky Marketing Diva. That's cute that your friends call you that or that you came up with that nickname for yourself. But that's not very searchable. So instead we need to put something that would be searchable. Marketing expert for Florida small businesses. Whatever it may be, searchable keywords go on that line. Then when it comes to the actual bio, your bio can be as many lines as you want it to be. But I recommend only having four lines in your bio. And the reason for that is that if you go more than four lines, Instagram will automatically truncate it. It won't delete it, but it will hide it behind a more window. And so people have to tap on that to expand the bio and read through the rest like, no one's going to do that. The average person decides to follow you in three seconds or less. So your bio should be four lines or less. It should be as concise as possible. It should not use any insider lingo or any terms or phrases that your ideal follower would not already know. So don't use any acronyms or any terms and phrases that like you and your other experts or your other colleagues know, but your followers don't use terms in your bio that you're following. Followers already know. Again, your goal should be to be as concise as possible. So rather than saying something like, I help you get fit and be healthy and lose weight, just pick one of those things because you don't need all three. You don't need all the synonyms. We want to be as short and concise as possible so that people can skim our bio as quickly as possible and understand what it is that we do and thus increase their likelihood of deciding to follow us or not. And that's really the nuts and bolts of setting up your Instagram profile. There are other little things that I would recommend, like make sure that you do not show your Threads badge unless it is your goal to grow on threads or actively use threads to promote your Instagram. Don't show your threads badge. Also, turn off category display. Because category display counts as one of those four lines, but it's usually something that's kind of generic and not helpful. Like it'll say entrepreneur or video creator. It's just not very helpful. So turn off category display. But besides that, the big goal is that you want your bio to be understood or understandable by a stranger at a glance. And now we're already onto step number three of three of growing on Instagram. And yes, like I said, there are a million other little strategies and techniques. And that's what we do here at Build you'd Tribe is we constantly update you on all of those little things. But part of what we assume is that you already have step one, two, and three down. And so we highly encourage you, I highly encourage you right now to press subscribe if you haven't already. Because every single week we put out new little quick tips and helpful ideas and strategies and breakdowns, tutorials about how to grow on Instagram and how to grow on the other social media networks as well. But the foundation here is step number one, niche. Step number two, optimize your profile. And step number three, post. Now, within post, there are some common questions, some strategies, and some things that I want to make sure that you understand. And the first of those is, what do you post? When I say post, what am I talking about? Well, first and foremost, let me say I'm only referring to feed posts. So feed posts includes carousels, single photos and reels. Feed posts does not include Instagram stories, it does not include Instagram Live, and it does not include direct messages. Those three things do not help you grow. DMs have a huge purpose. DMs are, in fact, the most used area of Instagram. Instagram stories are my bread and butter. They're what I got started with. But Instagram stories, and this might be shocking to some people, they do not help you grow on Instagram. Instagram stories only reach your existing followers. Instagram stories are only shown to the people who already follow you. And so they usually equate to or account for less than 1% of growth. Like, it's really hard for Someone who doesn't follow you to find your stories. Really, the only way is if they find your account and then they watch your stories, or if someone like sends them your story. But both of those things are very, very rare. So usually the only thing that's going to help you grow is a feed post again, carousel, photo or reel. Now, which of those three is the best? It depends slightly on what your goal is. But of course you clicked on this episode because you want to learn how to grow on Instagram. And so in general, the best kind of post for growing on Instagram is a reel. And that is because on average, reels get the most views and reels get the most reach to non followers. So reels on average will get shown to more new people than a photo or a carousel. There are people who grow on Instagram who grow wildly successfully, who have millions of followers, who have never posted a reel, who only post photos, or who post photos and carousels, or who only post carousels. And that is totally fine. It's totally possible. But statistically speaking, you will have the best odds of growing and you will grow the fastest if your focus is reels. Now, I say focus. I don't think that anyone should do 100% of one kind of content. Even if I'm working with someone who has over a million followers followers, and they have those million followers from posting almost exclusively carousel posts, I'm still going to recommend that they mix in some reels and they mix in some photos. A healthy Instagram strategy has a balance of all three kinds of feed posts. Now, what should your reels be about? What should your feed posts be centered around? They should be 100% or close to 100% related to your niche. If they are not, if you post something that is not related to your niche, one of two things can happen, and both of them are not very good things. The first thing that could happen if you post something that is outside of your niche is it just doesn't perform well. I'll use myself as an example. Occasionally I will post a snowboarding video or photo of myself because I love snowboarding and it's something I'm very passionate about and I just can't not share it with my audience sometimes. But I know that every single time I do that, it's going to perform very poorly. In fact, some of my worst posts I've ever made in terms of how they performed were snowboarding posts. Posts that I loved, posts that were great, posts that if they were posted on a snowboarding account, would have done great. But my followers don't follow me for snowboarding. They follow me for Instagram tips. Similarly, your followers follow you for whatever your niche is, so stick to it with your feed posts. Now, I mentioned that there's two bad things that could happen. That's the first. The other bad thing that could happen is that your post actually does well. It goes viral. You post a hilarious video of your dog pooping on your toddler and it goes viral. Well, now guess what? Now you have a viral hangover. Your account is struggling to grow because Instagram doesn't know who to show you to because you just went viral for one thing, and now it's trying to show you to other people. It's confused. You've confused the algorithm, you've confused your followers, and you might have even gained hundreds or thousands of followers who want more videos of a dog pooping on a toddler and not whatever it is that you actually sell or do or post about, not whatever your niche actually is. So 99% of the time, as close to 100% of the time as you can make it, you stick to your niche with your feed posts. And like I said, there are exceptions. Sometimes I post about snowboarding, sometimes I post about my wife. I understand there are anniversaries, there are birthdays, there are important dates that you want to make sure that you acknowledge and post about. But generally speaking, keep it to the niche. Now, when I say keep it to the niche, I just mean that it has to relate to either the who or the what in some way. Preferably your post would relate to both the who and the what in every post. But there are going to be some posts that. Let's take myself as an example, right? I'm posting about how to organically grow on Instagram for small business owners. Sometimes I might post something that isn't directly about growing on Instagram, but it's still something that's helpful for a small business owner. Sometimes I might post about something that's how to grow on Instagram, but it's going to apply to a more general audience or it's going to apply to content creators rather than specifically small business owners. So that's what we like to call at Build you'd Tribe and within the Insta Club hub, naps. Naps stands for niche adjacent posts. And it's okay to take naps from time to time. Naps can be very healthy and helpful. Just make sure that not every single one of your posts is a nap or else there is no niche in the first place and the final part of my answer to what do you post is if your goal is growth, the best form of engagement is a share. According to Instagram CEO and according to our own research in the Insta Club Hub, you will reach the most amount of non followers if your post is getting more shares. A share, also known as a send is the best form of engagement to increase that kind of reach. And so what I'm going to recommend that you do is create shareworthy content. A lot easier said than done, right? Obviously you want more shares, create share worthy content. I did an entire YouTube video, an entire podcast that I will link up in the show Notes below about shareworthy content, what the different kinds of share worthy content are examples and how to create them. But generally speaking, that should be your focus. Rather than trying to create a super valuable educational post that everyone is going to press save on, your focus should be on creating a post that everyone is going to send to a friend, share to their story, send to their group chat, tag somebody below because that is ultimately how you're going to grow the fastest. So again, step number three is posting. We just talked about what to post. Another common question that I hear is how much should you post? I'm going to answer that without giving you a number, which is unfortunate because I know you want a number. I know you want me to say you should post twice a day. You should post three times a week. According to Instagram CEO and according to numerous studies, the more you post, the more you grow. To say that another way, as you increase your posting frequency, typically we see an increase of growth rate as well. So should you post once a day? Sure. Should you post three times a day? Sure. Should you post 12 times a day? Sure. Should you post once a month? Sure. Go for it. Ultimately, what matters not is the number. What matters is two things. Number one, what matters is consistency, sticking to that number. So whether you post once a month, once a day, or once an hour, staying consistent with that number. And number two, how you find that number in the first place is asking yourself the question, what can I sustain? Whenever people ask me, brock, how much should I post? I love to flip that back on them and ask them the question, I don't know, what can you sustain based off your own goals, based off your own timeline, based off your business, your availability, the season of life that you're in, and all of these things? Figure out what you can sustain. Maybe you can sustain one a week. Maybe you can sustain one a day. Figure out what that number is and then challenge yourself to do just a little bit more. So if you can consistently maintain 5 per week, challenge yourself to increase to 7 a week. Because, not to get too philosophical or preachy on you, but in life and on social media, growth happens when we push ourselves past what we can sustain, past our comfort zone. It's just like in the gym. How do you get bigger biceps? You do as many curls as you think you can, and then you try to do one more and then you fail. It's called going to failure. That's how you grow your muscles, that's how you grow your followers. So I don't want you to fail on Instagram. I don't want you to get to the point of burning out. I don't want you get to the point of like, oh my gosh, I could sustain five, but as soon as I went to six, I burnt out. I was overwhelmed all the time. I don't want you to get to that point, but I do want you to implement systems and strategies, hire a team, outsource what you can so that you can increase your posting frequency, because that is ultimately how you will increase your growth rate. And I did mention a moment ago, 12 posts a day. And I kind of threw it out there as a random hypothetical. And I know that no one will post that frequently, but according to our own studies, there are some people who have had the craziest, fastest growth you've ever heard of. We're talking millions of followers in just a few months, and that is usually achieved by this hyper extreme consistency. Now, it's not something I'm going to recommend to you, but I just tell you about it to set the case in point that it is absolutely true. The more you post, the more you grow. I also want to say I'm a big proponent of the more you post, the more you grow. Because when it comes to the debate of quality versus quantity, ultimately both matter. Ultimately, if you are posting crap, if you are posting super low quality posts in order to meet your criteria of frequency, that ain't gonna work. But when people say that quality should be your only focus and that that's all you need to care about is quality, I will often push back by asking them, how do we achieve quality? How do we make a good post? And I'm a firm believer that you make a good post by making a bunch of really bad posts. Not because you're trying to make them bad, but because you're still learning, you're still growing. And when you're first getting started, I want to encourage you to rip that band aid off and just press post. Your first 200 posts on Instagram will not be very good, and they won't be that much better if you spend all your time stressing out and overthinking and watching course after course and YouTube video after YouTube video on how to make an A plus high quality slam dunk post. Instead, what I'm going to recommend that you do is you just post it and then you learn from it, and then you post again and you learn from it. You apply what you learned, you post again and you learn from it. You apply what you learned and you post again. And that is how, by the 300th post, you're an excellent content creator who can create high quality content in a super short amount of time with minimal amount of effort or budget, because you've put in the work to get there. To say it another way, practice makes progress. So the more you post, the more you grow. And focusing on quantity is how you can achieve higher quality. All right, so that was how much to post. Another really common question is when should you post? And while some times might be better than the others, there's ultimately no universal best time to post. There's only your best time to post based off your audience. And the only way to figure that out is by consistently posting at different times. Posting at 9 in the morning for a week or two, posting at noon for a week or two, posting in the evening for a week or two, and just seeing if there's any sort of correlation. If posts perform better at certain times of the day, eventually you'll get to the point where you know that Saturday afternoons are your best time to post memes and Friday mornings are your best time to post educational carousels. You'll get to that point eventually. But when you're first getting started, I don't want you to stress out over the time that you're posting. And then the final question is, how do we post that much? How do you post more? I mentioned earlier, systems, outsourcing, teams, hiring help, and all those things are absolutely helpful. But if I can give you one tip to actually increase your output without significantly changing your input. And that means any form of input, time, resources, energy, anything like that, is to upcycle your content. Upcycling is a term that we use in the Insta Clubhub to describe the act of reposting or recreating something that you've posted in the past. Now, if you're starting from zero day one on Instagram, then You're not going to have posts from the past to pull from. And we'll talk about that in just a second. What to do if that's the case. But maybe you've been consistent for a few months, then you missed a few months. Or maybe you were trying to grow really hard in 2023 and then 2024 was just not your year. Go back to the past. Go back to that content that you have previously posted, specifically the content that has previously done well, and do one of two things. Either directly repost it. What I mean by that is literally just post it a second time, find it in your camera roll so that you can post it again, or if you don't have it saved in the first place, use a website like saveinsta app to download it once again. But basically the bottom line is just post the exact same thing, same caption, same audio, same everything. If it worked well before, it likely will work well a second time. And you could also refresh or recreate it. So slightly change the caption, maybe re edit the video, maybe swap out the hook for a different hook, maybe rerecord the exact same video just with your new haircut. Recreate things from the past. And that will be a great way for you to create more content and post more frequently without having to significantly increase the amount of work that you have to do. In fact, this upcycling strategy is what I do for about 75% of my posts. About three out of every four posts that you see on my Instagram are either a direct repost or a recreation of something I have previously posted. And I'm someone who, like I said earlier, has over 700,000 followers on Instagram. I get 30 million plus views every single month on Instagram, and I have never received one single negative comment about reposting. And that's because most people are seeing tens of thousands of posts every single day. They don't remember the post that you made a few months ago. And if they do remember it, if they are part of that elite 1% who remembers what you posted 90 plus days ago, well then they probably remember it because it was that good, it was that funny, it was that educational or valuable. And so just like watching your favorite episode of TV for a second or third time, just like rewatching your favorite movie, they wouldn't mind seeing it again. All right, so that is really the 1, 2, 3 of growing on Instagram. The three steps to growing in 2025 if you are starting a new Instagram account or you are going to relaunch. Here's what I would recommend doing. First, take one to two weeks to work behind the scenes rather than trying to hit the ground running. As soon as you finish this, I know you're excited, but hold the horses and instead of trying to immediately launch your new Instagram account, spend a week or two batching content. Spend a week or two just focused on creating content and not even posting it all yet. That way, a week or two from now, when you do get started, you could post once a day and you could post once a day without having to create content for a week or two, right? Because you already have all this stuff ready to go, all of these posts that are in the can, so to speak. So spend a week or two just creating as much as you possibly can. If you are starting from zero like it's a brand new Instagram account, I would Recommend posting about 12 of those posts before announcing that the account is open. Right. It's going back all the way to what we said at the beginning. You want to have some close in the store before the grand opening. So if you are starting a new Instagram account, have some posts there for people to look at before you announce on, you know, your Twitter, your Facebook, all your other profiles saying, hey, new Instagram, go follow me, make sure that you have some posts for them to look at. Even if you are continuing on, you know, your same Instagram account and you're just going to be re focused on growing in 2025, I would still recommend taking a week or two to just batch content. That way, moving forward, you feel like you're ahead rather than feeling like you're constantly on the hamster wheel trying to play catch up. And that's it. That is how you grow on Instagram. You get 1% better with each post. You continue to just press post and learn from each of those posts that you make. You continue to stay up to date on the trends, the changes, the new hacks that are working and that are not working on Instagram. But ultimately it's the same. 1, 2, 3. Pick your niche, optimize your profile and get consistent with your posting. We here at Build you'd Tribe and in the Insta ClubHub will continue to help you stay up to date with those hacks, trends and strategies so that you can get the most out of the post that you are making. But ultimately, if you take nothing else away from today's episode, I hope it's these three words. Just press post. Thank you so much. And as always, happy networking.