← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
97. How to Grow Your Instagram & Reels Audience Fast: The Step-By-Step Growth Formula
00:27:36
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey friend, welcome back to Call Her Creator.
- [00:03]
B
Powered by your All In One Creator Store, Stan Stan is the easiest way.
- [00:08]
A
For you to make money online. All of your courses, digital products and.
- [00:12]
B
Bookings are hosted within your link in Bio.
- [00:14]
A
If you're ready to start your free.
- [00:16]
B
Trial, visit my show Notes and click my affiliate link to get started today.
- [00:21]
A
So I'm going to go through things that you can do today that will help you grow your social media following. When you grow your social media following you, you'll have an audience that wants to buy from you, whether that be your service, a digital download or offer, or a membership. We've talked about a lot of different things that you can sell on the Internet these days. So if you're still not sure what you want to do, go back to one of those episodes and see how you can monetize your social media and I will give you a ton of different ideas. So today we're going to be talking about 14 ways that will help you grow your Instagram profile. Now, Instagram followers are more than just a number. They're members of your community. So that said, if your goal is to grow on Instagram, you could see an increase in traffic, sales and engagement when you grow your following. So we're going to be talking about a couple of things that will help you to grow your following on Instagram. Now, before we get into that, there's two things I want to talk about. First thing is I usually give you guys a social media update, which we're going to do in a minute. But I am reading the 5am club because I hate waking up in the morning. I want to sleep, sleep, sleep. But I have two young kids, so I think like sleeping in for me is like 8am But I really want to join the 5am club because I feel like I did it for like a week a couple months ago and me and my friend Jordan would go to the gym together. And it truly took off so much pressure for me trying to find time in the day to go to the gym because I had that extra time in the morning, that extra hour, but I fell off the bandwagon rather quickly. But I'm reading this book called the 5am Club. It's written by Robin Sharma. So far I'm like, I'm only like in the first half of the book, but I read something today and it was just so good I wanted to share with you guys. So it says, consistency is the DNA of mastery and small, daily, seemingly insignificant improvements, when done consistently over time, yield staggering results. Please Remember, the great companies and wonderful lives don't happen, but by sudden revolution. Nope. They materialize by incremental evolution. So this just had my wheels turning. And then I reached out to my team on Influence Marketing Studio, like our Slack channel, and I was just like, guys, here is my daily wisdom for y' all to close out our week. I want y' all to just understand, like, just doing one tiny improvement a week can truly improve you into mastery. It just takes those little tiny things. I can't remember what example they gave in the book. I feel like they were talking about, like, when this rocket went into space and something happened where the rocket ship blew up. I could be totally wrong if it was the rocket ship or what it was. It was. Something blew up, okay? And. And lives were lost from it. And at the end of the day, they realized that it was from one little tiny piece in the machine that went wrong. So that one little, tiny piece, had they been, like, being meticulous about things and really checking every detail and just getting better at those little tiny things, this probably wouldn't have happened with the rocket. So it just kind of made me think too, like, wow, that is so true. Like, the tiny little details in our business, in our lives, are really what make up the big things. So don't sleep on the tiny things in your life and your business. Hopefully, that inspires you again. That's the 5am Club. It's a book. I know. There's a workbook with it too. Right? Right now I'm just trying to get through the books so that I can join the 5:00am club and wake up at 5:00am all right, so our Instagram update today is that Instagram will soon enable creators to build AI versions of themselves. Now, how do we feel about this? I'm not sure. According to social media today, that's typically where I get my updates for you guys. App researcher Alessandro Paloozi, who I like to follow over on X and Threads, he said that Instagram is developing the next stage of its AI bot creation platform, which would be built into the app and would enable users to create an AI version of themselves. The program, which is in its early stages of testing and known as Creator AI, would allow influencers to chat with fans through direct messages on the social network and potentially through Instagram comments in the future. According to five people briefed on the company's plans, the program will essentially be a chatbot that mimics the voice of the Instagram influencer to respond to fans, the people said. Now, it does look like it's coming. Meta's been developing this new AI bot creation process for some time and the latest screenshots that I saw do kind of suggest that it's getting closer to launch. So how wild would that be? Like, we all talk about DM, automation and ManyChat, but what if we had like this AI bot that did things for us on social? Really creepy, but it's something that could totally happen. So we'll just have to see. All right, today's agenda, we are going to talk about ways to grow your Instagram account. I'm going to walk you through different tactics that I've used to grow my followers. Some of these tactics are easy one time steps and then others can be implemented into your well rounded social media strategy. Before we get started, there are people out there that don't have any patience to grow their Instagram, so they end up buying bot followers. I just want to tell y' all how detrimental that is to your profile. First off, buying followers is against Instagram's terms of use. So obviously you could get, if they find out, you could get your account suspended indefinitely. Two, when you buy these fake followers, if they don't engage with your content, they are worthless to you. They're not going to buy from you, they're not going to engage, they're not going to give your post any love. The algorithm's going to see your post not getting any love and then your content is just going to die into nothing land and your Instagram profile is just gonna freeze up and never really grow again. So you have to really be careful with those people that are sending you dms or telling you that they can send you likes. Don't do it. It is not good for your help, the health of your account, it's not good for you. It's just gonna cost you money. Like the vanity metrics are cool. Wow, they gave me 10,000 followers. But then what guys? Then what are you gonna do with those 10,000 robots? You're not gonna be able to grow anymore. You're not gonna be able to be who you wanna be because those people aren't going to engage with you on your profile. So just keep that in mind. So the right way to grow, that's what we're focused on today. So first and foremost, it's very important that you build a strong personal brand and make your value very clear on your profile. So before we even start talking about the tactics that you can take, I mean, this is a tactic, your first tactic is to make sure you're set up correctly. So think about this. Would you walk into a store if you had absolutely no idea what it sold? I got this example from the blog on later and I was like, wow, that's actually a very good example. I probably wouldn't because why am I going to waste my time? So the same goes with your Instagram account. If someone lands on your profile and they have no idea what you are there to offer, they're probably going to click back and keep scrolling. They're not going to follow you. So let's take for example, Call her creator account. I think I optimized it pretty well. If you go to that account, you'll see that it's called Call her Creator the podcast. I tell them what I do, I tell them exactly how I help them and I tell them why they should follow me. And then if you scroll down, you'll see my posts are all branded with the same colors. I talk about the same content pillars over and over again. So it's just very clear what you're going to get from me when you follow that account. So just be very clear with your Instagram. Now, if you're in the beginning phases of this and you need to audit your own account right now and you need a little bit of help, I do have a free Instagram profile audit. I'm going to link it in the description of this episode. You guys go grab it, claim it, and go audit your account. It's really going to walk you through keywords, the backend stuff, editing your profile, your headshot, your profile picture, all those good things that you need to edit your profile and then talking about your profile. The next step I had for you guys to grow your account is to create a cohesive Instagram feed. And that doesn't mean that you have to make this beautiful, like graphic photo, graphic photo, Instagram grid. That's not what I'm talking about. What I mean more so is that first impressions matter. So when someone does land on your profile, are they going to understand what you're talking about? Like the content pillars, will they be able to identify three to five content pillars that you always talk about? Are they going to see your face or maybe your logo? Are they going to see the same couple of colors or font choices? You can, if you go to my profile, social marketing queen or call her creator, neither of those Instagram profile, like, the grid is perfect, but what you will find there is that everything is pretty cohesive. Like, I talk about the same couple of things over and over again. I Choose the same colors as much as I can. I try to show up and show my face. So if you need some inspiration as far as creating a cohesive feed, feel free to go get some inspiration from my own account. If you're noticing that you're using different feedback fonts on reels, or you're choosing a different color every single time, or your graphics look completely different every single time you post them, it's time to nail down your branding. And that's why my Instagram membership is actually really good for this. We make templates for you that all you need to do is switch out the colors and the font choices and they're all going to be pretty cohesive. Like day in and day out, you're going to have that same type of style. It's just really important, in my opinion, when it comes to branding is going to elevate your brand. It's going to elevate who you are and what you have to sell. People are gonna trust you better. So that is a very big part of your Instagram strategy. Before even starting with other growth tactics, you really need to nail down your Instagram profile and your feed. Tip number three, have a hashtag strategy in place. So hashtags help you get discovered. I highly recommend creating a hashtag vault. So for all of our clients at Influence Marketing Studio, they all have their own Google document with hashtags based off of different pillars. So like, we'll have like location based hashtags, keyword hashtags, industry specific hashtags. And so when we're creating their content on a monthly basis, we can easily peek into that those hashtags and pull what we want and we're not having to reinvent the wheel every single time. I'll also recommend Flick here. They're really good at telling me what hashtags are actually working for me. Am I getting views from specific hashtags? Am I ranking for specific hashtags? So go create an account on Flick if you haven't. I do have something in my Instagram profile for that too. I can drop it my affiliate link into the episode notes here too. But Flick also, I mean, Flick has a bunch of other little things too that you can do in there, like analytics for your whole profile and content marketing and an AI assistant, all kinds of stuff. But I really specifically use them for our hashtag research. And it cuts a lot of time having to research what hashtags we should use because Flick's already telling me, hey, this one's working. Keep using it. Hey, that One's not getting you anywhere. Stop using it. The next tactic I have for you is to post at the right time. Now, I know some people will argue with me that it does not matter what time you post, but I don't agree because I've tried posting at weird times, like 2am for my audience and the post kind of dies. It doesn't perform very well. But I've noticed when I post specifically in the early mornings and then in the later evenings, my posts do pretty well. Now, I will say I'm an Instagram coach, so I'm pretty good with my hooks, I'm good with putting out high quality content, and I also, you know, keep in mind what my captions say. So you got to keep all of those things in mind too. But at the end of the day, you want to post when your audience is online. So this is why it's important to understand who your audience is when you think that they're going to be on Instagram and post when you think they're going to be active. Now, I typically, when I first started, started posting. If you go back to your Instagram post, it'll tell you what day you posted, but it won't really tell you that specific time that you posted. So I started journaling the times that I would post and then I'd go back like two weeks later and say, okay, post A, B and C performed really well. What time did I post those at? And I started to see a pattern there with what times I was posting and then the highest performing content. So definitely keep your post time in mind. If it's now, if I had to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest impact, 10 being the highest impact for your growth strategy, I'd probably say like a six. I'm not gonna say it's like a 10, but I do still think it's very important. Number five, partnering with other people in your industry. I'm sure now that you're on your growth journey, you've probably started seeing other people in your industry who post consistently like you do. Maybe you're grabbing Inspo from them, maybe you are sending them likes, liking their stories. Whatever it might be, now it's time to reach out and say, hey, we're in the same industry. I think we have the same audience, or maybe we have the same goals. Would you like to do a collaborative reel with me? You don't have to know each other in person. You don't even have to really know each other on the app. But if you can just stick your head out there and put yourself out there and say, like, hey, I want to collaborate with you. Let's share each other's audiences, then I think it would do you some good. And now what I've seen work is typically if you use like someone in the industry that has around the same followers as you. Obviously if someone with like 2,000 followers goes and asks someone with 20,000 followers to do a collab, they might not say yes just because it doesn't benefit them as much. So keep that in mind. But I do want y' all to know too, like, you don't have to work with these big profiles either. So like, if you're a smaller account, it's totally okay for you to work with another smaller account. If you, in fact, micro influencers creators, they actually have a higher engagement rate than these bigger influencers. So keep that in mind when you're trying to decide who you want to collaborate with. You can also do an Instagram live together. If you don't want to do a reel or a carousel post or a static post, ask if they want to go live and just talk about your industry and ways that you guys can provide value to your audience. That's another really good way to get out there in front of more people. Number six, creating more reels. I will tell this to you guys every single episode that I have. Reels are still one of the most effective ways to reach new audiences on the app. So unlike other types of posts, carousels still do pretty well too. Reels still are performing the best. They have a designated spot on the Explore page nowadays and their tab on the home feed navigation bar, making them super discoverable. Now here's some of my top tips when when it comes to creating reels, first and foremost, you want to make sure you've got a really good hook there. We don't want a too long of a hook. So you want like six words or so you want to use numbers in your hooks. If you can, for example, like three reasons why or five tips or top two mistakes you're making, those are things that really suck people in. So focus on your hook. Use numbers. I most of the time use trending audio. Even if I turn it all the way down and it's me talking, I still will put trending audio behind my audio so that that the algorithm sees I'm jumping on a trend. For some reason, Instagram still pushes people jumping on trends. So something I do to kind of hack the system, adding on screen text for viewers without sound. I've told y' all before, 85% of people watch reels without the sound. So you can either use the caption sticker when you're creating a reel, or if you just want to use the text overlay tool and maybe write keywords out as you're talking, that's fine too. I've kind of played around with both. I typically will go the route where I do keywords versus the caption sticker just because the caption sticker has been malfunctioning on me a little bit lately. Like I'll go to post it and it cuts off my words. So I don't know, Instagram might've fixed that, but I would use keywords and then obviously aim for high quality video rather than uploading content from another channel with a watermark. Use clear videos from your phone if you can. I've told y' all before. In past episodes I use something called insta video save.net if I am going to pull a video over from another channel just so that it removes the watermark for me. Tip number seven Create Memes and Share Worthy content Adam, the CEO of Instagram, has already confirmed that sins and shares are a top priority when it comes to the algorithm pushing out your content. So the more shares you get, the more likely your post is going to get fed out to more people in the Instagram algorithm. So you want to share that share worthy content. Now what do I mean by share worthy content? I've got like three tips for share worthy content. First one is memes that's gonna be content that others will relate with and wanna share. Typically it's a celebrity or maybe it's a funny person that went viral and now it's turned into a meme. Number two is inspirational motivational posts. Those tend to go pretty viral, especially in the entrepreneurial space. And I've seen it in the motherhood space too. Like just writing out those quotes that motivate someone. Those do very well and then newsworthy content. So if something is really big on the news or it's trending, you could always screenshot something or record a video of it and then do the green screen effect and maybe talk about it in the back. That's also going to get you shares because it's super important. People want to know what's going on in the world. Number eight is one of my favorite and it's so underrated right now, but still performing very, very well for me. I remix top performing reels, so if I'm on the explore Feed and I see a really funny reel and it's got like millions of likes or views or something close to that. I'm probably going to remix it and put my own spin on it. So what this does is if you're on the reel, you'll see something that says remix there. I think it's under like you have to press the little three dots and then it will say remix. Now when I how I choose remixes, first I look for something that's performing really well already. Then I'm going to put my own spin on it so that it makes sense for my industry. You're going to throw people off. If you try to remix a reel that has nothing to do with your industry and you haven't added any like flavor to it of your own, they're just going to be like, why is this person remixing this content? I'll tell you a do and I don't hear too. So one time I remixed, there's this big creator over on Tik Tok who also shows up on Instagram. But people, she's super well known, but she's not like a celebrity, but she's just super well known for like relatable, funny boyfriend content. Well, we had remixed one of her reels to talk about the Instagram algorithm and I got a little fire from a few people saying like they were confused because they know her as this certain specific type of influencer. And then I remixed her reel and confused everyone. So to make sure that that doesn't happen to you, be picky with who you do decide to remix. I would not remix like certain things or people just to stay away from getting in trouble by others. I know that's kind of like you're probably thinking like, well, Caitlin, why are you telling me to remix? I guess what I'm trying to say is remix meme worthy content. So like Michael Scott from the Office, totally remix those. There was some scenes from a cartoon like Moana, I remixed those. Like, those aren't going to make people mad. Whereas if you remix like a popular creator that doesn't want their stuff remixed, you might get heat for it. Now keep in mind, and this was my kind of argument in my head, you can turn the remix feature off. So if these people didn't want their content to get remixed, they could turn that feature off to where I wouldn't be able to do it. Two, this is an Instagram feature, so if you want to use it, you're not going to get in trouble. It's not the same as Serial reposters and screen recording people's content and posting it as your own. You're actually using the Remix Instagram feature. And when you click it, it's going to say remix with, and it tags the person so they're getting full credit for it and everything. So, I mean, be careful with remixing just because I said there's some people that don't like it, but I see a lot of creators jumping on it now. I do it myself and it works pretty well. So it's something for you to try. I have seen people grow their views and their following by remixing other reels. Number nine is the Burger King method. And I love this. This is a really good tip for you guys to remember. And it's easy to remember because we're talking about burger King and McDonald's. So the burger King method is where you use your competition to your advantage. So instead of you spending time and hours researching your target audience and putting all this time and efforts into finding out who they are, what they want, where they go, like, you just use your competitor instead. So Burger King does not do any of the market research when opening a store. What they do is they let their competitor, McDonald's, do all of that work for them. So McDonald's spends millions of dollars a year researching where they're going to open up their next restaurant or location. And Burger King, once they decide, once they open it up and they find out they understand the city the customer need, that's obviously a good spot for them. Burger King just builds directly across the road from them. Like, what? I had no idea about this. I forgot where I had seen this on Instagram one time maybe a year ago, but I just thought it was brilliance. It. It's true. Like, if you're just getting started in your industry and you don't have a lot of, like, research behind everything, you can totally use your competitors and kind of see, like, what kind of content are they posting? Is it working well? Is it flopping? What does their branding look like? Not saying a copy of their brand, but at least you're kind of getting in the groove of what your industry looks like. And don't focus on one specific competitor. Like, pick like two or three people in your space that are doing really well and kind of understand them, their posting habits, what they're talking about, how their content is performing, and then you can kind of put that into your own strategy. The Burger king method, number 10 is threads. Threads are now being shown over on Facebook as well. Now, I told you on A past episode. If you get on threads and you start threading or writing a status update, sometimes those status updates will pop in my Instagram feed, but now they're getting showed over to Facebook too. So this is like giving you triple the awareness of your thread. So if you were to start getting on thread threads and started updating your statuses, you know, become the industry expert, say what's on your mind. Maybe give a tip. Tuesday, Wednesday wisdom. Thursday you're talking about a personal story or a customer story. Friday you're giving a fun fact. Like, just start getting in the groove of speaking what's on your mind on threads. The cool thing over there is like, it doesn't have to be prim and polish. You don't have to add images or reels. It's just text. So it's easy to do. Obviously it's one thing added to your social media marketing plate, but if you get on there and just start threading away, you could possibly get featured on other social media channels. I know that what that ends up doing to me, if I find a thread that I like, I end up going to their thread profile, following them there, and then I go back over to Instagram and I find them on there and I follow them there. So bing, bing, bing. You're. You're growing a bunch of channels while threading. Another underrated tip that a lot of people don't do is boosting your top performing content. Now, I'm a very big organic girl, but I do love me some boosting in the back of Instagram and Facebook. So if I have a content that's performing really, really well, and I have a little bit of a budget, a marketing budget that month, I'm going to boost that post to reach even more people. Because my organic post has already performed well, which means my audience likes it, the algorithm likes it. So I'm just going to give it a little pep just to reach a few more people. And when doing that, you're able to target who you boost it to. So maybe I want to reach more women with it. Maybe I want to reach more people in the ages 25 to 44. Or maybe I want to boost it just to my Florida family. Like, whatever it is, you don't have to do a lot of research or work there. You really just go look at your content shared for the last month or the last 60 days, find what content performed the best, and then throw a little money at it to boost it up even more. Number 12, increase your posting frequency. If you want to Increase your input. You need to increase your output. Someone told me that a couple months ago and I was like, oh my gosh, maybe you're right. So I started posting twice a day versus once a day. I did see my engagement go up, I saw my reach go up and I've seen my follower growth go up as well. Is it more work on me? Absolutely. But I've seen I've reaped the benefits of posting more. So if you are not seeing a lot of success with your current posting strategy, maybe double it or at least add in one more extra post a week and see if that helps. Run it for 30 days, then you can compare the numbers. It may help, it may not. If it doesn't go back to your schedule. But if you do see an increase, then it's time to pivot. Number 13. Okay, I see why I said 13. This kind of went into reels the other day, but I did say use trending audio. But with this specifically, I wanted to tell y', all, stick to early trending audio. So when you go, when you see that some audio is trending and you want to make a reel, click on that audio and just see how many people have already used it. If you're seeing over 10,000 people, if you're seeing over 20,000, anything more million, stay away from it. Because that means that trend is already starting to get old by the time you jump on it. It's going to be a needle in the haystack if your piece of content gets promoted with that reel. So I try to stick to early trends that are in like the 1000 to 3000 uses, but anything under 5000 uses is pretty good for me. Like I'll say, yes, I'll use that audio. And then lastly, your last tip today for growing your account is to ask for engagement people. When they look at your content, they don't always know what to do next. So if you are straightforward with them, tell them to comment a word or tell them to comment an emoji or tell them to send it to stories or tell them to tag their friend, then they're going to think like, okay, she told me to do this, let me do this. So you're giving them action to take. They're more likely to take it. And if you want weekly plug and.
- [26:32]
B
Post ideas just like this, you can make sure to sign up for Club influence. I will put the link in the show notes. We give you trending reels every week. Viral hooks, caption templates, canva templates every single week. And if you use code CHC I will give you 20% off of your first month for being a call recruiter, creator listener. That's a month worth of content for less than 37 guys. It's a no brainer. Content doesn't have to be overwhelming, it just needs to be intentional and that is what we will do inside of Club Influence.
- [27:02]
A
So if you liked today's episode, please.
- [27:04]
B
Leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to podcasts. And don't forget to screenshot this episode and share it to your stories. Tag me. I love to repost your shout outs to my audience. Bonus points if you are doing your money walk. We need to stay consistent with that.
- [27:18]
A
I'm about to get better at my money walk. I took a little vacation for a couple past weeks of July but getting back into it for August and I'm.
- [27:26]
B
Ready to make some money moves.
- [27:28]
A
But the best way to do that.
- [27:29]
B
Is to grow on a money walk and listen to the Call Her Creator podcast.
- [27:33]
A
Thank you so much for being here today guys.
- [27:35]
B
I will see you next week.