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Okay. I am so excited about today's episode because I'm always teaching you guys tips and tricks to go viral on Instagram or TikTok. But today, I want to show you guys or share how to actually grow on Instagram without having to go viral. It's not like you have to make these crazy good videos or post and go viral to grow your following. There's actually other ways that you can do it. And I've been testing out this strategy for a while on my Call Her Creator account, and I'm finally gaining traction. And so I've kind of wrote everything out. I'm going to talk about all of it today, and I'm going to share with you guys how I've grown my Call Her Creator account over 2,500 followers without having to go viral. So stick around. Let's learn these strategies, these techniques. They're easy to implement on your own. Just got to follow along. Hello, I'm Kaitlyn Rhodes. I am your host of Call Her Creator, powered by Stan. I'm here to help you guys make money doing what you love to do on Instagram. And today we're gonna talk about how you can actually utilize Instagram in the best way to grow your account. So I was actually sitting down with a client the other day, and I told her, I was like, hey, you know, if we're gonna strategize about your Instagram right now, you need to tell me what you're focused on. Are you focused on growth or are you focused on monetization? Because there's different strategies according to whatever it is you. You're wanting to do at the time. And she's like, no, I think I want to grow my account right now. And, you know, you can do it simultaneously, too, but there are specific things to do if you want to grow your account. There's specific things to do if you want to make money from your account. So today we're going to focus on growing your account. Okay. These are going to be easy to implement steps. Some of them might be harder than the others. It depends of who you are as a person. Like, if you're scared to get on video, this might be hard for you, but I'm going to hopefully break you guys out of feeling that way. And maybe if I can give you all the tools that you need, I can make you feel more confident about it and then help you to show up better. Okay, before I get into this strategy, I want to quickly talk about trial reels. I've been testing them over on Call her creator. And I want to go through my results with you guys real quick. So I've been doing a mix of posting old videos that performed really well and just posting them as a new trial reel. And then I've been creating new content just to test it around and see what works better. So if you've been on Instagram, you've probably seen people talking about, oh, just repost your viral reels. I grew thousands of followers this way. Well, I've been trying that and it's not working. But here are some real results that I've been doing. So let's see, I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 trial reels that are out there right now. And let's see. 200 views, 120 views, 400 views, 200 views. Those are all videos that performed really well before. And guess what? They're not going viral again. They're stuck in, like, the 200 views. There is one video I reposted. I can see here, it got 1800 views. That's better than 200. That's my top performing trial reel. There's another video on here that went viral for me over on Kaitlyn Rhodes, but over here it got 134 views. So I also noticed when I took videos from Kaitlyn Rhodes and tried to run em as a trial reel for Call her creator, I got a notification from Instagram saying, hey, we're going to give the original creator credit, which is obviously myself. So I think it's also looking to see if you're posting other people's content, which is great. But those are my numbers for trial reels. They're not that great. I still don't have this feature on Kaitlyn Rhodes, which I really wish I did, because I'm wondering if posting trial reels to a bigger account helps you reach more people. This is just my theory, because trial reels for Call Her Creator just aren't performing as well as I'd like them to be. But if you have a big account and you're posting trial reels, I would love for you to send me a dm. Let me know if that's successful for you, what you're doing, what your views look like. And if you have a small account and you're listening to this podcast, please let me know if you're trying trial reels and let me know what your average views are like. I would love to see if there's a correlation between bigger accounts and smaller accounts in our views. All right, so let's get into how to grow your following on Instagram without having to go viral. So the first step in growing anything on Instagram is to create a posting schedule that you can keep up with, that you can sustain. Consistency is key when it comes to Instagram growth. We've heard it before. I know it sounds cliche at this point, but it truly is how you grow. You stay consistent. You post depending on what you know your schedule looks like and you keep up with that post. You have a routine, right? So I always tell people, start small and build up. Start by posting three times per week, every week. Focus heavily on short reels because Instagram prioritizes video content. But then sprinkle in those carousel posts too for added depth and value. But start with three a week and then you can scale up when you're ready. And once you feel ready and confident, you can increase that posting to five times per week, balancing between reels, carousels, static posts to keep your feed looking dynamic. Plus, Instagram tells you they want you to play around with all the features, so you don't want to just go hard on one, you want to sprinkle them all in. I myself for my Caitlin Rhodes account, which is over 180,000 followers, I post twice a day. That's a lot to keep up with though. It's a lot of pressure on me mentally. It's a lot for me to post physically, so I don't tell people. I'm not ever going to tell someone. Post twice a day. But if you want to know what I post, I post twice a day. So I say start with three, three to five times a week. If you can do more, cool. If you can't, that's okay too. We want to stick with something that you can stick with because as soon as you stop there will be a drop in engagement and that will not be good for analytics. I also tell people, if you need help, like keeping up with this batch, create in an hour of your day at the beginning of the month and record a bunch of reels and save them to your camera roll. Or record a bunch of B roll and save it to your camera roll so you have it on deck. Whenever you're ready to create content. This will help you stay consistent as well. I do have a free 30 day content calendar. If you need help coming up with ideas on what to post, I will put it in the show notes. But this calendar gives you 30 days worth of content ideas. So you could literally, if you wanted to, if you're smart, carve out an hour this week, grab my 30 day calendar. Create all those 30 days of content and then just schedule them out using the In App Scheduler on Instagram. I still think that gets me the best reach over any other scheduling tool. I use metrical too, and I still get good results there. But something in my brain just says to use the In App Editor, so. Or In App Scheduler, but that's just me. All right, so once you've got your posting schedule put together, then you need to have an engagement strategy in place. You have to give to get engagement is what's going to turn your viewers into actual followers. Okay, so you have heard me talk about the 555 strategy and it's basically where you just dedicate 15 minutes a day and do 5, 5, 5. So engage with five new posts like and comment thoughtful comments on posts in your niche, or search up some hashtags that are relevant to your industry and comment on five of those posts. Then I want you to reply to 5 comments on your post. This could be on any post that you've posted, maybe like at least within the last two weeks, so that those people are still relevant. I feel like if you went like back 60 days and you replied to somebody that commented one, they might forget. They might have forgotten who you are. Or maybe they're not even active on Instagram anymore. So try to come, try to comment on something that's kind of newer. And then next you're going to engage with five stories. So you're just going to go up to the stories slides on the top of your profile when you're looking at the feed and you can reply to people or react to their story, whatever it is. Give them some kind of engagement. Let them know that you're home, you're enjoying their content, you like what they posted, strike up a conversation, ask them if they like the same things you do. I don't care. Just communicate with them, engage with them. The thing here is consistency signals to the Instagram algorithm that you're active and you're an engaged account and that is only going to help you grow. Okay, Number three, when you're growing your account, you want to collaborate with some bigger accounts. So something I do with call her creator is I will collab on a reel with the Kaitlyn Rhodes or I'll collab with Stan's account. Since Stan is my podcast producer, I get to do that. So you wanna be strategic with your collaboration. So pick a bigger account that's in the same industry that probably has the same type of audience as you and see if they wanna collaborate with you. You can ask chat GPT for some kind of DM to slide in the DMS and ask them or what. I love, I love if someone comes to me in my DMs and says, Hey, I wanna collaborate. Here's the idea, can you record this part? I love when they've already done the work for me. I don't like when people say, hey, you want to collab? What's your idea like? Come on bro, you want to collaborate with me? Come to me with an idea. If I ever reach out to people to collaborate, I've already got the idea. I've already got exactly what they need to record, what they need to say when we're going to post it, all that, all that jazz. Cuz I don't want them to have to do any heavy lifting because they're going to help me, right? I'm going to get in front of their audience. So the least I could do is come to them with a plan. And then when you do collaborate, engage with that audience. Make sure you're replying to comments. Be authentic, be yourself and let them know that you're home. The great thing about collaborating is that you're able to cross promote in front of their audience and they get in front of your audience and it gets you in front of a bigger audience. So people will be more inclined to follow you. If they see that you know, someone they're already following is is collaborating with you, they probably trust you. Oh, let me follow them too. I love collaborations. Some ideas here. I don't always want you to just think of a direct competitor. I want you to kind of think of somebody that compliments your brand. So like for realtors I would say go talk with a mortgage person. If you're a med spa, maybe you're an injector for Botox. You could work with someone who does facials because you guys are obviously going to be talking to the same people. If you're a social media manager, maybe you collaborate with like a video editing tool because you guys compliment each other. So think of things in this space that compliment you. Event planner. Maybe you're a wedding venue, so you collaborate with a mobile bartending service. Those are ways to like compliment what you do and get in front of their audience too. But I love collaborations. You can do it as a reel, you can do it as a carousel or you can go live with them. Depends what you guys are comfortable with or do all three. I will say doing it more than once is best because it's not like you're hitting this cold audience. Like they've kind of got, they've kind of got to learn who you are because you've, you've been shown a couple of times. Therefore, like that fourth time, if y'all ever want to come in there with like a sale, like a salesy type post, they'll be more inclined to trust and purchase because they've seen you before with that person. My next tip over here is this one is always like so controversial and I go back and forth between this, but I think at the heart of it all, this is how I feel. I want you to focus on your quality of your content over your quantity. I know people will argue this like, well, the more you post, the more times you have your more, you have more chances to get in front of more people. Which is true. You know, the more you post, you are giving yourself more opportunity to get in front of more people. But I just can't get over the fact that if Joe Schmo is posting as much as possible, but it is like low quality video, there's no lighting, his screen is smeared. Like, I don't care how many times Joe Schmo posts, I'm not going to follow him because his content is garbage. Now if Stacey Macy is over here posting and she, I don't see her a whole lot, but when I do see her, she makes a bang. Don't you think I'm gonna follow Stacey Macy over Joe Schmo? I love these names that I'm giving people, by the way, but that's just how I feel. High quality content. Don't post unless you have something meaningful or valuable to share and make sure that video looks good. I'm not saying you have to have a ring light and have this overly produced reel. I'm just saying make sure it's well lit. Make sure there's text on screen, there's a hook. Make sure the audio is working in case they've got that volume on. Even though most people watch videos with their volume off. Be visually appealing, okay? Educate, entertain, or inspire them. Always what I say. And then always, always, always have a strong call to action. Every single post you share needs to have a call to action that encourages them to do something. Whether that's to DM you a word for a challenge or save this post for later so you can come back to it. Or send this to a friend that needs to hear this. You're telling them something to take action. CTA. You will if you really focused in on your CTAs for the next week. You will see such an improvement in engagement from this week to next week. If you just were to tweak a few things. I've seen it with clients, I've seen it on my own content. It works. CTA's work next step to growing without going viral is leveraging short reels. Reels are Instagram's priority and they don't need to go viral to work for you. Okay. You just need to keep them short. Keep em short and sweet. Aim for 7 to 15 seconds to maximize that watch time. What is watch time? Watch time is where people the amount of time it takes them to complete your video. So if you've got a 30 second video, they need to watch a lot of that video for it to almost complete watch time. That's why you kind of aim for these shorter videos. You want to also hook them in early. Those first two to three seconds you have to capture their attention. So that could be with your visual hook. Maybe you're popping into the video. That could be your text hook. Maybe you've got something written on that reel that really stands out. Or you know, the caption hook is the third one. But I don't think your caption is ever going to be the one thing that stops the scroll. So I would focus either on the visual hook or the the text overlay hook. And then when you are posting reels, trending audio typically seems to perform well. Make sure you're choosing a trending audio that is fresh or new and doesn't have too many uses. If you are someone who doesn't have time to search for trending audio, you can join Club Influence. We send trending audio to you every Monday and it's typically early trends. We tell you how to record the reel, the caption to go with it, industry specific examples, everything. Like we're basically serving it to you on a silver platter for you to just hit record and post. And then lastly I'll add that in the show notes. By the way, for to join Club Influence. I would love to have you guys in there. And then lastly for your reels, add text overlays. I talked about it earlier. That's your hook. Highlight key points to make your reel more engaging. Remember, people mostly watch reels with the audio off. So you want to have that hook in the first two to three seconds at the very top and and then you know, throughout the video you can do pops of text overlay too. Like just to kind of say what's going on. So they could Understand your video, even if they can't hear it, gotta give them enough context to understand what it's about. Step number six, which is a very underrated step, but it is very, very much required to grow on Instagram, and that is to understand who your audience is growing. Your audience starts with knowing who you are speaking to. This. This is gonna help you come up with your content. This is gonna help you come up with your caption. This is gonna help you come up with your offering. All the above. If you try to talk to everyone, you're going to talk to no one. And I'm struggling right now with this on my personal account. I started just posting for fun on my personal account. And I am. I can't seem to define who my niche is or what I want to post about because I like to post about funny marriage stuff and I like to post about my kids and I like to post about travel. So I'm really just using it as a hobby. I'm not trying to, like, grow it per se or monetize on it, but if I really wanted to, I would need to define who I am talking to, because then, then that's going to allow me to create all of my content around those. So when you define your niche or your industry, that's when you can define who your target audience is. What problems are they facing? How can you solve those problems? What can you teach them about? And then once you're able to define your niche, then you have the post, then you have the information to post the kind of content that you need. You'll be able to address their pain points, share solutions with them, provide actionable tips with them, because you know who you're talking to. If you've never heard the term buyer's Persona, that's one thing I want you guys to look up. I used to give y'all homework when y'all would listen to my podcast. This is your homework this week is to look up a buyer's Persona. Because in your business, you should have a couple buyer's Personas. You should have, you know, at this. At the end of the day, they probably all want the same thing, but they're all different people. If I think about my social media agency, they all want to shine online. They all want social media management, but one of them might be a flooring company, one of them might be a pool company, one of them might be a realtor. So those are my different buyers Persona. We've got a woman business owner who's busy and can't take the time out of her day to post on social. We've got the gentleman who's been in the business for years and he doesn't like social and he doesn't understand it, you know, so I'm. You see how I've got they, they have the same goal but they have different pain points. But my social media agency still allows us to solve those pain points in different ways. But it also allows me to create content to attract those people to my social media agency because I'm speaking to them with my different angles. So look up buyer's Persona. Create three different buyers Personas for your business and and then let's talk about it. That will help you to understand your audience and create really good content. Step number seven, analyze and adjust. I want you to regularly be evaluating your performance because this is how you improve and I talk about this in almost every single episode on Call Her Creator. And it's to analyse, analyze your data, track your metrics, pay attention to your likes, your comments, your shares, your saves and see what is resonating with your followers. And then you're going to want to double down on what work. So you're going to identify your top performing post that got the most engagement. You're going to identify your top performing post that got the most shares. You're going to identify your top performing posts that reach the most people. Those are three different metrics there. And then once you've got that then you'll be able to create similar content based on those goals. So say this week you really want to get a ton of shares. This week you're going to focus on that type of content that got you the most shares. Say you want to get the most views. This week you're going to focus on the content that got you the most views. It really helps you plan out your week and it saves you saved you so much time and you're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Experiment with this too. Test different content formats, posting times. I typically post around the same time each day, but there are days where I will test a different posting time just to see how it performs. And then you also want to test your call to action too because some people might say might like dming me a word. Some people might want to comment that word, some people might want to go click the link in my bio. Not really. But I'm just trying to show you guys that different CTAs work, you gotta test them out. Step number eight, this is one of the final steps and it's probably One of the most important steps here. Patience, young grasshopper. Growing your first 500 followers is not going to happen overnight. Growing your first 1,000 followers won't happen overnight. Growing your first 2,000 followers won't happen overnight. But if you put in the consistent effort and a focus on quality, you can build a loyal and engaged audience on this app. And the more loyal they are, and the more engaged they are, the more that your page is going to continue to grow. And the more that you grow, the more that you engage these people, the more sales you're going to have. Now, a quick checklist for growth before we sign off on here. One, I talked to you guys about posting consistently. You want to aim for three to five times per week. And that needs to be a mix of reels, carousels, static images. Utilize all the formats and see what your audience resonates with. Next, engage with people daily using the 555 strategy. Then you wanna collaborate with bigger accounts in your niche. Go ahead and make a list. 10 people that you want to work with this year. Start working on those people. And before you come in with that DM to collaborate with them, make sure you're engaging with their content. Make sure you're following them. Because if someone approaches me to collaborate and they're not following me, I will not even give them the time of day to respond because I just feel like that's rude. Like, personally kind of build something with me before you try to take something from me. Right? Next. One, ensure that every single post that you post out there has a purpose and a strong call to action so that people know what to do next. This will improve your analytics, I promise, because people will be clicking on your post, they'll be liking your post, they'll be engaging on your post. It helps your numbers and then track performance and optimize over time and time and time. I usually check things weekly for myself, but at the agency here, we check things every 30 days. I mean, the girls are always looking at analytics because we log into these accounts daily. But as far as, like, making a report for our clients, we're doing that every 30 days just to measure the growth, make sure if there's a certain type of content that our people are really leaning into, we're going to lean into that, too, so that we can make even better content around it. It's all in your numbers and it's all at your fingertips. You just have to utilize it correctly. All right, that is the end of today's episode. I do want to invite you guys to One more thing. I did an Instagram engagement challenge. I had over 300 people a part of this challenge, and the feedback I have received from this challenge has been phenomenal. It's been one of the best challenges I've ever ran. People are reporting an increase in engagement, so they're seeing higher amount of likes, comments, views. Really, really good, good analytics from this. I'm going to leave this challenge free for one more week, but after that, I'm going to start charging for this challenge. So if you'd like to hop on this challenge before I put a price tag on it, I'm going to put it in the show notes. I'd love for you to catch it. Actually, what I'll do is if you're listening to this episode, I'm going to give you guys a special link in the show notes that will make this challenge free for you forever. The general population, they don't have to pay to join this challenge, but you guys can get in it for free because you're here and you're listening to my podcast, and I love you so much. And if I could ask maybe for a favor from you in exchange, I'd love for you to leave me a review on today's podcast episode. If you liked it, please download this podcast. You will then have it downloaded to your library, which means every Wednesday, when a new episode pops up, you'll get alerted. So, okay. I love you guys so much. Thank you for being here. We will talk next week. I hope you found this episode helpful. Peace out.