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In my Instagram follower case study, I’ll show you a free tool that I used to attract highly targeted and highly engaged followers to my Instagram account (and it was an account that had been pretty badly neglected, which goes to show that you can use this strategy even for brand new accounts).

In a 24 hour period I more than doubled my Instagram followers and my numbers continue to climb. Check it out and post any questions in the comments box below!

 

Did you use this, or another strategy to grow your Instagram followers?   Let us know how it worked (or any thoughts/questions that you may have) in the comments field below!

 

 

Video Transcript:

 

Hey guys. In today’s Blog Genesis Quick Tip, I’m going to show you a free tool that will grow your Instagram followers practically overnight. It’s a free tool on not only will you see a huge boost in your followers, but they will all be highly targeted followers who are interested in what your blog is about. So let’s dive in.

Here we are on my giddyupcycled Instagram account. This is a website that I have, it’s one of my blogs, and it’s a DIY kind of home décor type blog. Now, Instagram has not really been a strong suit of mine. I have tended to focus a lot of my efforts on Facebook and Pinterest and some other things. Instagram has definitely not been my forte, but I’m working on changing that. I discovered this tool that is fantastic at targeting followers who would be interested in my site and getting them to follow me. If you look right now you will see I have 30 posts, 112 followers, and I’m following 103 people.

What we’re going to do here is I’m going to show you, right now, you see how many followers I have, and then I’m going to come back in 24 hours and I’m going to show you what my account looks like, so there’s kind of a proof of concept here. I’m actually going to show you my computer calendar just so we can verify that this is about a 24-hour period. I have had this Instagram account up for well over a year now. Obviously, again, I only have 30 posts so I have not really been giving it very much love, but I’m going to show you how … My guess is I will more than double the amount of followers in the next 24-hours.

Right now, let’s pull this down here, right now, it is May 13 at 4:45, approximately, in the afternoon. I’m going to come back again tomorrow, May 14, at around the same time and you’ll see the difference in the amount of followers that we have. Let’s jump over to the tool, it is called Crowdfire, and there’s an app that you can install on to your phone. I’m much more of a laptop worker bee. I have trouble working exclusively on the cell phone. I prefer things that I can put onto the computer and really go crazy with my keyboard and all that good stuff.

What we do is … Here, we click this link to sign in with Instagram and if you’re signed in like I am already, to my Instagram account, it is going to automatically pull up the Crowdfire dashboard here. Now if you weren’t logged in to Instagram, it’s going to take you to a page where it will ask you to authorize this application to access your Instagram account, and it will take you through one extra step to enter in your e-mail, and you can create your free account with Crowdfire. Now there is a upgraded version, but the free version works fantastic for at least just giving this a shot. You might kind of become addicted to it to the point where you want to go ahead and upgrade.

We’ll just look on the left hand side here. We’ve got a number of different options here in the column. The first option here, we can sort by people that I follow who are not following me back. If I notice over time … One thing that can happen, especially with this strategy that I’m about to show you, is that your follower count is, or the people that you are following, is going to go up quite a bit and the people following you back is going to be a lot lower. If you start to see a big difference in those numbers you can go in here to the non followers column, or this page, and just go through here and unclick these little red circles to unfollow people who are not already following you back.

The fans link is a page of people who are following you who I am not also following back. If I wanted to go in and just make sure I’m following everybody who follows me, I can use this option. Go through here and check through some of the different options here. They have a white list, so if there are people that you want to make sure you don’t ever accidentally unfollow, you can add them to your white list. The option here that we’re going to pay the closest attention to is copy followers. Really, the whole strategy here is we are going to take an Instagram account of somebody that is closely related to my niche, that has a lot of followers, and we’re going to create a copycat audience.

I’m going to pull up an Instagram account. Let’s just say my blog is about … giddyupcycles is about home décor and DIY and that sort of thing, so HGTV would be a great option. People that follow HGTV may also find a lot of the stuff that I post to be relevant to what they’re interested in. We’re going to type in HGTV and just hit enter here. It’s going to pull up a list of people that follow HGTV and it sorts them by how active they are on that page. These are some of HGTV’s biggest and best fans. There’s this little green icon here. What we’re going to do is go out and just follow all those people. The hope is then that they get the notification that we’ve followed them and they’re going to turn around and in turn follow us back and that very rapidly is going to grow your Instagram follower rate.

So if we just start clicking these little green check marks; you’ll see I can just sit here and click, click, click away. If you look in the top left corner here, you’ll see a number and this is the number of people that you have clicked to follow. Now, there are limits with Instagram. I’ve found with the particular app … Actually it’s a little strange. If you use the mobile app the follower limit seems to be lower than on the laptop. I haven’t confirmed that for sure, I was just testing between the two and it seemed like there was a pretty hard 25 person follow limit when I used my cell phone but when I had done it on my computer. If I find more information I’ll update the video here.

Basically, you can go in … There is an Instagram limit of how many people you can follow per hour and once you hit that limit the Crowdfire app is actually going to stop you. They’re not going to let you keep doing it. So that’s what kind of keeps it from being spammy, but really you’re just following people that you know are interested in what you talk about.

So we’re just going to go in here and click this follow button and we’re going to follow as many people as it will let us follow. Like I said, it’s going to get to a point here once I get probably close to 100, I think 100 is the limit right around now. Once we get to that number it’s going to pop a notification that we’ve reached our limit and we can come back in an hour. So here’s that notification. So now, if you want to really just go crazy with this just to see how well it works you can set a timer and come back every hour. You can do it once a day, obviously it’s up to your time and how much you want to invest in this. I recommend just taking one day and committing yourself to go in every hour, or as often as you can, to hit this … to follow as many people as you can and track how well this is bringing in new followers for you.

What’s interesting here, if we go back to my giddyupcycled account, you’ll see before I had just followed those 100 people, I had 112 followers and I was following 103 people. So now if we refresh this page, let’s see if our followers have gone up at all. I now have 114 followers. So in the last 2 minutes I have gotten 2 additional followers. Now it only shows that I’ve followed 46 additional people. That means, more than likely, that 50 or so of the people that I just followed have their accounts set to be able to require any followers to be approved. So once they approve that I can follow them, that number will increase. More than likely those are the people that I have found who will then go ahead and follow me back.

Here is my challenge to you guys. Take 24 to 48-hours, somewhere in that time frame, go on to the Blog Genius Mastermind Facebook group and I’ll put a link in the video here, to that group if you’re not already a member of it just go to that group and request access. I want you to post up a link to your Instagram account and how many followers you have when you start the challenge, before you actually go and use the Crowdfire app. So I really encourage you to give this Instagram challenge a try. I hope you’re as excited about this as I am. I’m going to come back and update this video in 24-hours, and I’m going to show you here how many followers that I’ve gained in the next 24-hours.

Hey guys Ashley Rader here, I’m back. It’s been 24-hours since I started the Insta-challenge. So what we are going to do here is I’m going to go long into my Instagram account, and we’re going to see how far it’s come in the last 24-hours of using Crowdfire. If you remember from yesterday, I’ll put up here a screenshot of where my Instagram account was just about 24-hours ago, so 24-hours ago I had 112 followers and I was following 103 people. We’re about to see where I am now but what I want to do here, just to make sure, I’m going to show you my computer time stamp so we know that its only been 24-hours since I started this challenge. Let me pull this up on my computer here. It is May 14th at 4:29 PM, so we’re actually just shy of 24-hours. I think I was right around … It was 4:45 in the afternoon yesterday when I did the first video. Just shy of 24-hours and let me go and pull up my Instagram account. Okay, so here is my feed and if we go into my actual profile I’m now at 231 followers, I’m following 724 people. My estimate… Wow. I just barely made my goal of doubling my followers. I had 114 and I’m 3 over doubling it – doubling it would have been 228. So within 24-hours I added 117 people to my Instagram account.

Obviously this is not a strategy that you’re going to do on a day-to-day basis, sit there and … I think I probably went in 8 or 9 times over a 24-hour period and did the maxed out the Instagram followers. It took me less than a minute to do it each time I did it, because they have that 1-hour wait period after you followed 100 people you have to wait an hour. It’s not the type of thing that you’re going to do 24-hours a day forever, but I really encourage you just for one day to see how far it can take you. Just maybe set up a schedule where you go in a couple times a day, take 1-minute, follow a bunch of people and move onto something else. Like I said, just in a 24-hour period it doubled my followers that had taken me over a year to get the initial 114. Obviously if your page … If you’re a lot more active with posting than I had been, more than likely there would be even a bigger increase in followers because people would go to your Instagram account and see a pretty active page.

One thing I can do here … What you see here now is there’s kind of a big difference between the number of followers I have and the number of people that I’m following. If I wanted to kind of bring this a little bit closer together what I can do is go back over to Crowdfire and go up to my non-followers. I can just go in here and unfollow a bunch of people just to kind of bring things back even – people that are not following me back. Then if I go back over to my Instagram account here, it was 724, let’s see where it’s at now. Now It’s at 664. You can see how easy it is to really kind of follow a bunch of people, see who follows you back, unfollow the ones that don’t follow you, so you can kind of keep these numbers relatively even. You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re following 10,000 people and you only have 500 people following you.

Just one thing to note, if you do go in no follow people those actually count against your hourly limit. You have 100 actions per hour that you can take whether it be following people or unfollowing people. Maybe if you take a day and you spend a whole day following people, the next day then, you go and you spend it kind of unfollowing the people that aren’t following me back.

I hope this gets you really excited for what you can do with your Instagram numbers by just spending a little bit of time seeking out fans of the type of content that you write about. Like I said yesterday, if you want to take part in the challenge go to the Blog Genius Mastermind Facebook Group. Put up a post with a link to your Instagram account and the number of followers that you had before you started the challenge, how long you waited, and how many followers you had at the end of the challenge. I’m really curious to see how well this works for you guys so please go and post in the forum and give me feedback on how well this is working for you. I will see you next time.

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