So you want to establish your brand and increase awareness of said brand? So where do you begin…

There is an undeniable power of the Internet. And our Internet is dominated by Social Media.

With Instagram & Facebook front and center. So today we’re gonna talk about Instagram.

Instagram has been the most ENGAGED social media outlet in the recent years and it’s because of their unique, simple approach.

Collages of beautiful photos and videos create a profile that can make any user easily comprehend what your Brand is about. Well… if done correctly that is. And a news feed exists to help users digest hundreds of new posts every day. This formula allows Instagram to be a catalyst for kick starting your Brand!

Okay… So you have a Clear, Phenomenal Photogenic Business Card within a sweet little digital @Package.

Now what?!

It’s probably a good time to learn how to grow more Instagram followers.

Followers are key. They trust you and are somewhat invested in you already, within each users’ free time. So therefore- they are the closest point of contact on the web’s digital landscape for making a sale.

In other words:

Instagram + Fans = Awareness + Trust = Funnel into Conversions AKA Sales.

Following still? Great! So I asked myself… What is the Best Way to Gain Real Instagram Followers?

I discovered there are 4 ways to do so within the platform.

Pay for Ads

Pay for Cross- Promotion (Or exchange value to receive for free)

Hashtags

Engage with Prospects (aka something I call: Engaged Marketing)

So which one sucks and which are the best?!

Well to be fair… I believe they all have their potential. But you have to be educated or you’ll just waste your time and money trying to “buy real Instagram followers”.

1. Paying for FB/IG ads, for example, has turned many people into millionaires via ecommerce endeavors such as “drop shipping”. BUT if it was that easy everyone would be a millionaire. There’s thousands of hours of education and perfecting your campaigns that can’t be avoided. And $1K + online training courses to accompany. All while praying you don’t get lost in the oversaturation of information on the subject; a majority which has its own hidden agenda and won’t lead you to the correct tried and true techniques. But if you manage to make it past that, you’ll have the ability to utilize ads to buy real Instagram followers. Of course there’s a better chance they’d rather buy a fidget spinner, than have an impulse to follow your profile. So this leads into reviewing other solutions…

2. Cross- Promotion is also very hit or miss. Cross- promo is essentially when an influencer shouts you out on a post or story. It can be free and effective if you’re receiving love from active IG accounts with 100K + followings. And therefore that would mean you’d have to be at 100K + as well in order to deliver a fair “cross promotion”. ;)

So what if you’re stuck in a Catch 22 and don’t have 6 figure followings? Then you have to pay up my friends! Kim Kardashian, for example, charges half a million dollars for a single post.

And smaller influencer accounts are still nearly as farfetched in price quotes.

3. The lovely #

Well once again the term Catch 22 comes to mind. Although it seems as the most “natural” way to increase Instagram followers organically, they can be pretty ineffective unless you manage to get into the Instagram Discovery Section for a few hours. But once again, that takes a pretty active following already.

4. Which leads us to Engagement with your fellow Peeps.

So this is something that actually works well but it’s time consuming. You would basically target like minded individuals that would be most likely to be your fans. For example, if you were launching a new sneaker company-@Adidas and @Nike would be a great base to go after.

From there you would simply engage with these prospects (leads) via likes, comments, following them, and even messaging. This can be VERY effective if performed every day, but it takes hours each day and I didn’t want my thumbs to get carpel tunnel. Ha But that’s what I found to be the most affordable, effective route to increase

Instagram followers organically.

So then I did some digging and learned about software automation companies. Though I was skeptical at first, I certainly came to the conclusion you can’t buy organic Instagram followers but you can “buy organic Instagram exposure”.

There were a few companies which I experimented with free trials for, and many were crazy enough to not offer a trial and just expect me to blindly signup without seeing how they operate…

Out of the free trials I went on here were my results:

Company 1- 110 new followers in 1 week

Company 2- My account got red flagged for liking too fast. So I quit the trial.

Company 3- 88 in 5 days.

Company 4- 227 in 3 days.

I don’t even want to waste my breath on the other 3 companies, after discovering #4. It’s called SocialGiant.Co

Let me start by saying the only problem I had was that their free trial was 3 days, but they did as much gains in those 3 days as it would take the rest to do in 2 weeks!!!

So I forgive them.. ha

What stuck out was they did AB testing. That’s their secret. Meaning let’s say your sneaker company wants to target the audience of @Nike and @Adidas. Well they can see, for example, that Nike received a 5% conversion rate and Adidas received 10%. Meaning twice as many followers. I also like how I’ve always been in contact with the same representative since I started. They’re definitely as close to the term buy organic Instagram followers as you’ll get. It’s been a month now (I stayed on board) and I’ve went from 7.6K to just hitting TEN!!!!!

So summing it up, I’d definitely look into “Engaged Automated Marketing”. Regardless of who you go with, it’s a ton cheaper and simpler than the other options.

- Written by: Chloe Zhang