First of all, let me preface this post by saying that I REALLY do not care about my numbers. I know that it seems like the only people who say that are ones who have built a following of millions, so it might seem easy for them to say that. Here’s the deal. I would rather have 400 followers of people who love and believe in what I do, and/or may even use my services for their own photography rather than having tens of thousands of followers that consist of bots, fake accounts, spam accounts, or worse, follow for follow accounts. F4F accounts are easy to pick out because they usually have something like 1000 followers and they follow 10,000. Speaking of, let’s talk about that for a second, if you are following people on facebook just to gain their follow and then you unfollow them shortly after, just don’t. In my opinion, that’s the quickest way to turn someone off from your brand, services, or business.
Back on topic, I have read articles along the same lines of what I’m going to talk about and all of them had far different results than me. Many of them went on to say how they gained hundreds or thousands of followers. In their blogs they tried acting like they were the everyday instagram user, until you got to the end of their blog and found out they already had tens of thousands, a couple even had six figures followers! Well, sure, gaining a couple thousand followers with an already hundreds of thousands under your belt seems pretty easy. But what about real world users. Ones that only have hundreds or a couple thousand followers. What can they expect. Well, I’ll tell you.
At the beginning of July, I had around 580 followers. I posted at least one post per day, however, I think only 2-3 days that month I posted one time. Every other day was at least 2-3 posts per day. Usually one earlier in the morning around 7:00am, then around 12 or 3:00 pm, then around 7:00 pm. All of these times seem to have the hottest numbers. Now, I use instagram a little differently, I use it as a sort of blog. Each picture, I type a story with it. At least a few sentences, but usually, it’s a paragraph or two. I know, many people aren’t going to sit and read it, but part of who I am as a photographer is a storyteller, and I wanted my posts to reflect that in words. I also used the maximum amount of hashtags available, or close to it. That’s about 30 hashtags per post. Ready for the results?
Drumroll……. I gained a whopping 40 followers.
Sure, 40 followers when I started with 580 is a 7% increase. This is like an account with 100,000 followers getting 7000 new followers in a month. Not too shabby. However, since it was only 40, I decided to click on every account and see what my new followers consisted of.
20 followers unfollowed me (more than likely F4F accounts unfollowing because I didn’t follow back)
13 followers were spam accounts
20 were follow for follow accounts
7 were legit followers
Rather than a 7% increase, I really had a 1% increase. The math is really funky with losing so many F4F followers, but I started the month with 580, and ended with 20, but I had gained 40 new followers.
What does all this mean? One might say that it’s not worth posting every single day, this is what I learned… I’m not posting enough! Social media is a loud platform and to make sure you are heard, you need to be as “loud” as you can, meaning you need to post so much that people have to see your stuff. Sure, some might unfollow you because of this, and that’s fine. However, you’ll gain so much more that want to consume your content and possibly use your service or business. At least this is my theory. For the next month, I’m going to test this out. I’m going to challenge myself to post at least 5 times per day. If you haven’t read my post about Planoly, check it out. If you want to do something similar, Planoly will really help! I’m also not going to use 30 hashtags. I’m going to use very specific, strategically placed hashtags. In a month, I’ll report my numbers.
