How we added 10k new followers in a quarter of the time it took to acquire the previous 10k

In September of 2020, we launched brand new social channels for one of our clients. They had no social media presence previously, so when we created an Instagram account their total number of followers was zero.

After a little over two years, the following on Instagram eclipsed the 10k mark. It took almost 600 posts, stories, videos and Reels to get us there, but the account had reached a significant milestone. The next 10k came much quicker than the previous 10k, as we reached the 20k follower benchmark in just seven months. Not only that, but we achieved that feat producing a mere fraction of the posts it took previously.

Between September, 2022, and March, 2023, we posted 250 times on Instagram. Of those posts, 90 percent of them were in the form of IG stories or Reels. Why is that important? Because in August, 2020, the platform made a significant pivot towards pushing Reels in an attempt to compete with the rise of short-form video platform, TikTok. Over the next few months, Instagram feeds would take on a whole different experience.

The growth that we saw in the past six months is likely a direct result of catering our content to the platform’s recent changes. While both engagement and impressions dropped year-over-year — common for most accounts on the platform after IG’s changes — our number of followers soared. Six of the last seven months, we added more than 1,400 new followers to our audience. It wasn’t that more people were seeing our content, it was that our content was being consumed better by people interested in what we produced. Because we were producing Reels, the algorithm better served our content to people with similar interests. Our Reels were showing up in people’s Feeds and in the Explore page because we had optimized the content for the platform. 

This approach is applicable to other platforms as well. YouTube has made a big transition lately to Shorts — its way of competing with TikTok and Instagram. Twitter has recently changed the maximum character limit from 280 to 4,000. Facebook stories are relatively new to the platform, and TikTok allows for videos up to 10 minutes long. It’s important to adapt your content to take advantage of all these changes as the platform adapts as well.

Do you want to get your followers up? Get in touch with our team and get ready to level up your business.