How To Kickstart Your Instagram Poetry Profile
You don’t have to be a social media expert to grow your Instagram poetry profile in 2024. Back in the golden days of Instagram, all you had to do was follow someone’s page, and if they thought you had an engaging account, they would more than likely follow you back!
Unfortunately, follow-for-follow strategies are considered spammy nowadays and will not work in this current climate. So in this article, we are going to explore the effective ways to grow your Instagram profile. We will consider both free and paid methods that should yield results with enough time and effort.
Although we will focus on growing Instagram poetry pages, note that you can apply the same principles discussed in this article to build a personal or business Instagram account in any niche, so let’s get started!
Why grow an Instagram page?
Instagram is the sixth-largest social media platform on the planet with over one billion monthly active users! It is one of the best ways to showcase your products, connect with fans and build a brand. Established businesses and brands look to successful pages, also called ‘influencers’, to promote their products, and we estimate that this influencer economy was worth over USD 9.7 Billion in 2020.
You need to have several thousands of authentic followers to attract business from paid brands sponsorships. Nano-influencers have 1000 to 10 000 followers. Micro-influencers have 10 000 to 50 000 followers, mid-tier influencers have 50 000 to 500 000 followers, and Macro-influencer have 500 000 to 1 Million followers! Mega Influencers are those that have over a million followers.
Expected earnings per post vary from niche to niche; however, a good average is to calculate $10 per 1000 followers.
A healthy Instagram account builds social proof for your brand. Social proof is a way of demonstrating credibility in the eyes of your intended audience. The general public assumes that the more followers you have, the more likely you will be a leader in your industry. People are more likely to purchase your products and services if you have tens of thousands of followers supporting you already.
Building a substantial social media following allows you to move that traffic from one platform to another. You could appear on a Spotify podcast, YouTube interview or perform at a virtual show on Facebook Live, and your audience is just an Instagram story or a tweet away! So where do you begin? Let’s start with the basics:
Free Instagram Growth Strategies
Five hundred million users log on to Instagram every day. There is an over-supply of content, which is the primary reason it is not as easy to grow an Instagram account anymore. There is simply too much competition out there on no possible way Instagram can show you all the posts from the accounts you follow on any given day.
Instagram, therefore, has to favour certain accounts and several posts over others to ensure a pleasurable user experience for the users of their platform. The infamous Instagram algorithm uses predetermined parameters to decide which posts get seen and which ones never see the light of day.
First, I will discuss some basic practices you should be implementing to give yourself a fighting chance of getting your posts seen and then we will explore two paid options you can use to tip the scale in your favour.
Post regularly
Daily Active Users (or DAU) is an essential metric to the platform. Posting frequently indicates to Instagram that you are an active user, and there are likely to prioritise your posts over less frequent users. Thankfully, you can schedule your posts weeks in advance natively from Facebook’s Creators studio to save time.
Use smart hashtags
A hashtag is a metadata tag symbolised by the # key before a relevant keyword. For instance, #poetsofinstagram is a popular hashtag amongst poets on Instagram. We use hashtags to categorise posts within a particular niche to make it easier for users to find posts that interest them.
To give your posts the best chance of discovery, refrain from using general hashtags used by millions of people. Your posts will drown in a sea of thousands per day long before anyone has had the opportunity to discover them.
Instead, shoot for a combination of longtail hashtags that have a few thousand users. Your posts have a higher chance to remain at the top of their search results and, in turn, give you more time for people to discover them.
Examples Hashtags to stay away from
- #poetrygram- 1,558,101 posts
- #picoftheday- 634,967,840 posts
- #poetsofinstagram- 14,677, 361 posts
- #poetryislife- 1,758,510 posts
- #artistsoninstagram- 71,411,182 post
Examples of good hashtags to use
- #poetryandlove- 74,173 posts
- #poetryinstagram- 33,074 posts
- #poemlover- 77,295 posts
- #writingofig- 98,245 posts
- #spokenwordpoet- 47,867 posts
Do not use too many hashtags in your post captions. I sometimes see people pasting 20 or even 50 hashtags in their image description. This clumsy approach takes away from the user experience and gives the Instagram algorithm reason to bury your post.
Less is more. Use a maximum of 3 hashtags, and if you would like to use more, then paste them as the first comment of your post.
Cross-promote posts to other platforms
Instagram feed images that are cross-posted to your Facebook feed are more likely to reach more users than natively shared photos on the Facebook platform. The algorithm rewards users who use the features they make available to us.
Use Instagram’s features.
Facebook developed Instagram Stories in response to Snapchat, and Instagram Reels also made it to market just in time to suppress Tik Tok’s surge. By using these competitive features, Instagram will reward you by showing your content to more users, thereby granting you more opportunities to grow your page.
Make use of other features like IGTV and story highlights to gain favour with the Instagram algorithm. The more touchpoints you build, the more opportunities you have to gain new followers.
Participate in viral challenges.
If Instagram is an ocean, then viral challenges are waves- ride them. Now and again, a new poetry challenge will arise in the form of a hashtag that gains a lot of traction and could potentially earn you hundreds of followers in a short space of time.
These challenges, usually poetry prompts, can be daily, monthly, and sometimes tied to a theme, season, or agenda. The Instagram explore tab and search for keywords like #decemberpoetrychallenge (or you may insert the month you are in). Facebook search can also help narrow down your search.
Paid Instagram growth strategies
No matter how often you post or how good your content is, you will need to invest in your profile if you want to make money from your page. Instagram is no longer a hobby anymore, it is a business, and every business requires capital to meet its targets. Now let’s discuss two popular strategies you can test out.
Paid promotions/ shout outs
Some people grow their Instagram profiles for the sole purpose of selling shout out or promoting you to their audience. I was curious about their charges, so I messaged them to find out their prices and decided to plot my findings in the table below:
Some of these pages offer multiple bundled packages at discounted prices, and I could not include them all in this table. There are thousands of pages that provide this service. Use the explore tab or search function to find them and shoot them a direct message asking them for a feature or promo.
Run a Facebook ads promotion.
The quickest and cheapest way to grow your Instagram page is by way of Facebook ads. On average, advertisers can expect to pay $0.20 per follow; however, you can get the cost down to as low as $0.05 per conversion with the proper optimisation. Meaning you could theoretically convert 100 new followers with the minimum investment of $5.
I will be publishing a step-by-step guide to setting up a high converting growth campaign for Instagram in a future article, so subscribe to our magazine at the bottom of this page if you are interested in skyrocketing your Instagram growth.
I do not endorse the use of shady software that promises you thousands of followers as they pose two risks. 1) Although they are not illegal, they may operate against Instagram’s terms of use, and therefore, if caught, you run the risk of getting your account suspended or terminated.
2) You also run the risk of attracting bot traffic or burner accounts that will hurt your metrics in the long run. Your engagement is your second most important metric after your page size, and potential investors can smell fake followers from a mile away, so don’t do it.
Growing your Instagram profile is a labour of love that can set you apart from your competitors and set you up for new opportunities. Be prepared to grunt it out over a substantial amount of time, but it will be worth it in the end. For the best results, use a combination of these free tips; the results may surprise you.
Here’s a look at the top 25 Instagram poetry profiles as of late 2022
