Growing a real, engaged, and valuable following on Instagram is a primary concern of many businesses, influencers, and individuals. There are many approaches to doing this, ranging from doing it yourself to working with an Instagram growth agency such as Social Boost who engages with your audience through liking, commenting, and following to draw their attention to your account and earn you followers.
But with several ‘ways of doing things’, it can be tricky to know which one is best for you. In this article, we explore the different approaches you may take to grow your Instagram following. We will also take a deeper dive into Social Boost and look at how their approach can help influencers and businesses grow their following in a natural way.
Who is Social Boost?
Social Boost is an organic Instagram growth agency. They work with businesses, influencers, and individuals to help them develop a real and engaged Instagram following.
When you start working with Social Boost, they assign you to one of their Growth Experts who will be responsible for getting you the results you want. This is achieved by taking the reigns of your Instagram account, identifying high-value potential followers, and then systematically engaging with those followers through likes, comments, follows, and unfollows to draw their attention to your account and encourage follows.
These actions are carried out by their team by hand, without the use of bots, to ensure that targeting is specific and personalised to your individual needs – this drastically increases the quality of your new audience.
Social Boost provides each client with a Dedicated Campaign Manager, who is your main point of contact. They update you on your campaign and make sure you’re getting the right follower. They also give you tips on your content (if you want them). You can communicate with them by Video Call or email.
So, in short, they do the engagement for you, which leaves you to focus on creating great content that resonates with your audience. This technique has proven to be quite effective.
What is Organic Instagram Growth?
‘Organic growth’ is a term you will see used a lot across various marketing topics. But what does it actually mean
When used in marketing ‘organic growth’ refers to any growth which occurs without the use of paid advertising. Ways you can organically grow your Instagram include:
- Posting awesome content
- Collaborating with influencers
- Engaging with your target audience by liking, commenting, and following
Why Go Organic?
There are benefits to both paid and organic growth on Instagram.
Paid growth can help you grow your audience quickly but has the obvious downside of taking a considerable financial investment. Typically paid growth is useful when you want a quick boost of followers, such as during a marketing campaign – but this approach isn’t sustainable.
Organic growth can be slower, especially if you do it yourself. However, it will save you money and usually results in a higher quality of following. All businesses should seek to consistently grow their following organically over time.
Best Ways to Organically Grow Your Instagram
There are several approaches you can take to grow your Instagram account organically. In this section, we explore three of the most common approaches and offer you some insight into which one might be best for you.
Benefits of Social Boost
We have already offered you some insight into how Social Boost works. Below we take a look at how working with Social Boost might look like for an influencer, business or individual.
Social Boost for Influencers
Like it or not, influencers are typically categorised based on their follower count. This usually means that brands typically place a large proportion of perceived value on how many followers an influencer has.
This is clear when you look at what brands are paying influencers. For example, mega influencers with 100K+ followers usually command the biggest fees and those with just a few thousand in their audience earn much less per post.
However, as brands become savvier there is an increasing number of them assessing other metrics beyond follower count. These brands also look at metrics such as engagement (likes, comments, shares) and sentiment (how people react to content).
This approach helps brands to weed out influencers who have grown their audiences using dubious methods such as purchasing fake followers.
Working with Social Boost may help you attract real, relevant, and engaged people to your account. It will also boost your engagement and help you build a community around your content – both things that many brands place a great emphasis on.
Case Study:
Social Boost worked with @itsalanah.brooke_ to grow her account by 279% (7,529 followers). They achieved this by using their targeted organic growth methods.
By growing her following using organic methods, @itsalanah.brooke_ has made herself more attractive to brands. This is especially true of brands that undertake due diligence on the influencers they work with to ensure they haven’t been purchasing fake followers.
Social Boost for Businesses
Smart businesses know that a large and engaged social media following can help them increase brand awareness, communicate key marketing messages and even make direct sales.
In addition to this, a large following and high levels of engagement on Instagram can act as social proof, highlighting to new potential customers that they are a legitimate and trusted business.
Imagine this customer journey (let’s call your new potential customer Joe):
- Joe has a challenge
- Joe does a quick Google search to find a product to solve his challenge
- Joe finds your business, but he has never heard of you before
- Joe does some research on you, which includes checking out your Instagram account
Now, imagine Joe finds your account has hardly any followers, little engagement, and very few recent posts. This will likely make him feel like you aren’t an established business, making it hard for him to trust that you will properly solve his challenge.
When a business works with Social Boost, they can grow a relevant and engaged audience, which is going to help show people like Joe that you can be trusted. This approach also allows you to forget about the growth element of Instagram and instead focus on publishing high-quality content.
Business Instagram Growth Example
Social Boost worked with @prolycht (LED Spotlights) to help them achieve a massive 125% in audience growth (7,829 followers).
For every organic follower that @prolycht earns via working with Social Boost, they gain an opportunity to sell to a new and potentially loyal customer – that’s 7,829 new potential customers with minimal effort on their part.
Social Boost for Individuals
You may be asking:
“What is the difference between an influencer and an individual who wants to grow their following on Instagram?”
Well, it typically comes down to motivation.
An influencer will be motivated by increasing the number and value of brand deals they can pull in. This means that they want to grow an audience of consumers and will need to create content that is a great match with favourite brands.
But not all people want to grow their social media following to become influencers. Other motivations include:
- Making yourself more employable
- Selling a personally created product direct to followers, such as a book or course
- Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your specific niche
- Landing paid speaking engagements
Pros & Cons
There are a few upsides and downsides to Social Boost. Although they seem to be one of the better agencies out there. There’s still room for improvement.
Pros
- Real Organic Instagram Followers
- No Bots: Real human-powered growth (Verified by video call)
- Dedicated Campaign Managers
- 24/7 Email, Phone & Live Chat support
Cons
- Social Boost doesn’t currently have a dashboard. They offer a dedicated Campaign Manager who updates you by email. This is more like a traditional Marketing Agency.
- They only work with Instagram and Tiktok Growth.
Other Organic Instagram Growth Options
Of course, there are other options when it comes to generating organic growth for your Instagram accounts. The two most popular of these include using automated tools or attempting to grow your following yourself.
In this section, we explore these options and offer some benefits and downsides to each.
Alternative Methods
Automation & Bots
What is Automated Growth?
Bots automate your Instagram and follow, like and comment on your behalf. Many people believe bots to be spammy and inauthentic. Generally, followers gained from bots are less likely to engage with your content, as they might not be as suitable as hand-picked followers.
Benefits of Automated Growth
There are two benefits to automated growth, which are both due to the fact that you are using bots rather than dealing with real humans. Automated growth is:
- Cheaper
- Easier to manage
Downsides of Automated Growth
In reality, using automated growth is only marginally more beneficial than buying fake followers. This is because:
– You might get banned or suspended from Instagram
– Followers gained are often low quality
– May damage your image online
– Followers gained are unlikely to engage with your content
Self-Management
What is Self-Management?
Self-management is much as it sounds – growing your Instagram following by yourself. This would include everything from creating and publishing content to finding relevant accounts and interacting with them.
Benefits of Self-Management
The major benefit of self-management is that it doesn’t cost you anything but your time.
Downsides of Self-Management
There are several downsides to this approach:
- Highly time-consuming
- Difficult to perform consistently
- Requirement to build targeting skills in house
- Requirement to build engagement skills in house
- Potential need to invest in additional software and tools
Summary
Working with Social Boost could be a good way to grow your Instagram following organically.
Not only does this enable influencers, businesses, and individuals to develop real growth, but it also helps them to target those who matter the most to achieving their growth and engagement goals. However, they do not offer Youtube or Linkedin Marketing, so you might need to look for another agency for these services. But if your focus is Instagram, they may be a good fit.