I have been on Instagram as a content creator and manager. Pages managing humor / funny / comedy content. I started at zero with my knowledge about it and targeted reaching 50,000 followers in 6 months. But things didn’t go as planned and I completed the target in 12 months. There were multiple ups and downs in the path, but I had finally reached it.
Over time, I have seen Instagram evolve from better to the best. Multiple mistakes were made by me in this journey and finally I managed to reach the 50,000 milestone. What i have understood over time is that if I didn’t commit these mistakes, I would have made the same number of followers within 2 months of starting the page.
The mistakes are as below:
- Unstructured bio:
- Bio of a page is important because whenever someone lands on your page, it’s the first thing they are seeing it. Similar to the front of a brick-and-mortar store. A customer would always have this mindset that if the face of the store is good, the products must also be good. Similar to this, if we would not have a structured bio for our page, it would not make a good impact on someone visiting it and may lead to not following your page.
- There is no perfect bio, but it should usually look as below:
- <Your Name> and/or <Your Skill>
- <Your business type>
- <Things you do> (this can range from 1 to 3 depending on the area it covers, this should not cover more than 2 lines)
- <A sentence that requests for following you or a link that would lead them to your website or relevant webpages where they can find more relevant content>
- Growth on someone’s content:
- Most of us starting our Instagram page would not have any idea of how to create content so the best way to complete this action is copying the content of other creators.
- As I mentioned before that Instagram has evolved a lot over time, this is relevant to copy paste content as well. Instagram also has an image to present, to show the best content to its users so that they stick around for more time. So, when instagram realises that the content is copied it avoids showing it to its users. Thus delaying growth. So it’s important for us to create original content.
- So what should be done? I would agree that its difficult to create new content everyday and in unlimited numbers. So the best solution to this is not just copy pasted but copied and customised to create a new approach to it. If the content created by you is totally new. There is nothing that could beat you to grow. For example, if you see any movie in the theatre and then on Netflix, Netflix will always try to add a touch to the movie, which could be by adding extended video or story to it, otherwise they would miss on the viewers that have already consumed this content.
- Your stats are your reality check:
- Do you think that getting guidance from someone who says he is an expert can be of most value to it? It may be of some value but the only reality that would help you is the stats of each post that is being uploaded by you. You have to understand the thought process that have been behind the post because of which it is performing better than others. For example if a content creator has uploaded a reel in which his primary idea was around tea, which went viral but when he uploaded another reel related to tea it didn’t go viral. So, it could be confusing to you to understand the reasoning behind it but this is the truth that Instagram has shown, and we have to keep trying to create the next big reel.
- Having the right focus:
- We always run behind the results, not the efforts. Like in the case of Instagram we would measure the success by the number of followers. Which i think may not be the correct criteria. The correct criteria should be the reach of our posts as that would bring in maximum traffic. Sooner or later, people would follow us.
- Having a niche:
- We have to understand that Instagram is not a human but a code which has its own way of working. So it may not work as we want it to rather we have to work by understanding the code which we call as algorithm. For example if we have uploaded a reel which went viral and was related to a specific topic such as gym motivation and later we upload a reel which is related to corporate joke. The Instagram algorithm would send the new reel to the same set of users who watched the last reel which were gym related consumers, and they may not give the same response as before to this reel. So, it’s always recommendable to stick with a category and once we are part of the algorithm it would work on bringing our content to those users and increase the reach of the channel.
Again, the final decision is not ours but Instagram’s who would guide our growth. But all we can do is be consistent with the content upload and its quality.
