GENERAL THOUGHTS

Instagram automation, or any social media automation, is NOT a way to develop relationships with customers.
You should NOT use Instagram automation as a way of growing your main business account. You should however use and grow themed sub-accounts, that you can use to drive the traffic to our business account.

 

YOU SHOULD AVOID

Followers / following: Bots / low quality accounts
Non-locals (if your business is local, like most are, they are not your target audience)
People following the influencers that don’t like our industry
Instagram considers accounts that bundle the same hashtags together within posts consistently, spammy. There needs to be a lot of diversity in a hashtag strategy.

 

HACK#1 FOLLOW PEOPLE BASED ON LOCATION

Bots follow users based on #hashtags

That’s why you should follow people based on the locations they checked into.

But why can this work?

The most important reason is that bots don’t check into locations!
Because people checking into a location are interested in what’s happening there
And in our case, because the business is local, so the user is a local.

 

HACK#2 CHOOSE HASHTAGS WE CAN RANK FOR

Getting Ranked

What it means – When we search that hashtag, if our posts makes it to the featured page or the top 9 posts of the featured page, you’ve been ranked.

Why it matters

From experiments 90% of likes within the first 5 hours are from people who don’t follow us.

Significantly we get more account visibility.

Choosing Hashtags

Choose hashtags we can rank for.

An account with 2500 active followers using the methods outlined here, can rank for hashtags with up to 5M posts. (projection)

It’s important for ranking that the hashtags are most relevant to the image – not the brand.

There seems to be a correlation between the amount of time you remain ranked and the engagement you get through a hashtag.

It’s like any search query – The more aligned our image is to the hashtag being researched the more engagement we will get.

Best way to do hashtag research

Go to similar accounts with between 2k and 10k followers who also have 100 to 200 likes per image. We find common hashtags for our industry.

Example of Hashtag strategy

We should put Hashtags in numerical order.

The order is based on the number of posts per tag – largest first.

We should test how big we should go and if it matters.

How to get the most engagement from your following

This also boosts rank

We should post at “Prime” times.

We can use IG’s native analytics tool or download the Prime App.

We have to have an IG Business account to see the Analytics.

Like a bunch of recent posts right before posting. Comments are even better.

Post at least once a day – There is a drastic difference in views on accounts that post 7 days vs 6 days.

The more often you post in a day the more all posts will show up in the followers feed.

It’s a lot to make content consistently but we should post several times per day

IG’s goal is to get you as well as your following to stay on IG as long as possible. The more you give it, the more it gives you.

Things IG measures (aside from Hashtags) for Ranking in order of leverage

Post Saves
Post Comments
Post Likes
Post Views

 

HACK #3 CROWD-SOURCE CONTENT

We crowdsource content from our community. We can crowdsource from other channels also.

How to download content from Instagram

From desktop:

Go to Instagram Viewer that lets you download content. We can use http://yooying.com/
Navigate to our hashtag or any person’s profile we want to download content from
Click on Download — opens image in full resolution in new tab (many other downloaders won’t do it in full resolution)
Save image or video

How to keep track of all the usernames and write captions

Once we download the content we need to keep track of the username and text they had in their handle so we can credit them.

PLUS: we want to use our standard captions plus hashtags in every post

So we can use this spreadsheet with formulas in every cell to create the perfect caption that always credits the right person

Example

How to schedule posts

Now we look at all the content we downloaded and the spreadsheet we filled with the matching captions. They are in the same order. So the first image I downloaded fits the first caption i wrote and so on.

Go to Grum.co https://dash.grum.co/ (Paid app)

Start scheduling the photos we downloaded with the captions we pre-wrote in the sheet.

Copy paste the hashtags from the sheet to the first comment.

Schedule.
Done.

Grum will post the content for you (the only tool that does this for Instagram)

NOTE:

We should post 4-8 times per day, according to the Nathan Chan from Foundr magazine’s strategy.

Space this content out throughout the day.

Try different times using Grum and compare engagement

Not super important. Don’t sweat it, but just test out night/day differences over time.

Alternatives: while on the phone we can download content with the app Instasave.

 

Guest post by Pavel Malos, Growth Hacker @ eJobs