Hey, I’m Sunny Lenarduzzi. Want my super ninja secrets on how I’ve recently skyrocketed my following and engagement on Instagram? In today’s video I share how to blow up your Instagram following and increase engagement like crazy!
Growing a supportive, engaged Instagram following is an artform. Recently, I’ve kinda blown up on Insta, so I created a video for you on how I did it!
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“DOUBLING MY INSTAGRAM GROWTH (2019)” (video)
“QUICKEST WAY TO POST YOUTUBE VIDEOS TO INSTAGRAM” (video)
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My engagement on Instagram has skyrocketed, so what’s the secret?
Well, it’s all in how I post.
It’s a lot more than just picking a photo, writing the caption, and throwing it up there. There is some seriously ninja secrets that go behind every post that I make, so I’m going to break it down in very nitty gritty detail in this video.
You know me talking mostly about You Tube, but I do love Instagram.
It’s my second favorite platform, and when I did a video about it, and how I doubled my Instagram growth a little while ago, it really took off, so I figured if you found that valuable, I was going to make another video for you on going behind the scenes on how I actually post to Instagram because I have some seriously crazy tips.
Let’s dive into step one, which is just picking a photo.
When I pick a photo that I want to post to Instagram I know what performs well because I’ve done the same thing that I do with You Tube.
I pay attention to what works with my audience, the kinds of captions that work really well, and the kinds of photos, so pretty standard on Instagram. It’s so personality driven that photos with me in them tend to way outperform any other kind of content, so I always try to pick a photo with me in them.
I did just recently do a batch content creation day, and I had a bunch of photos taken.
My guidance for those photos was I want it to feel like the audience, or my community is in my house with me. I want it to feel really natural, not so perfect, not like I’m modeling. I just want to feel like it’s me talking to a friend, so that was the guidance that I gave with these photos that I just got done.
Step two is writing my captions.
I’ve played around with a lot of different styles of captions, short, long, blog posts. What I found is that blog posts captions, longer form captions that really tell the story and educate, shockingly, are the ones that do the best, so educate and inspired are the ones that do the best on my account.
Again, you really have to pay attention to your own account and figure out what works best for you.
I write my captions inside of my notes on my phone. I write these all the time when I get inspiration, or I’ll just write little prompts of like, oh, that’s a good idea. I should write a caption about that. I keep them in my notes and I put little dots in between each paragraph, so that I can create spaces.
I know there are other ways to do it. That’s just how I do it. I write out the whole thing. And then, I’m going to use that later to copy and paste into Instagram. But, we’re not even going to get to posting quite yet. Let’s move into step number three.
Hashtags, this is step number three.
It’s really, really important, and something you may have forgotten about. But, I just want to quickly explain before I show you exactly how I do my hashtag research, and my strategy for it. That hashtags are similar to the strategy we use on You Tube with keywords.
You need to make sure that you’re getting found by the right audience, and you’re getting discovered by new people when you make a post on Instagram, so you’re not just relying on just solely your audience, but you’re actually reaching a broader audience. I’m going to explain that formula on Instagram right now.
The formula is actually very similar to You Tube. It’s based on the amount of results, which is your search pool, and the amount of engagement for the top ranked posts, and if you can compete with them.
The tool that I use is called, Flick Tech. It’s paid, but I will show you another tool in a second that’s actually free.
The strategy here is you want to rank for the smallest hashtags first, so it’s not super competitive, and your hashtags have to be relevant to your posts. Meaning, that the picture and the hashtags are the same, so if it’s a picture of a dog, you should have a hashtag that is relevant to dogs.
On Instagram, you are only allow 30 hashtags per post, so you want to try, and stay below that. For me, what I like to do is a combination of about 25.
You don’t want to repeat hashtags on every single post because if you do you’ll get flagged as spam, so I just keep different groups of hashtags for different topics in my phone, and I rotate through them on my different posts.
All right, so this is how you actually do it.
The search pool for your Instagram posts for your hashtags, you want to have a group of five that’s under 50,000, a group of five that is between 50,000 and 200,000. You want to have a group that is between 200,000 and 500,000, and a group that is between 500,000 and a million, so five hashtags in each of those groups.
Then, you want to have one group that’s hyper, hyper relevant to your image, and then a mega popular group. You’re going to save those for later. That’s your five groups, and then you have a mega popular group. We’re going to use those in stories in one of my ninja tricks later on. The key comes in knowing how many results you’re competing against and the engagement.
The other tool you can use is DisplayPurposes.com. You can use this on your phone. It’s super easy. It’s free to use.
Step number four is to combine your caption and your hashtags and put them into Instagram, so you’re actually starting to do the posting process.
I’m just going to copy and paste this all together. It has my whole caption, and it has all my hashtags in there as well.
Step number five, really simple, you want to make sure you always add in your locations.
You want to click on add location, or pick one of the auto populated locations right there. And then, you want to add something in that’s a little extra, and very similar to on You Tube where you do transcriptions. I always say it’s so important to have these because the more information that you give the platform that you’re using, the more they can figure out where to put your photos, and help you reach more people, so it’s very similar to adding a transcription on You Tube.
You also want to add something similar on Instagram called the ‘alt text’.
You click on alt text under advanced settings, and you go to right alt text. This is for people who are visually impaired, so that they can know what your images is about. You’re going to actually describe what the image is about.
And then, the next thing is you’re going to tag all the appropriate accounts that are relevant to the photos. For me, I’m going to take Aritzia because that’s all of the clothing that I’m wearing. And then, I’m going to tag the scrunchie that I’m wearing, which is Shop Chelsea King. I’m going to tag myself. You always tag yourself in your photos.
Please don’t tag people who aren’t relevant to your photos. You get flagged as a spammer when I do that. I often get tagged by people that I don’t even know, and in pictures that have nothing to do with me, so just don’t do it. It’s the bad practice on Instagram. It’s not the right way to get engagement.
And then, you’re going to go ahead and you’re going to share your photo.
The next thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to actually share this photo to your story. This is super important because then it’s notifying your entire audience that you have a new post that they can go engage with. I’m going to click the little share arrow, and I’m going to add post to story.
This is where it gets real nitty gritty. Watch the video starting at 10:15 for all the details on how I share the post on my Stories.
Step 10, which is the final stage of how I post is you want to make sure you’re blocking off 30 minutes to just engage in the comments.
You want to make sure that in your captions, as I mentioned earlier, when I write them I always put a call to action for people to comment below, so people are going to leave comments, and the more engagement that your Instagram post gets in the first 30 minutes the higher you will rank, and the more reach that you’ll get, so first 30 minutes to an hour really.
I always block off 30 minutes of time, and I make sure that I’m not doing anything else when I do post to Instagram, and I have 30 minutes on my calendar to just go in there and respond to comments and ask questions, and get as much engagement on the post as possible.
The beautiful thing about using Instagram this way it’s super intentional. Yes, it takes more time, but the great thing is and what I’ve been experimenting with is that I talk about You Tube bringing in leads, and customers, and new audience members all the time when you use it in the right way, and when you get your videos ranked.
Well, when you do this on Instagram is does a very similar thing. It’s not going to be years, and years, and years of those leads coming in, but it will be a longer effect than just posting up a photo, and having that instant hit of success. You will see some long term results because you’re ranking for those hashtags, which is super exciting.
I have two other videos – How I Doubled My Instagram Growth and how I use Instagram to drive a lot more views to my YouTube videos, so make sure you check those out.
If you enjoyed this video, I would love to know in the comments below what your biggest takeaway was.
Thank you so much for watching!
-S
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