How do you get your first 10 000 followers on Instagram?

One of the most frequent questions that I am asked is how to get the first 1000/5000/10000 followers.

Say, today you have setup an account on Instagram, you have invited friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and now you have 18 followers. How do you work your way up to 1000 or 5000 followers?

How do you get your first followers?

First, I would like to point out that it is a complicated task, far more complicated than increasing the number of followers from 10,000 up to 100,000.

If you have a bigger audience, you have more opportunities for free promotion, your content and recommendation engines work better. You can go to the top with your hashtags and so forth.

That is why I recommend using active tools for a start.

1. Mutual following

I keep saying that this tool gradually dies down, but mutual following is still a good tool to start with. When you follow some users, they follow you back.

But your following should be targeted. You shouldn’t randomly follow everyone far and wide, you should only follow the people who have used a hashtag that you target.

Let’s presume you work with medical technologies. You have an annual event that brings all professionals together. They upload pictures with the hashtag of the event. Follow all those people, because they are your target audience. At the start, this type of audience is the best. A person who completely corresponds to your target audience profile is worth 5 users who do not correspond at all or don’t correspond enough.

But don’t overuse this tool. You might be sanctioned, so follow users bit by bit, 100-200 people, for a start.

2. Targeted advertising

The second tool that has an immediate effect is targeted advertising. It allows getting up to 10000 followers in five-six days.

The obvious disadvantage is that you need to pay for advertising and it is not cheap on Instagram. But, if you set targeted advertising properly and show it to the users who you consider to be your target audience, then you will have a fast increase in followers.

But to achieve this you will require a considerable budget at the start, which is why this tool is not always suitable.

3. Promotion through popular bloggers

You can buy a post from a popular blogger. It can be a live collaboration, or an announcement post, or a series of announcement posts and so forth.

If used correctly, this tool gives an increase in the target audience, i.e. the audience that follows you from recommendations.

What you shouldn’t use at the beginning

What you shouldn’t count on to get the first several thousand followers.

1. Content-promotion

Don’t expect to get to recommendations and attract a new audience with the help of content. It only works when you have over 1000 followers. If less, then recommendation engines do not work.

2. Giveaways

Do not count on giveaways. If you have almost no followers, I don’t recommend adding participants of giveaways to the channel straightaway. It might lead to a very low reach and make further promotion difficult.

3. Buying bots

The most common mistake is to buy bots. Bots can put you in a deadlock situation: your account might get banned and in the future, you will have problems increasing engagement amongst other problems.

So don’t waste your money and time on bots.

Use these three promotional tools that are sure to help you to get the first several thousand followers.

If you are ready for a long path to success, then just post quality content, use proper hashtags, write informative posts. Slowly but surely your audience will get bigger, but remember that it will take quite a while. When you already have 1000 followers, you can start using more promotional tools and bring your posts to the top with hashtags, they will be shown in recommendations, and, most importantly, you will be able to look for the mutual promotion partners and exchange audiences.