K atie c ouric

CHAPTER 8
GAINING INFLUENCE ON
INSTAGRAM
ith more than seven hundred million monthly active users, Instagram is a
platform that can’t be ignored.
1
It’s an essential marketing and storytelling
tool that gives users a quick, accessible, emotional, and highly visual
experience of your brand and messages. It’s one reason Instagram has the
highest average brand engagement rate of all the main social media
channels.
2
Nevertheless, it isn’t the easiest platform on which to achieve rapid
growth. One of the biggest differences between Instagram and Facebook is
that it’s not inherently built as a sharing platform, leaving you with the need
to find other ways to make content go viral. While Facebook is designed to
get you to share, Instagram is primarily designed for you to like, comment,
and tag. Success on the platform relies heavily on your ability to leverage
strategic partnerships for growth. A lot of the information you’ve gathered
from 
chapter six
, “Strategic Alliances,” will be of great use to you to
achieve success on this platform.
For real growth, virality, and success on Instagram, your goal is to get
people with status to like and comment on your content. On Instagram,
status is defined by two metrics: (1) number of followers, and (2) lifetime
of an account. Those who’ve been on the platform longer have more clout.
The algorithm is created this way to prevent people from cheating the
system. There was a time when some users were rapidly building new sister

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accounts to lift the weight of their other Instagram accounts (this doesn’t
work anymore, so don’t get any ideas).
Rapid Growth on IG
Getting featured on the Explore page, which is Instagram’s general search
page, is the best way for content to go viral and for you to be discovered.
Getting featured on this page in a large number of people’s accounts
requires a lot of “power likes”—likes and comments from high-profile
accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. Each
Explore page is tailored to the particular user’s interests, but if a super
influencer likes your content, it will be more visible to a good number of
people.
Adley Stump, a digital marketing strategist, explains that this is because
likes grow exponentially. If a verified account with a hundred thousand
followers in your niche “likes” your content, Instagram’s algorithms will
push your post to the majority of those hundred thousand followers’
Explore feeds. And that’s just one power like—imagine getting a hundred
or a thousand power likes. Also, although it’s not necessary for the power
likes to be niche-specific, it does increase the conversion rate for growth
because you’ll show up in feeds of people who already show interest in that
type of content. It’s less valuable to get power likes from someone in the car
niche when you’re in the pet niche.
One way to get power likes and to reach a lot of Explore pages is by
using engagement groups (see 
chapter six
). Using them as a part of your
Instagram strategy really helps your content go viral. Joivan Wade
recommends having at least five people, ideally with larger followings than
you, or around your audience size, with whom you can regularly exchange
likes and comments.
One method I have found a tremendous amount of success with is by
identifying large pages or networks of large pages that are willing to allow
you to advertise on their accounts. The best way to go about this is to
identify pages in your niche and direct message them on Instagram asking
for their advertising rates. Most of them will come back with what it costs
to do a “shout out” or a message of support for your page across their page

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or network. I always respond and ask them for a guaranteed follower
package (e.g., I advertise X number of dollars and you guarantee me X
followers in return). Most accounts will respond saying they don’t offer this
type of package, so you have to find the accounts that are confident enough
and willing to offer this type of support; otherwise, a normal shout out will
only get you a few hundred followers max. Find the accounts or networks
that are creative and really good at driving traffic that results in followers.
In addition, you have to test many of these networks to weed out the
ones that will sell you fake/bot followers. The only way to test these
networks is by segmenting the tests on different days (i.e., test one network
one day and another network another day). I recommend only spending a
few hundred dollars with each network first and see who delivers high-
quality (real) engaged followers before scaling. Once you find the network
that delivers, then you can scale.