K atie c ouric

Tagging and Using Privacy Settings to Gain
Followers
Anthony Arron, comedian and founder of Instagram account imjustbait,
which gets around a hundred million impressions a week and fifty million
views a month, agrees that to get content to go viral, you need to use a
circle of influencers. If you’re in a network of big pages posting your

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content, you’ll receive more attention. That’s what most of the people he
knows with big accounts do to gain views and to go viral.
Additionally, Arron has found that playing with the privacy settings of
his account is the best way to capture more followers. He posts ten to
fifteen videos a day on his page, spreading the posts throughout the day to
reach people in different time zones. When he posts a video, he leaves his
page on the public account setting so that a lot of new people can see it.
However, he’s found that even though people see and like the videos, they
won’t necessarily follow him. To combat this problem, he will randomly set
his account to private after he posts the videos to encourage people to
follow him to access the locked content.
Sometimes he’ll have upward of eighty thousand people watching a
video and tagging their friends to view it as well. When people’s friends
come to watch the video and see that the account is on private, they’ll
usually follow the page because they want to see the video that their friends
have tagged them in. The key is, if the content is good enough, people will
follow him for the opportunity to see it. This forces him to keep creating
good content so these people won’t later unfollow him. This strategy has
brought Arron around two thousand to five thousand followers a day.
He also puts a watermark on all his videos that says, “Follow
@imjustbait
.” That way, whether people repost, save, or simply view his
videos, they’re more likely to know about his account and follow him.
Erick Brownstein of Shareability agrees that getting people to tag their
friends in posts is a great strategy. Since Instagram is not as shareable a type
of platform as Facebook, his team finds that tagging is the best way to help
people spread content. Tagging is like a personal invitation to get someone
to see something. It’s the way people show their friends content they think
will be relevant to their tastes.