You might know that your social media marketing strategy isn’t complete without a powerful Instagram account. You’re tempted to buy Instagram followers or even by getting free Instagram followers, but you’re not sure about how it works, or even if it’s a good move for your social media strategy.
To answer your first question, yes, it is possible to buy real followers.
When my clients ask me if they should buy followers, my first question is WHY? Why exactly do you think you need to buy followers? Their answers have been:
✔ My account is new and I don’t think people will take me seriously with an account that has a few followers.
✔ I’ve been trying to follow some of the best organic practices like commenting on people’s posts, sending messages, but my account doesn’t really grow.
✔ I have heard that I should buy followers so that my account can have the 10,000 users and I can get the swipe up feature.
I get it. You want to see big numbers. I agree with you. So let me cover in the rest of the article everything you need to know before you buy real Instagram followers.
Digging Deeper Into Your Instagram Strategy
Time is the most precious asset we all have. The last thing you want, especially if you’re the one in charge of marketing your business, is wasting your time.
Every great social media marketing strategy starts with GOALS. When it comes to Instagram marketing, this platform can serve you to funnel connections, with 3 different goals:
✔ You want to use Instagram as a channel to get people to visit your website.
✔ You want to promote your products or services directly on the platform.
✔ You want to be known by more users to expand your brand and your message.
Which one is your goal with this social media channel?
Instagram Funnel For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If this is the first time you’ve heard of SEO, it pretty much means Google (yes, Yahoo Bing and other navigators, but mostly Google). Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
Instagram marketing can be part of your SEO and website traffic strategy. To activate this funnel, you need:
✔ A business account with over 10,000 followers to activate the swipe up.
✔ A great content marketing plan with strategic long tail keywords to turn your users into readers.
✔ Instagram stories with links so that users can visit your website.
Your actionable metrics will be:
✔ Target audience
✔ Followers
✔ Users reached
✔ Website sessions
Buying real followers in order to grow your Instagram profile for SEO purposes is something I recommend, but with a lot of warnings. It can be done, completely legit (without getting suspended) but it needs to be done right.
Marketers don’t share their buying sources because it’s common practice by Instagram to monitor those services and shut them down. But they do exist and they work. You can get 10,000 followers in a week. They will be targeted based on a hashtag or based on followers who follow a targeted brand.
You could buy Instagram ads, but they don’t seem to drive such a great service to get more followers, in comparison to the other methods to buy followers. Another big plus is that you can buy followers cheap.
Typically, I recommend this strategy for service-based businesses who have an established content marketing strategy in place.
The negative side of this strategy, when you buy followers, is that your account will experience a low engagement rate; but that should totally be ok with you since you’re not basing your strategy on that metric. Your metric is website traffic.
You will also need to track and analyze your Google Analytics account, using the channel grouping feature so you can measure the ROI of your Instagram Marketing efforts.
What do I do before I hit the 10,000 followers? Can I add links (swipe up feature) to my story without the 10K followers?
Yes, you can have swipe up before hitting your 10K followers mark. You can use IGTV. Read my tutorial here.
Instagram Funnel To Build Your Revenue
Since most of Instagram’s users are millennials, if you’re marketing to that audience, especially fashion and beauty, building a funnel to get more users on your e-commerce funnel sounds like a great goal.
Keep in mind, that just sharing photos and videos won’t create and instant delivery of the results you’re expecting.
The essence of successful e-commerce marketing lies in knowing your potential customers well.
✔ Where are they in their buyer’s journey?
✔ What are their main problems?
✔ How can you solve those problems for them?
✔ And so on.
I like how Julia McCoy from Express Writers wrote on her Granular Guide To Creating A Buyer Persona
When you answer these questions, you’ll know how to convince potential buyers to take the next desired action.
What if you can’t answer all the questions about your buyer persona?
If you can’t answer all your questions about your buyer persona, there is a good chance that you need to focus on other business activities to get more clients.
Now, let’s assume you know your buyer persona and you want to monetize them.
Affiliate Marketing is a great way to monetize your Instagram Account. This is a very common in an influencer marketing strategy.
Instagram isn’t a shopping app like Amazon, Etsy, or Wish. When you visit Amazon, you’re ready to buy. However, when you’re navigating on Instagram, you’re not necessarily looking to buy. You might; if you feel inspired and influenced enough to take action.
I’ve seen great results from influencer accounts who promote affiliate links to market their fashion styles. If you’re open to monetize your audience with affiliate marketing, here are some websites who offer great commissions.
To activate this funnel, you need:
✔ A business account with a real audience who like you, trust you and believe in you.
✔ An impeccable feed with amazing visuals.
✔ Cutting-edge hashtags strategy.
✔ A real audience who can relate to you, so you can inspire and influence.
Your actionable metrics will be:
✔ Target audience
✔ Followers
✔ Users reached
✔ Link in bio clicks
Should you buy real followers if you want to make money with affiliate marketing?
No. I would not recommend buying followers for an e-commerce or affiliate marketing funnel.
Your goal is based on quality vs quantity. You want to have real conversations with your audience. I recommend Instagram ads to drive people to visit your link in bio, on top of other organic strategies to grow your account (except for buying followers).
Instagram Funnel For Brand Awareness
Brand awareness refers to the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand. Brand awareness is a key consideration in consumer behavior, advertising management, brand management, and strategy development. Wikipedia.
If your business is working toward better brand awareness and you’re doing everything possible to grow your audience on social media, it’s critical you get granular about your message, your target audience, and the metrics you need to watch in order to measure your ROI from social media.
Personal brands can have great success with this Instagram funnel. You’ve probably heard about micro celebrities and micro influencers of Instagram.
Brands and small business owners are considering influencer marketing as a way to grow their business.
Unlike celebrities with hundreds of thousands or millions of social media followers, micro-influencers may have anywhere from 1,000 to 50,000, possibly more. While the exact numerical definition varies among experts, statistics suggest smaller niche players may wield more influence when it comes to effective social media marketing.
Micro-influencers drive engagement, which is key in influence marketing, according to digital marketing solutions firm MediaHub. Retail and entertainment clients saw about 50 percent higher engagement using micro-influencers, the firm said last year in a post on its parent organization’s website.
If your goal is to become a micro influencer, then a branding awareness funnel is where to start.
To activate this funnel, you need:
✔ A business account with a real audience who like you, trust you and believe in you.
✔ An impeccable feed with amazing visuals.
✔ Cutting-edge hashtag strategy.
✔ A real audience who can relate to you, so you can inspire and influence.
Your actionable metrics will be:
✔ Target audience
✔ Followers
✔ Users reached | impressions
✔ Engagement
Engagement, Reach, and Impressions, which metric matters?
Reach is the total number of people who see your content. Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not.
Think of reach as the number of unique people who see your content. In a perfect world, every one of your followers would see every piece of content you posted.
Unfortunately, that’s not how things work on social, and not all of your followers will see every single post you publish. For instance, Groupon has 17 million followers, but their organic content doesn’t come close to getting that number of engagements because only a fraction of their audience sees it.
However, an impression means that content was delivered to someone’s feed. A viewer doesn’t have to engage with the post in order for it to count as an impression. Also, one person could have multiple impressions for a single piece of content.
Best Practices for Instagram Insights
Instagram Insights can help businesses learn more about their followers, find out the types of content their audience enjoys, and learn more about how people engage with their business on Instagram. The three primary insights you can use in this tool are:
Discovery: This insight measures how many people have seen your content and where they find it. The main things considered are the reach and impressions of your content. Reach is the number of unique accounts that have seen your posts. Impressions are the total number of times your posts have been seen.
Interactions: This insight measures the actions taken on your account from a certain length of time. Actions can include profile visits and website clicks.
Audience: Insight on your audience can help you inform about your potential customers, where they are located, and give you insight on your current Instagram followers.
At this level, when you’re growing your brand awareness, pay attention to the reach, more than any other metric. Also, keep in mind, that Instagram uses hashtags boards, so your content will be placed on boards and it will be discoverable. This is why you can see people interacting with a post that is a year old (for example).
What if I’m in a rush to grow brand awareness and monetize my audience?
Some business owners want to drive quick results; especially local business owners. If you’re a local business (franchise, brick and mortar, spa, dentist, medical practice, attorney), you still want to use Instagram marketing, but this won’t be your only source to drive visits to your location or calls to your office.
You will require a granular digital marketing strategy that integrates social media with other avenues like SEO, Google Adwords, and event marketing.
I love recommending SEO for 2 reasons: it’s scaleable and once it hits results, your traffic comes from passive efforts. The only downside: it’s a lot of work.
When is it recommended to buy followers?
In closing, if you’re using Instagram marketing as a funnel for your SEO, since this isn’t your main source of traffic and you won’t be counting on a mirco-influencer status, buying followers will be the best route to take, to accelerate in your traffic.
Once you have the 10K followers, you can change your game plan to drive real awareness, following the brand awareness funnel game plan as explained above.
This educational piece is part of my #summersocial series. Follow my Instagram stories to never miss an article!
Can I schedule a consultation with you to discuss my Instagram strategy?
Yes, of course. You can use my scheduler bar on this page, or simply click here.
