Follow Unfollow Instagram Growth Method In 2019

I’ve already mentioned this many times, but in my opinion, follow-unfollow is still the best method to use to grow Instagram from scratch. I know a lot of people will disagree and a lot of “gurus” claim that this method can get you in trouble, ruin your Instagram account, lower your engagement rate and so on, which is absolutely not true if you are doing it the right way. I’m using follow unfollow to start each account that I’m growing, and as I’ve mentioned already I have 2.4M followers spread across 10 different accounts. Out of these 10 accounts, I’ve started 8 using the follow unfollow method.

Since a lot of people still, don’t believe me since I’m not a “guru” I’ve decided to start a new account from scratch and grow it to 10k just to show you that follow unfollow is working perfectly and that it’s the best Instagram growing method for fast growth (if you only want to use free methods). Just like with every method there’s a right and a wrong way to do it, and especially with f/uf if you do it the wrong way you probably will fck up your engagement and have a harder time to grow in the long run. However, if you do it the right way, it’s the best way to get laser targeted engaging followers completely free.

I’ve published a video explaining and showing how to do everything in depth, I suggest you to first check that video out.

If you like to consume content by reading instead of watching than continue reading.

What are you going to learn

This is my ultimate guide on how to do follow unfollow method in 2019. You are going to learn absolutely everything about this Instagram growth method, and once you finish with this article, you will know exactly what you should do and how, and if you’ve already tried and failed what exactly you did wrong. I’m now to blogging, and English is not my first language, so I apologize in advance if there are some errors in grammar or something. Below you will find the table of content and what exactly you are going to learn.

• Why people claim that follow-unfollow method doesn’t work
• What is the follow unfollow method
• Difference between follow unfollow and follow for follow
• How to do follow unfollow properly to grow the account and keep high engagement rate
• 3 different ways to do follow-unfollow method
• Most common mistakes that people make with f/ uf method
• Tips that will help you increase the follow-back ratio and grow faster

Why People Claim That F/UF Doesn’t Work

If you’ve been doing Instagram marketing or growing Instagram accounts, you’ve probably seen that a lot of people hate follow/unfollow method, saying it’s dead in 2019, that it doesn’t work, that it will ruin your account, that your engagement rate will drop and so on. Especially on Reddit in some communities, I’ve seen people hating f/uf saying it’s unethical and so on.

First I want to say that if you think it’s unethical and that’s the reason you hate it, maybe you are not cut to do marketing since with that mindset, you won’t go far. It’s basically the same thing as saying that all marketing is bad and unethical because you are basically exploiting peoples natural behaviour and using it to manipulate people into buying something that they wouldn’t otherwise. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s what marketing is, and every type of marketing uses these “flaws” in human psychology to push their message, product or whatever. If you think that it’s unethical, then you should search for another profession, this one is definitely not for you.

Another reason people hate on it and claim it doesn’t work is because they’ve heard that it doesn’t work so many times from these guru guys over YT or forums. You need to understand that most of these guys have never actually tried anything, and they are just copy/pasting each other, and when one of them said it doesn’t work, others are going to claim that as well. They are making money teaching how to make money, while never actually tried anything. They basically want to tell you that nothing works except from their “secret sauce” that you can buy for just 497$. If you are one of those guys, who believe in this BS than I don’t really know how you’ve even found my website. Go ahead and buy that guru crap, you are going to be a billionaire in no time, forget about my website and my methods, you just don’t need them.

Maybe you’ve tried to follow unfollow and it didn’t work for you, and that’s the reason you hate it or claim it doesn’t work. Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but you haven’t been doing it properly. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been doing this for quite some time, and it worked for me every time, and it’s working for a ton of other people who are doing it right. Continue reading if you want to learn how to do follow unfollow the right way in 2019.

What Is The Follow Unfollow Method

If you are not aware, follow unfollow is the Instagram growth method that revolves around you following a bunch of people, who will then get the notification that you’ve followed them, which will make them interested to check your Instagram account (you need to have nice name and profile photo). Once they check your account, if you have good high quality content that’s interesting to them, they will most likely follow you back. Now your success depends on your source (where you are finding people to follow), your content quality and your overall account look.

I’ve already mentioned in my video, follow unfollow works best for niche or theme pages, because it’s really easy to find the right source, and your follow-back ratio should be much higher. It also works for brand pages that are in some niche. It however rarely works on personal pages, and that’s also one of the reasons people think it doesn’t work, because they tried it on their personal page, where they post nothing but selfies of themselves, and it doesn’t work like that. There is a twist you can apply if you want to grow the personal page with follow unfollow, and if you’re interested in that you can check out my 3 methods to grow a personal page article here on medium.

Once you are following let’s say 1000 people, and you got 500 of these people that are following you, you then go ahead and unfollow everyone that didn’t follow you back. That’s why it’s called follow-unfollow.

Difference Between Follow Unfollow And Follow For Follow

A lot of people are mixing these two methods thinking they are the same, but they aren’t. I’ve explained what follow unfollow is, let me explain what follow for follow (f4f) is. Follow for follow is basically the exchange of follows, I will follow you if you follow me. There are apps that will help you find people to exchange follows, there are facebook groups, even on Reddit people are doing it. The reason this method doesn’t work is that you won’t get targeted followers that will engage with your content. You will just get followers that are interested only in increasing their own follower count, and in most cases are absolutely not interested in your content. This will bring your engagement rate down and can potentially ruin your ability to grow your Instagram account. On the other hand with follow unfollow, you are not promising anyone anything. You just simply follow people that seem to be interested in the same type of content that you are creating. They will get the notification and probably check your account. If they like what they see they will follow you back, and engage with your content. If they don’t like your content, they won’t follow you back, and there’s no harm in that, you will simply unfollow them later and that’s it. That’s the reason why with follow unfollow you will be getting highly targeted and engaged followers that are going to help you start ranking for hashtags and in the explore feed.

How To Do Follow-Unfollow Method Properly

Now let’s go over how to actually do follow unfollow method properly to grow. The first thing I want to mention is that since June, Instagram really started to crack down on bot and 3rd party tool usage and the only way to grow with follow-unfollow successfully is to do it manually. I know a lot of you would like to use some tool that promises it will do everything for you, but the thing is, you will get action blocked, your account health and trust score will decrease and your reach will go down as well. You can see my video, where I’m demonstrating how I’m doing this manually, and it really doesn’t take much time. If you are serious about making money on Instagram, 30–60s per manual follow session is basically nothing, if you consider that this account can make you money for years. If you are not that serious and only have one account that you want to grow, it’s even easier, because it won’t take you more than 5–10 mins per day in total.

Another big misconception that people have is that they think you should use follow unfollow until you reach 50–100k followers. This can be done, but it is indeed time-consuming and it will probably take you a year or two, to reach 100k just using follow unfollow, and I’m sure your trust and health score would suffer. My way of doing it is to just use it to start the account off. What I mean by that is to use it only until you reach first 1–2.5k followers. That’s because in most niches, that’s enough to start ranking for hashtags. Once you start ranking for hashtags, you will start to grow organically and you don’t need to use follow-unfollow anymore.

Follow-unfollow method consists of two cycles: The Following Cycle and the unfollowing cycle.

Following cycle is when you are following people and the unfollowing cycle is when you are actively unfollowing. You should avoid mixing these cycles because that can lead to the action block and it also just makes things harder to track.

Following Cycle

Now let’s talk about the following cycle.

There are several ways to do this, but let’s cover the most basic way first and then we are going to cover other ways.

You want to find a source from where you are going to follow people. The best way to do this is to just go to the page of your competitor (someone that has much bigger page than you in the same niche) and use the likes from their most recent post as the follow source. A lot of people just go to the followers list of their competitors and start following, but this is not good, because among their followers (especially if it’s a big page) are a lot of bots, inactive users and so on. On the other hand, people who liked their recent photo are the people that are engaged and that are active. Which means if they follow you back, there’s a great chance that they will like and engage with your content as well.

Now you should just go to the recent post, open the like list and start following people. I’ve made a post and a video about the limits of follows per hour and per day, so make sure to check that out first to avoid any action blocks.

Once you get to 1500–3000 following you should start the unfollow cycle.

Unfollowing Cycle

In this cycle, you are going to unfollow everyone that does NOT follow you back. That’s another mistake that people make, and they are unfollowing everyone. This will lower your follow back ratio, and make it much harder to grow. You don’t want to unfollow people who did follow you back (because some of them will unfollow you as well, plus it’s a d**k move), you just want to get rid of people who didn’t. If you want to have that fancy following count of 0, you can unfollow everyone later on (once you reach 10–20k).

There are a lot of free apps that you can use to check who hasn’t followed you back, but if you want to be 100% safe, I suggest that you use these apps just to see and write down these usernames, and then do the actual unfollowing within the Instagram app. It does take more time, but it’s much more safe, as I’ve mentioned in my video on how to avoid the action block.

How To Maintain High Engagement Rate

If you are sourcing and targeting people as I’ve mentioned, you will have a much higher engagement rate than people who just go to some random page and start following followers of that page. But there are other ways to improve the engagement rate, that I always suggest you should use, because it will help you to start with the organic growth much faster, and to stop with follow-unfollow completely much faster. I advise you to check my video on captions for high engagement rate first and to definitely check my 0 to 10k series, because there I’m actually showcasing everything that I’m doing to maintain high engagement rate, and the account that I’m growing in this series started to get “viral posts” and to grow organically from just 500–600 followers. This is really important, and if you are not able to maintain high engagement rate, you will have trouble growing the account later on.

Three Different Ways To Do Follow Unfollow Method

There are three different ways to do the follow-unfollow method. Actually there are even more ways, but other ways are really improper, so I’m going to mention just these things that are working right now. Each of these ways are working, but some require more time than others and will reward you with a higher engagement rate and better quality of followers and higher follow back ration.

Method #1

This is the regular method that I’ve already explained when I’ve mentioned how to do the following cycle. You basically just find big page that has the most similar content to your’s and start following people that liked the recent post. It requires very little time and yields good results.

Method #2

In method #2 you want to find a few pages that are in your niche and turn on the notifications to get notified when they publish a new post. Once they do publish a new post, you want to follow people who liked their post within the first hour. The reason is in the first hour, the post most likely didn’t start to rank for hashtags or the explore and everyone who liked it is also following this page + these are really hardcore followers, since they’ve liked that fast (most of them have also turned the notifications, which means they are really interested in the content). This will yield more engaged followers and much better follow-back ratio.

Method #3

With method #3 you want to do everything like in method #2 but you want to check each profile before following. You want to see their followers to the following ratio. If the profile has, for example, 10k followers and is following only 100 people, you don’t want to follow them, because they will never follow you back. You want to just follow regular people, that don’t have huge following since this increases your chances for follow-back even more. This one is the most time consuming but it definitely yields the best results.

I’ve already mentioned that in my 0 to 10k series, I’ve been doing the most basic method since I don’t have much time, but it still yields pretty good results, and my engagement rate is awesome.

Most Common Mistakes People Make While Doing Follow Unfollow

I’ve already mentioned some of the mistakes that people make, but let’s go over these again.

1. Following the wrong people, using the wrong source: A ton of people is doing the following cycle by just going to the followers of their competitors and start following. As I’ve mentioned this is just wrong, and it will lower your engagement rate + follow back ratio and lead you nowhere.
2. Doing too many actions per hour/ day: As I’ve already mentioned, there are certain action limits, and you should not go overboard. If you do, you will get the action block. Make sure to check my article about what triggers the action blocks and how to avoid them. There you will also find my action limit recommendations.
3. Trying to grow to 100k with just follow-unfollow method: I’ve already mentioned this, but follow/ unfollow is the best when you use it to start the account off. You don’t want to depend on it, or to use it to grow beyond 5k. As I’ve said, this is good to get the initial following and nothing else. You can’t grow your way to 1M followers with this method, it’s the best to use to start off, and then use other methods to start growing organically.
4. Unfollowing everyone in the unfollowing cycle: As I’ve mentioned, this is a big problem, since a lot of people will unfollow you as well, plus it’s a d**k move. Just unfollow people that didn’t follow you back.
5. Using follow unfollow for their personal account with only selfies and 0 value: Follow unfollow that’s done like this, doesn’t really work for personal accounts, especially not those where your feed is just filled with selfies and nothing else. I will soon make a video and article on how to grow a personal account with f/ uf.
6. Using 3rd party apps: This is a big no-no since June 2019, and it can cause you problems with action blocks and even shadowban your account.
7. Not using other methods to improve engagement rate: As I’ve mentioned, if you check my YT channel, there are a lot of ways that you can use to improve the engagement rate. Use this, because it’s really important to start growing organically and stop with follow-unfollow as soon as possible.

Tips To Increase Follow-Back Ratio And Grow Faster

Your follow-back ratio depends on several things. First of all, it depends on your username and the profile pic, since this is the first thing that people you follow will see in their notifications. If it looks sloppy and unappealing, they won’t even check out your account. Make sure to have this look as clean as possible.

Your BIO and your content need to be on point. When someone does check your profile, when they receive the notification that you’ve followed them, the first thing that they are going to see is your bio. Make it look clean, with a call to action to follow you, and explain to them what they can expect (Why should they follow you). Your content needs to be niched and HQ, as I’m sure you know already.

From time to time, while you are in the following cycle go ahead and like posts in your feed, even post comments. A lot of people on Instagram are already aware of follow-unfollow. They’ve been getting bot followers and once you follow them, they are not sure if you are a bot or real person. When you interact with them after you’ve followed them, that will definitely let them know, that you are indeed a real person.

Use my tips on how to increase your action cap and avoid action blocks. This will let you do more follows and faster unfollows, which will then help you reach your critical number of followers much faster.

If it turns out you are not getting much follow-backs, experiment and test with the source from where you are targeting and following people.

Wrapping It Up

This is how you do follow-unfollow method in 2019 manually. If you do everything correctly you will get pretty good results in a short period of time. From my experience, it should take you up to 30 days to reach “critical mass of followers” that will then engage and help you start ranking for hashtags and start growing organically.

As I’ve already mentioned I used this method on almost all of my accounts, and I’m using it in my 0 to 10k challenge, which is going pretty good as you can see.

If you are really serious about making money on Instagram, and doing this professionally, you can start and grow several accounts with follow-unfollow at the same time. Even better is to start all these accounts in the similar (but not the same) niche. That way you can also leverage other accounts, cross-promote and so on to reach your goals faster.

As you can see, even when you are doing it manually it shouldn’t take you much time, and it’s pretty effective especially considering it’s a free IG growth method.

I really hope that you’ve enjoyed this and that it will help you to start growing Instagram accounts. If it did help you, feel free to share it with your friends (it will help me + it will help them).

If you have any questions feel free to ask them here or on my YT channel, and I will answer ASAP.