My journey of growing an Instagram account from 0 to 10,000 followers.

I run Young & Shining, an online magazine for young achievers. Through running it I became good at reaching out to achievers and also managing Facebook and Twitter.

In 2016, I had been using Instagram personally but I was not a power user. And, being a social media junkie I wanted to do that.

Best way to learn something is to do it.

So, I set out to be a power user and grow @YoungandShining Instagram account from 0–10,000 followers.

I started the account activity from July 10, 2016. As of Oct 20, there are 3233 followers on the account.

What you see below is how I have grown it so far. I’ll continue to update it as I reach next milestones — 5k, 7k, and 10k.

First 100 followers.

First 100 followers were easy. I created the account, gave it a good name Young and Shining. Luckily @youngandshining Instagram handle was available. So happy about this.

I started posting pictures with a unique message for each to attract people. I posted 2–3 pictures before following anyone so that those who check the page one I follow them, do not see an empty page.

Then I started following my friends and told them to tag their friends. Some of them did. Because of this I got followers of my friends as new followers. Some of those who follow my personal account also followed this account.

That’s how I got my first 100 followers. Woohoo! It took me 2 days [July 10th — 12th] to go from 0 to 100 followers.

After that I wrote a thank you message to my first 30 followers (I had planned to send to all 100 but could only do 30) to show gratitude and so that they stick to my page and engage more.

This is the message I wrote:

Hey, Thanks so much for following :)

As one of the first followers you are special. I wish you happiness and ongoing success.

Great if you get some of your friends to follow YoungandShining by tagging them. This will help spread the message of goodness to a bigger community.

I have pre-written this message that you can post or anything else that you want to post:

Love the vibe of @youngandshining check them out …. [tag your friends here] …

Thanks in advance.

Great if it works for you — ok if it does not. Still love you a lot for getting the party started.

- Aish: Founder, Young & Shining

I made one rookie mistake. There was no bio on my account for first 2 days. I fixed this as soon as I realized this and wrote this bio.

Welcome to the tribe of those who want to Shine🌻 Spreading the message of Happiness and Motivation youngandshining.com

It is important to have a short to the point bio to let new visitors to the account what your page is about. Also add any important URL (usually your website) to get clicks. Right now, I am not tracking the number of clicks but I’ll do later.

100–1000 followers

Now my plan was to follow the followers of accounts who were similar to what I was doing only bigger in size.

For finding accounts to follow I used Instagram search and used keywords like — inspiration, motivation, inspirational and motivational.

From the accounts that came up I picked up some of the biggest and good quality accounts. I targeted accounts with more than 100,000 followers and eventually ended up following followers of The Good Quote, one of the biggest Instagram account in inspirational quotes space.

So far I did all this without any app. I just went to their account and started following their followers. I followed around 40 to 50 people a day. Some of them started following back.

I also got lucky somehow. One of my posts went viral and I got 1500 likes in no time. This brought a set of new visitors. Then another post became popular and got 500 likes and a new set of followers.

It motivated me to do better. What’s funny is that I have not been able to get so many likes on any post but eventually I’ll reach there.

On July 12th — right after I got 100 followers. I signed up for a paid account with basic plan ($4.99) of Crowdfire. This is a power tool I suggest that you invest from day one. Through this tool you can see who is not following you and you can follow.

Unfollowing the unfollowers is important to keep good follower/following ratio. Because people do not want to follow accounts who are following a lot of people and only few people are following them.

That’s how, I got to 1000 followers on July 23th. [So it took me 13 days to go from 0–1000].

This was quick, right? Maybe my pictures did wonders haha. Jokes apart, during this time I was consistent and posted pictures regularly. Took action everyday. That is the real reason for fast 1000 followers.

1000–3000 followers.

It took a lot of time because I lost focus. More than 2 months to reach there. I couldn’t give my 100% to my work.

I tried reposting Instagram pictures with good quotes from other accounts in the same space. I continued following around 250 people a day. I wanted to follow more people but on Instagram you can use 400 actions a day. It is good not to follow and unfollow a lot of people at same time. Instagram may see this as spamming and block your account. I also got one warning. So I slowed down.

I also planned to do follows and unfollows on different days. This worked somehow and I slowly reached 3000 follower.

To reach it took me about 2 months. July 23rd to beginning of October.

3000–5000 followers.

Coming soon!!

….

It is Oct 20th as I post this. I will continue to share what I learn as I go from 0–10,000 followers.

Stay tuned as I continue my journey of growing @YoungandShining account.