My Instagram Journey

My account: https://www.instagram.com/michaeldockhamphoto/

I had numerous friends, especially my two nieces, telling me to jump into the Instagram pool and finally did so late in 2016. I have made progress (20x’d my followers from a measly 100 to over two thousand) and have had quite a few “features” on which is an honor considering the enormous talent that is out there.

This is what I have learned to curate a healthy Instagram account.

What I do (and I would love to learn what others are doing). At the outset I ran across a short description on what works to grow your account. This credit I give to Holly Johnson (https://www.instagram.com/missholldoll/) when she wrote a nice summary of how she grew her account (now up to 313,000).

  1. You have to have great content, however, I have run across plenty of feeds that have 20 to 30 thousand followers and their content is mediocre at best while others have spectacular content and they have a few hundred following them — this mystifies me and I haven’t figured that out yet other than I strongly suspect they are paying for followers / likes and then what is the point?
  2. Focus on a topic. People subscribe for a reason. Stick with the subject area. Once you figure out what you want to post then stick to it and remove all your other photos that don’t align with the content — or start a new account.. Some people have a feed for personal “just for fun” and for their landscapes or whatever other topic they care about. Just don’t mix them.
  3. I turned my personal account into a “business” account so that I could gain analytics which I used to understand when my followers might look at my account which leads to…
  4. I post once a day at around 630AM to 9AM timeframe — I also read somewhere that this was the “ideal time”. Whatever you do make it as consistent every day as possible so your followers can find you.
  5. Post once a day, every other day — too many posts and too few posts loses your audience.
  6. Liking other people’s work is important but comments are best — give them meaningful and specific feedback and read what they wrote to offer up context to the photo. Be genuine. Provide feedback that you want. This is social currency at its best.
  7. When others like / comment on my content I turn around and like / comment on their content (if I actually like it — keeping it genuine).
  8. Follow those that follow me — if they are legitimately in my area of interest — and if they drop me I drop them. I learned early on that people were tricking me into following them so they could generate likes and a follow and then dropped me a few days later. This leads to…
  9. Use an app that tracks who follows and unfollows you. I use Followers Pro for Instagram — it is free to see unfollows but you pay for advanced analytics which I don’t.
  10. Don’t pay for follows, really, what is the point? I am in this to share my art with others. If it is just a lot of fake computer generated likes and comments then what is the purpose?I want real engagement with people not with bots.
  11. When someone comments on my photo I comment back.
  12. I tag and hashtag to get featured. I look at what other accounts similar to mine are tagging their photos with and I try to emulate that. Maximize the number of tags you can use which is currently at 30. Run your account through an analysis engine and find out what tags are most effective.
  13. When I travel I search out the best photographers or “feature sites” and track down what the great hashtags and sites to tag so that I can potentially get featured locally. I would say that I have had fairly good success doing this.
  14. I go through the content that IG thinks I might like and comment on things that are good — this “teaches” Instagram what I like and then directs others to my work.
  15. I enter photo contests as I see them by hash-tagging based on their rules, etc.

Other than being patient and doing all of the above is there anything I should do?

Michael Dockham Photo

Written by

Minnesota based photographer. Loves to capture the world in various poses during life’s experiences. 📷👍😀 https://www.instagram.com/michaeldockhamphoto/

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