Tips for growing a vegan Instagram account over 10K followers — in only 3 months. Without using silly bots.
This year, our catering platform’s page @vegcraver went from only 256 followers, early Jan to 14,5K followers by the end of April. In this article, I am revealing everything I did for it to grow as it did.
WHY IS 10k AN IMPORTANT MILESTONE FOR YOUR IG MARKETING?
Reaching 10k is key for your marketing, I do not say this because of the cool 5 figure number. But because it’s actually a requirement that once you have it, Instagram will enable the SWIPE UP on your stories.
What’s the SWIPE UP? This add on is maybe one of the most effective marketing tools on the platform. 🙂
You will see it in your stories.
With it, you can add links to your CTAs. For a better conversion. For example:
- To your vegan e-commerce stores.
- Quicker sign up to your vegan newsletter.
- A link to any vegan press that supports your mission or brand OR, hey an article you write on Medium 😉
- The sky is the limit really.
A SHORT SUMMARY ABOUT @vegcraver (FOR CONTEXT)
Last year, at Vexquisit, we started a “small” side project, A plant-based catering finder app, we called it: VEGCRAVER, that without expecting it, just a few months after, took on a life of its own.
TThe VEGCRAVER Instagram page was created back in 2018, as a personal page to just share vegan food. Back then, there was no strategy or intent on growing it at all and by 2020 I had abandoned it. The name of the account was actually a perfect name for this project, so that was why we used the “old account”.
By the time I wanted to get it back up in 2020, the abandoned account, naturally had anything close to 0% engagement. So I first needed to revive the it.
Along this process I had the support of Dávid Talas, he specializes in Instagram.
A DEATH ACCOUNT PROBABLY HAS SOME BAGGAGE
If there is no interaction with the followers, the Instagram algorithm is probably marking your page as uninteresting, with this “invisible label”, your account will simply show up less when you post anything.
Some old followers might have also become inactive through time. They are “ghost followers”, who still count as ones who are not interacting with your page. I recommend just delete them: The followers’ number will decrease, but what really matters is the engagement percentage from the total amount of followers.
Disclaimer: it is easy to delete followers when your account is very small (on the hundreds), if you have already a very big account, using your time on it might not be worth it.
GETTING STARTED
THE CHALLENGE
Figuring out an Instagram strategy growth, for a product that has not launched yet and it doesn’t have content to show, made things harder on our end. Yet, it was clear I needed to attract an audience that would be interested in eating plant-based food.
THE AUDIENCE
As vegan business owners know, most of the audience for vegan products technically is not vegan, but flexitarians, reducetarians, meat-less Monday participants, vegetarian, people wanting to go vegan as much as they consider possible to them, or simply vegan-curious.
This is of course because the highest percentage of people in the world are not vegan (yet).
They mainly want to eat healthier and reduce their animal product consumption.
Of course, along with all the other vegan business owners, our end mission is to inspire people to soon or later join us and carry a vegan lifestyle. 🤫 😉
THE FEED
It is key to keep in mind that visually it needs to look cohesive so if anyone who visits your account, they can directly understand what your account’s brand is about.
Is it going to be speaking about your vegan product?
Will you highlight your values and alignment to sustainability, animal rights, etc?
Both approaches? Or something related, that your audience will be into?
It all comes back to the audience. From having this defined. You can start testing and discovering what type of value they are going to react positively to.
Define your account’svalue by asking yourself if the content is entertaining or informing.
THE HASHTAGS
If you do this part right, the hashtags will allow your content to be found by that potential audience, the ones who are not following you yet, but highly interested in what your vegan brand is saying!
- So, first, your post gets shown on your follower’s home page. Then, it gets shown on the hashtags that you include on.
- People on the explore feed who are looking at those hashtags, will then finally see your post!
Sounds easy right?! — well…… HOLD that excitement! it is not directly this easy or simple.
A common mistake I see small vegan accounts do is to use this hashtags: #vegan #veganfortheanimals #veganfortheplanet #healthy #plantbased, etc.
And yeah, the post will indeed get shown on #vegan feed — but very likely only for only a minute, because that type of hashtag is too big, and every second there are new #vegan posts. With a small account, it is best to start using only small hashtags.
Small tags: Around 100K · Medium tags: From 300k-1M · High tags: About 1–10M
The first important hashtag strategy goal is to not rank high on the recent posts and to not rank high on the top posts. The bigger the hashtag, the harder it is to rank. Once your posts gets more engagement on the non-followers who follow the hashtags, it will be shown on the Explore page. Where most of the new followers could come from.
COPY + A BOOK RECOMMENDATION
While we’ve hired the best copywriter in the world to help us with some web copy. If this is a service your business can’t afford or you are doing it yourself on your social media. Here are some tips:
- Your copy must be interesting to your audience.
- Interact with your audience through it. Ask questions.
- Keep it simple. Don’t make it wordy.
- Keep in mind storytelling!
Like Nivelle Medhora on his book: This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better, gives the best advice:
“Nobody cares about you, they only care about themselves”.
I recently read it in one sitting and I am normally a slow reader, but hey if the book had this engaging writing, then all the writing advice was gold. It’s short so I recommend reading it 100%!
TESTING TESTING!
When starting to build an audience, TESTING is Step 1, 2, 3, 4, etc!.
- The Content: At @vegcraver’s Instagram page, we first tested with publishing on the feed with vegan caterer’s features and curating some plant-based recipes. With both approaches, we featured amazing chefs who do amazing work for the movement. Observed how each one performed and which one was most welcomed.
2. The Hashtags: To define an ideal hashtag bucket that works, we need to know which of the hashtags we have picked were ranking us on the hashtag feeds. A way to see which hashtags are working is to wait for a few hours after posted and check if your post is on the recent hashtags feed. There are many free and paid apps that allow you to see this faster. The latest coolest one is Flick. Recommended by many IG experts!
Keep in mind to grow the size of your hashtags as your account grows. By ranking high on your hashtags, it signals the algorithm to push the content to the next size of tags.
@vegcraver’s IG STRATEGY
Some weeks after, it was clear that the recipes were winning on popularity.
We could see this on the analytics numbers: on saves, likes, non-followers reach, DM, or story shares.
This happened because our audience is not location-based. So naturally, if we point them a Berlin caterer, people in LA will not care as much as if they can save a yummy recipe for them!
So, the Instagram strategy is to provide plant-based recipes on the feed.
None the less. All strategies change with time, as we speak, we are looking at options to do some new approaches testing!
KEEPING VEGCRAVER’s BRAND VALUE IN:
We know that posting only recipes on an account that is not a recipe business had its dangers and that at the end of the day, we need to have some conversion. And loop back to our concept. So the two ways on how we get to stay on our business topic are:
- We stay subliminally on the catering business theme: The photography style of the recipes needs to look like a picture that was taken on a small or big event.
- On story highlights, is where we speak about @vegcraver’s launch. And anything brand-related. Hey, we even did a Spotify playlist! 🧡
ENGAGEMENT
For us to revive the VEGCRAVER account, I started with posting 3 times a day.
I know it is a lot! But having content that is ready, in our case, curating recipes makes it easy for a high-speed start.
DON’T FORGET IT IS ALWAYS ABOUT THE COMMUNITY
- Interacting with other accounts, through comments, likes, and re-shares makes a genuine community.
- If you want your account to be shown to your followers every day, then you need to post everyday. Stay around, and interact with your audience as well.
COLLABORATION FOR GROWTH
THE SHOUT-OUT POWER
Without this final step, our growth would have gone up, steady, but not as fast. The power of partnerships applies everywhere!
We implemented this step once our feed was consistent with the recipe strategy.
Through a daily shout out, our growth accelerated to first to 30+ followers per day to 200+ followers a day.
We were shocked by the numbers, and so many people interacting and DMing us.
WHO SHOULD YOU GET YOUR SHOUT-OUTS FROM?
- This really depends on your business. Look at who are the major influencers to your audience.
- Your vegan brand does not necessarily need only vegan influencers, but if you are trying to get reducetarians to try your vegan products, then see who they look up to. They are probably not convinced by vegans, but by non-vegans. OR recently converted vegans.
- In our case, we naturally partnered with an account of vegan recipes with over 585k followers. Who I gotta say, the guy running this page is the nicest! So fun to connect with people through this experience.
Keep in mind to verify that the account you partner with has high engagement. Be careful there are accounts that have literally purchased followers at shady pages.
BACKSTAGE OF @VEGCRAVER ANALYTICS
If you managed to read this much, Thank you! In return, we share our numbers along with the strategies that were implemented here.
The strategy used: Valuable content. + Hashtags strategy. + Power Shout out.
Some final advice
It is not about the number of followers, but the engagement, these followers need to be real people in order to have any sort of conversion.
So, make yourself a favor, and don’t purchase followers, do not do the “follow for follow” or “follow and unfollow” tactics.
These methods are very likely to not get you, real followers. And to the accounts who do this, many people consider them 100% annoying.
- Do not insist on random people or anyone who are not your target to follow you (friends, family). They should follow you, only if they find your content valuable. As a result, they will naturally interact with it. If they just follow you as a favor, they are probably not going to interact with your content, and in the long run, too much of this will make your engagement percentage go down.
- Do not use bots — They are dumb. We all notice when a bot is interacting with our Instagram accounts. Especially when they reply to stories questions. It is super annoying to look for replies and get “follow for more” or “great content, follow me” or anything trying to sound smart, but not really related. Bots are so easy to detect. Because of their nature, communication is not genuine and as a result, you miss don’t only not connect with new accounts but loose on trust.
CONCLUSION
It is all about perception, for some people 10k followers is a small number, in my opinion, for a brand it is small. But it is a good start. It is I believe a micro-influencer size? Yet for some, 10K followers is a lot.
- Yet again, if the account grows slower than expected — that is also okay, testing and implementing CAN take up time.
- Remember to take 10 steps back and remember that the point of having an IG account is for creating a community for your vegan brand’s engagement.
Disclaimer:
Within a few months, there is a chance that I will have a slightly different take on all of this.
As social media is evolving all the time: It is always about testing, failing, learning, pivoting, and trying to have the only rule that is stable: Bring value to your community.
Thank you for reading! Let me know if I left out anything. Now go eat your veggies!
