A case study of using follow/like automation & Instagram sponsored ads to gain followers for my public account
My name is Paul. I’m a Russian entrepreneur who is doing a little bit of everything: e-commerce, web/mobile development, digital marketing.
Recently I came to launch an Instagram public account targeting a wide amount of people (this might be my biggest mistake). I blog joking around, sharing my thoughts on pretty much everything (from short notes to long-reads) and posting cool photos. I do this mainly because I enjoy being able to express something of my own to people. It also helps me learn a lot. For the last 2 month I’ve gathered 4000 real followers. The way I achieved this result was easy. Having started off manually liking and following people that I thought might be interested in my content, I then switched to the tool that automated the whole process.
Later I realised that I want another tool to boost my followers base growth since that following and liking people is actually very limited. You can follow/like/comment reaching out to 800–2500 people per day (it depends on the tool that you use and risks that you are willing to take). The approximate conversion rate of people you’ve reached to turned your followers will likely fall into the 10%-65% gap. The latter depends on 3 factors: quality of your content, targeted audience (the wider the less conversion rate to expect) and relevance to your content of the people that you reach to. In my case the daily figures were as follows:
~1200 reach
~120 followers
~10% conversion rate
I hesitated for a while between commercial shoutouts by Instagram influencers with established followers base and instagram self-service ads system and finally chose the latter. My reasoning was that instagram ads are better because it’s completely controlled environment where one can do a/b testing on a targeted audience spending as much as a few bucks for each hypothesis in order to find the most efficient way of making people follow you (it still lacks loyalty thing that you can see when an influencer asks his/her followers to check you out though). I’ve been doing a lot of a/b testing before so I was sure I would shortly be able to get 500–1000 followers per day for the approximate price of $0.05 per follower.
My experience of using Instagram sponsored ads to gain followers has turned negative and here is why. First off, I was surprised to learn that Instagram ads format doesn’t support follow call-to-action (CTA), the button that is placed under each ad post (see an example of CTA here: http://take.ms/ScBYu). The supported CTAs are mostly targeted for e-commerce needs (e.g. “learn more” linking to product website page) and app marketing (“download app” linking to App Store download link). Thus there is no way to set “follow” as a CTA for your ad and it’s very disappointing. I figured out the way around this issue by pointing users to my account image located in the right upper corner above the ad image and literally telling them to click on it and follow me. The following example of the ad format I used will help you better understand what exactly I mean http://take.ms/JXiLy. I’ve played with dozens of various combinations of ad images and texts placed in them and here comes the second problem why my experience with instagram ads turned negative. Regardless of many trials I haven’t managed to make people seeing my ads actually follow my account. The most puzzling is that people DID liked my photos but neither who liked proceeded to follow me afterwards. To be precise I will share the exact figures of my experiment:
Total amount of likes on sponsored posts: 320
Total amount of people who proceeded to follow me: 3
Total amount of different ads I used: 26
I can’t believe that it’s the quality of my content that is to blame (my account posts receive 20–25% interaction on average). Besides the observed conversion rate (10%) of people I followed who proceeded to follow back alone undermines the hypothesis that people who see my sponsored ad, LIKE it and proceed not following me after checking my account because the content is bad. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen the 10% rate of follow-back from the people I follow. Hence I’m puzzled of what might be the reasons explaining this pattern.
If you have any ideas or information, please SHARE.
Ending notes:
Currently I’ve reached to dozens of users that liked my post but didn’t follow asking them for feedback of why they did that they did.
It came to me as a surprise that there is no cases of using Instagram ads to gain followers on the internet (at leat I could’t find one). That’s why I decided to publish this case of my own.
I’ve posted this issue on Facebook Help Center forum: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/community/question/?id=1415082485169991&added&rdrhc
Thanks for your attention.
You can contact me here or on Telegram @mipavel.
