Facebook and Instagram Growth Hacking

Exponential Social Growth Is Easier Than You Think.

Brand awareness, sales, and social clout in a digital space; building your brand or business’s social following is much easier and cheaper than you think.

I’ve spent the last two year testing methods on how to grow pages exponentially by leveraging content, growth hacking methods, and utilizing social influencers.

With a peak monthly Facebook reach of 35 million unique people reached and page growth of 40,000 unique users in one day, I’ll share some lessons I’ve learned.

Pictured below is one of my top posts with a whopping 12 million people reached. This video was shared with a dog owners permission and we gave their page credit.

I’ll go over Facebook first and then dive into Instagram focusing on 5 key aspects:

1. Content Creation
2. Scheduling
3. Social Influencers
4. Social Friends
5. Algorithm hacking

Facebook

For content, video is definitely the powerhouse for “hacking” the algorithms working within Facebook. If you have a still image to share, try creating a short 10–30 second video clip with the still image, even if it is simply music or captions.

If you are lacking in content, share content from other pages that you believe your audience will enjoy. This may also begin acquiring some “social friends” who in return may share your content. As an influencer, there is nothing worse than receiving an unannounced “can you share my content” message without even a greeting. Build the relationship before asking for favours.

Find social friends by messaging similar brands, content creators, or businesses that are at a similar stage in terms of follower count.

Starting a social friends group message is a great way to grow with similar brands and businesses. Ask your social friends to exchange the following (S/C/L) process after every post you make, or set up a time to make these exchanges:

• Share a post of theirs to receive a shared post of yours for free organic reach
• Comment on each other’s posts to boost performance
• Like your social friend’s posts to also boost performance

To ensure the most amount of organic reach possible, I’ve seen most success posting every 3 to 4 hours. If you’re looking to grow internationally this is on a 24 hour cycle. If you’re only looking to grow within North America, cater to the East Coast, starting your first post at 8AM EST, and your last post at 8PM EST.

Scheduling on Facebook is by far the most generous content publishing platform out of all social channels. Schedule up to 6 months of content in advance, in the “Publishing Tools” section of your page. To schedule shared content: copy the desired post or video URL, paste into a new post field, then delete the URL leaving the embedded content and hit schedule post.

Consider the following options when scheduling your posts:

1. Attach products from your Facebook Shop to your post if you are showcasing the product in your post (Links in your post will reduce organic reach so use the product tagging or refer users to look in comments for the link)
2. Utilize popular hashtags for organic reach
3. Catchy title or precise title
4. Interesting thumbnails are essential

After posting, your key to growth hacking is within your social friends and social influencers. If you have a low budget, stick to relying on social friends to share your posts in return for sharing theirs.

Facebook has this amazing feature in which anyone who has reacted to (liked, loved, even angrily reacted) your post is then able to be invited to follow your page. I have grown Facebook pages with more than 500 followers per day using this method alone.

If you have a budget for Facebook advertising, the worst investment is the “Boost Post” Facebook option. It is by far the most expensive way to increase reach, post clicks, and page growth. I only suggest using Facebook advertisements if you have an agency doing this for you, or if you have a sales funnel, a Facebook pixel, and have done extensive planning and research. Utilize the much more cost effective social influencer route.

Social Influencers

I use social influencers to achieve two goals: page growth / brand awareness, and generating sales. The steps below apply to both goals, however, organic content without leading to a product will undoubtedly give you more traffic to your page. Again, using products contained in your Facebook Shop is a great way to attach a product to a more casual video to generate organic leads.

First identify your users, then pay for a post. I personally use a manual method of choosing my social influencers. Try using Social Blade, browse hashtags, or use known accounts.

Once you have identified and chosen your influencers, create a cost table as shown below. I put more emphasis on comments than likes, as it indicates a more active follower. As seen in this table, it may be better to spend the money on a smaller account as they have more engagement. In this table, I would go with Influencer 5, as they only cost $0.34 per thousand followers and have 3.46% of their followers liking every post and a decent amount of comment activity as well.

I have had big returns of 400% ROI on Instagram product posts and there are many deals to be found from high reach social influencers. There are influencers with 5,000 followers that are charging $5,000 a post and there are also influencers that I have found with 200,000 followers that are charging $100. Always shop around and put together a CPM table to understand which account will have the biggest impact.

A link in your influencers bio (Instagram) or post (Facebook) is a necessity. Not many users will hop over your account simply because you are tagged, but they will open the link your influencer has mentioned. Also try to get a post in your influencer’s story (Instagram) with a swipe up link as well.

If you don’t like the idea of manually contacting influencers and arranging posts there are many different self-serving influencer connect websites. One that I have used and had successes with is Shoutcart. It allows you to connect with influencers, pay for ads, and even request a link in their bio. Again, I prefer manual, because some influencers don’t even know they are influencers yet and you can score a deal.

Instagram

With 800 million users, Instagram is a great place to have unlimited and instant reach to potential customers or fans. Later is an absolute necessity if you want to save time and energy while still posting the right amount of content.

Later is a scheduling web / mobile app for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. You can connect multiple social handles and add several team members. After scheduling your media, Later sends a mobile notification for Instagram posts.

Since Instagram is a continuous scroll style feed and the posts have only about a 24 hour impact window, less is more. I’d suggest only posting at most 3 Instagram posts per day. A majority of people are on their phones before work, around lunch time, and after work. My favorite post times are 8AM EST, 12PM EST, and 7PM EST.

Content

I’ve asked my fans if they prefer video or picture on Instagram. It was about a 50/50 split. If you like posting video and you are not a video specific account, I would suggest only posting a video every 6th post. If you want to do a mixture of lifestyle content with product content, a 3:1 ratio looks very clean on your overall Instagram feed.

Below is an example of how I have scheduled Doggomoji with a 1:1 ratio, posting funny dog media combined with a product post mentioning our link in bio every other post.

Hashtags

Whenever I read other social network strategy posts, they always mention the importance of always using hashtags and using generic hashtags like #boy #barbershop #coffee. I honestly say MEH to these kinds of hashtags. They might get you a few extra likes but it is all just hot air. They also look terrible on the bottom of your post. You’ll get a bunch of bot accounts from other brands commenting emojis and generic bot responses like “Awesome Post!” on your content and do you really want that?

Within my network of people utilizing social media, I have also heard the anecdotal algorithm advice that some hashtags actually stunt your reach, as they are hashtags that are often abused by users. The only time a broad hashtag will help you is if your post goes viral. If you think you can make it to the “Top Posts” section of a broad hashtag, then you will see lots of new followers and comments. So, if you have the next “Backpack Kid” or “Mans Not Hot” post then by all means, use the #funny hashtag.

If you want to use hashtags, be specific. Additionally, place your hashtags in the comments section of your post (they still work here) not in the title for a much more concise and clean post title.

iOS Text Replacement can help you when you’re using multiple hashtags. 30 hashtags are the maximum amount you can use and try using “..ht1”, “..ht2”, etc as text replacement in your phone so you can save time. This is found in your Settings — General — Keyboards — Text Replacement section of your phone.

Instagram Growth Hacking

RIP Instagress. The best instagram growth aggregation and growth bot I have ever used. Unfortunately it violated Instagram’s terms of use and was shut down.

Instagress utilized the powerful process of liking posts, commenting on posts, and following / unfollowing users that matched a set of parameters that you defined within the web app. You can do this manually, or use another bot (USING A BOT MAY VIOLATE INSTAGRAM’S TERMS OF USE — BE CAUTIOUS.)

Manually

The quickest I have ever grown an Instagram account is 5,000 users in a week. I did this by implementing the liking, commenting, following / unfollowing process. Identify your competitors, influencers, and pages that your potential customers / fans are currently following. Make a list of all these accounts.

Open the accounts in which you think your potential customers / fans are following, and start following that accounts followers. It’s a painstaking process but it works. Additionally go into these new accounts you have just followed and like their posts and potentially leave a comment on their posts. After 3 days unfollow these accounts and repeat the process. Again, I have generated 5,000 new followers in a week using this process but it was not a fun time. The steps are summarized below:

1. Identify accounts with a large amount of followers in your niche
2. Follow the users following these accounts
3. Like these users’ posts (I do their most recent 3 posts)
4. Comment on these users’ posts
5. Unfollow after about 3 days
6. Repeat the process (500 users per 3 days recommended)

The other growth hacking method is the same method used with Facebook: The S/C/L Process.

Starting a social friends group message is a great way to grow with similar brands and businesses. Ask your social friends to exchange the following (S/C/L) process after every post you make, or set up a time to make these exchanges:

• Share a post of theirs to receive a shared post of yours for free organic reach
• Comment on each other’s posts to boost performance
• Like your social friend’s posts to also boost performance

Using a Bot

Again, this is a grey area and may get your account suspended or deleted but a ton of brands use bots and its very obvious. If you’re using a bot to automatically follow / unfollow, like, comment, I strongly suggest Not Commenting. It looks really tacky and your bot may mistakenly post a comment saying “Great Post!” on someone’s personal content that is a more sensitive subject or personal post.

A great alternative to Instagress (RIP) is Social Growth. This tool allows you to input parameters such as accounts you want the bot to pull follower information from, when to be active, how many likes to apply per hour, etc.

There are many great articles about other growth bots and you can also just hire someone to do the manual process, however, the process always stays the same. Identify, Follow, Like, Comment, Unfollow.

Finally, just be active and genuine on Instagram. Message users, interact with their content and have fun engaging existing fans. Contests work really well to generate reach and excite your existing fans.

Final Notes

If your goal is to grow your page you absolutely do not need to use paid Facebook and Instagram campaigns to do so. Organic reach is very readily available by implementing these methods as well as utilizing social influencers to get more reach for less than running ads.

Your social friends are your greatest asset as it allows your posts to potentially go viral. Use the amazing Facebook feature of Inviting users that have interacted with your content to your page (until you surpass 100,000 followers.)

Identify and interact with your competitors followers using the follow / unfollow, like, comment method to quickly grow your Instagram follower base, but don’t go too crazy with bot comments.

These methods allowed me to grow pages to massive sizes on a basically non-existent ad budget. Doggomoji and Memeoji are the two brands I founded and produce daily content for. They have grown without the use of Facebook / Instagram advertising and have relied on organic and social influencer traffic.

Good luck with your pages and feel free to send me questions or comments.

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