How to get 10,000 followers on Instagram in less than 45 days

An Honest way to get 5,000 followers in less than a month without doing any of the following:
NO paying for advertising or promoted posts
NO buying followers
NO pestering larger accounts to tag us
N) pleading with friends and family for special favors

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We started posting April 17, 2017, and wanted to find an organic repeatable way to find healthy account growth, the honest way.

Of course we read a lot on how to do it but we failed to find a comprehensive and efficient guide and ended up finding a lot of follower hacks on our own... So now we’re passing them on to you!

As a new account, with hardly any followers, the beginning can be discouraging. (no one likes being the unpopular kid) You start off excited and then the reality ohits.

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Phase 1

We started off by focusing on getting followers, and found it frankly quite easy.
Choose your account & display names and profile photo wisely and to match what you’re trying to achieve with that account - all the good generic account names are taken but be sure that when someone is searching for specific types of account yours will be in the organic results. Having the right profile picture can give a sleek and professional first impression to your account and draw potential followers to click it.
Post regularly - 2 to 3 times a day - and use many hashtags. Instagram caps you at 30 hashtags per post, so choose them wisely, and if you want to stay classy don’t to the hashtags in the caption, rather in a comment to that post. We usually place the hashtags in a comment instead. Posting more than 3 times per day can cost you followers by spamming their feed, so do be careful with your number of posts per day and spacing them out. Also, check your Instagram analytics to know what are the best times of day to post according to when your followers are online.
Use the right hashtags such as ´followforfollow´ ´follow4follow´ ´instafollow´ ´like4like´ ´instadaily´ - keep in mind that followers you get via this technique will expect you to follow them back and are playing the same game you are, so they aren’t a good option long term. However, they will increase your following rapidly and make your account more appealing to the followers you actually want to get.
Follow many accounts - you can follow up to 7,500 accounts - there is a limit to how many accounts you can follow in an hour, which seems to be between 100 and 200, so you’ll take a while to reach it. After that you will need to start unfollowing people in order to follow more. That’s Phase 2, we’ll get to it later.
When you reach your hourly limit for follows, you can like images - choose a specific hashtag that is connected to your accounts theme and like recent posts that used it.
Other than liking you can also comment on the top posts for that hashtag to increase your visibility. In all honesty, any comment will do, like a single word or even an emoji. However, coming up with a personal remark or even asking a question that gets that account´s reply could increase your visibility a lot or even get your a follow back from bigger accounts.

Phase 2:

Our main goal was to increase engagement (likes and comments), more than simply get new followers, and here’s why: lasting engagement leads to organic followers.

Q: How is engagement calculated by Instagram?

It’s likes + comments and then dividing that number by the number of followers.
This isn’t information that is public, Instagram doesn’t really disclose how they calculate engagement. However, we found this on a website that measures influencer power..and it seems to be very close to what Instagram uses.

At this stage, you will need to start unfollowing people in order to be able to follow new ones.
Instagram caps you at 7,500 people you can follow - so from here on, if you want to keep growing by following people you will need to unfollow people you’ve already followed. The amount of people you can unfollow without raising Instagram’s red flags is capped too - seems to be at around 50 an hour.

This will sharply decrease your daily growth/ number of new followers every day, but there is no way around it.

For this we use InsTrack - it allows you to unfollow to right people. We did have to pay around 3 euros for the app, but we do think it was worth it. You can also do it manually for free, but that doesn’t allow you to select the people you unfollow thoroughly.

So the way we do it is:

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1. we unfollow people who stopped following us first.

2 . After that we unfollow people don’t follow us back - scrolling all the way down so that we unfollow from older to newer. Doing it this way prevents you from unfollowing people who follow you back and thus keeping your unfollow rate to the minimum.

For us this is a large list of people to unfollow and we don’t foresee reaching the end anytime soon, but once we do run out of people on this list we will start to unfollow users who don’t like or comment on our posts. This way we curate a following of engaged users, which makes our brand more valuable.

You can only unfollow so many people at once (the app will stop you from unfollowing more than instagram thinks it’s normal, which is an amazing feature that prevents your account from being red flagged and potentially suspended by Instagram.

Aim to follow accounts with larger followers than your own as it increases your chances to show up on the explorer pages of its followers.

Here are some suggestions for targeting quality accounts to follow

Search for accounts related to your niche (for us that’s travel) and follow similar ones;
When you find a similar account, look at the “suggestions” Instagram offers and follow the accounts they select in this feature.
Search hashtags related to your account’s niche and interact with the top posts (like, comment, follow); these posts are there not because they are the most liked or commented, but because they have the best engagement. One thing to note - check the post captions as sometimes the photos are being reshared by big accounts that link to the original poster of the photo - We tend to follow both accounts in this case.
When you come across an account very similar to what yours is or want you want it to be but that has a much bigger following, click on their followers and scroll down. Follow their oldest followers - those are the ones that have been following that account without unfollowing it and would probably be interest in your content too.

You should start noticing an interesting change in the new followers of your account. Many of your followers will be instagrammers you don’t follow, but found you through your actions above. This means you are achieving the organic growth we are looking for!

You want to have a mixture of large and smaller accounts following you. The larger accounts (whales) that follow will give you instant street cred and up your chances for being recommend on the explore tab of instagram and be suggested to other accounts. The smaller accounts are usually way more engaged and make your posts sparkle with social activity!

Phase 3:
Eventually you want to get your account to the stage where your account is growing organically without the need for you to activity follow and unfollow accounts.

The best way to get make your posts visible is getting them to the top post section of different hashtags (the more popular the hashtags are the more difficult it is to get there).
Make a list of those accounts with feature photos within your specific niche. Tag these accounts each time you post to increase the likelihood they feature one of your photos. If they have a large following this should mean you benefit from a number of their followers scoping out your feed!
Tagging other accounts, even if you don’t get picked up and reposted, will make you visible to a new batch of people!
Gamify your captions, by posing serious and silly questions to your audience. People cannot help but give their 2 cents sometimes and this drives up your engagement. Keep it to few words, ask simple questions to increase comments, like a picture of a place with the question "Anyone been here yet?" or offering your followers the choice between two things in the same picture - what to wear, where to travel, sunsets or sunrises, red or white wine etc... The calls to action can also increase your visibility and appeal to new followers, such as “tag your partner in crime” - increasing engagement AND making the people your followers tag aware of your account.

Follow us @thenovaturientproject and use the hashtag nomadcouples and we’ll be sure to follow you back and leave a comment on one of your recent photos.

We’d love to hear some of the tips and tricks you use to grow your account… message us through instagram!