S1 E3: Hashtag, It's Summer - how do I grow my Instagram account?

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Too Much Social podcast. This is episode three of the #it's some a series which is my invitation to you to stay in touch with your Instagram bookmarketing at the super busy time of year, without hopefully feeling completely overwhelmed. If you have not yet listened to the first two episodes, episode one is about how you might manage your time on Instagram so it doesn't take over your life, while episode two deals with the ever-present issue are the cringe. Now thank you to all of you who've listened so far. This is turning out to be a really fun experience so I hope you're getting lots from it too. Okay, so onwards with today's episode because I want to talk about something that is a great source of anxiety for many writers and authors on Instagram, account growth. Now this source of anxiety, I think, comes from maybe four main places. First of all, I think one of the sources of anxiety is in there simply in the knowing how to do it. Instagram nowadays is such a busy platform. It's easy to feel completely overwhelmed with which of the many buttons and levers you should push and pull to achieve the growth you feel you need to achieve. But the pressure to achieve that growth, I think, comes in part from the publishing industry who often misunderstand the role Instagram can play in book promotion channels and therefore they prioritize follow accounts over other UCs of Instagram. And that means that some of the anxiety and some of that pressure also comes from this sense that we have that we're not satisfied with a few hundred or even a few thousand followers because we lose sight of what those numbers represent, the actual people they represent. Thanks to an Instagram and social media culture that more broadly encourages us to see follow accounts as mere numbers that are in some way a measure of the legitimacy and value of our ideas. And the final reason why I think that so many authors and writers and the publishing industry have this anxiety around follow accounts on social media is because there is this lingering pervasive idea that the only way to sell books via social media is to have a huge following. Now, I'm going to talk more in a future episode about why follow accounts and book sales may not be as connected as is often assumed by writers and authors and the publishing industry and how community rather than a messy follow account can be your superpower on Instagram. But today I want to focus a bit about why you might want to grow your Instagram account because it's not really as simple as dismissing it entirely and saying let's not bother with that. How you might actually go about growing your account and finally at the end of the episode, I'm also going to invite you to have a think about growth differently in order to make your time on Instagram sustainable and even possibly enjoyable. So first of all, let's get into the question of why growing your Instagram account is a good idea. So I suppose this place to start is to think about book sales because when you combine good engagement with a highly relevant audience, a larger following will help you sell more books. Now, I think this question gets confused because sometimes it feels like what is talked about are the raw numbers rather than the engagement levels or the relevance of an audience. And you see there's a lot with celebrity books that are published that then don't go on to sell very well because there is this huge question mark over whether the audiences of those celebrities are even looking for their next read from that celebrity. So it is true that having a larger Instagram audience can help you sell books, but with this huge caveat that you need to have good engagement and the audience needs to be highly relevant. If you can achieve those two things, then yes, a larger following will help you sell more books. Therefore, it becomes a legitimate enterprise to try to grow your Instagram account. Having a larger Instagram following will also make your book more appealing to publishers. This is a specially true for nonfiction and memoir writers. And if you're listening to this episode in the US, I have heard on the grapevine that even fiction editors are looking at follow accounts in terms of how desirable a book becomes for them to publish. So in the UK, I don't think that is currently the case. I think the UK market is especially true for nonfiction and memoir writers, but not the fiction, but this may vary depending on where you are sitting around the world. Another reason why you might want to grow your Instagram account is because it will make you more appealing to other avenues of publicity such as podcasters. If they feel like they can piggyback on your audience to get more listeners for their podcast, they are going to be more likely to accept your pitch to be a guest or even to approach you directly themselves to come onto their podcast to talk about your book or talk about the themes and issues that your book explores. In a similar vein, you're also more likely to end up on the radar of broadcast and print media researchers and journalists, which might mean that you're then approached for comments or even for interview for certain publications. Growing your following on Instagram gives you the opportunity to build a network of digital surrogates and these are people who can help you spread the word online about your book. The best example I suppose on Instagram is the huge network of books to grammars that you can tap into and build relationships with who will help you spread the word about your book when the time comes. Instagram can also be a really important and significant source of support from other writers and also from your community of fans. I separate out fans from readers because your fans are people who are not only going to buy your book and read it. They're also going to review it and they're going to post it by the time line. They're going to show it with all their friends. Finally, similar to that idea, if you grow an audience on Instagram, what you can do on Instagram, regardless of the size of your audience, is you can take advantage of an effect that I call word of mouth with a megaphone and basically the idea is that if readers share your book online, the ripple effect of that can be super effective and obviously the bigger your audience, the more readers you may have sharing your book and therefore the greater that ripple effect can be. Now, we all know that the quickest route to account grade is to have a post go viral because there's this idea that this will then deliver all the book sales you will ever need. Now, I have to say at this point, I am fighting for my life not to go off an tangent about how this leap from viral post to book sale isn't actually how selling things on the internet to actual people even works, but even if it did work that way, I'll be honest, it's pretty unlikely to happen. So, let me talk you through some things that you can do in order to reach new people and grow your account. First of all, something that's really important to remember is to grow your Instagram account, you need to reach more non-followers than followers. And I'm going to talk you through three different types of content that currently are working really well in order to achieve this. So, the first kind of content is using a post format like a carousel, although you can also do a talk with a camera reel or even a reel with more detail in the caption to do this, but the point of this post is that you tell a story about your own experience and then you add something at the end of it that your audience can take away with them and perhaps apply to their own situation or to their own lives. I am seeing this kind of content reaching more non-followers than followers consistently on my own account and also across the accounts of my clients. A second thing you can do with your content is that if you have a post that is performed well in the past and when you look at the metrics you can see it's reached more non-followers than other posts. Think about how you can reuse that idea. Can you give it a refresh with me photographs? Could you change the format and turn a carousel into a reel or vice versa? Pay attention to what the data is telling you and do more of that, not necessarily for every single post, but just make sure you are repeating ideas that work in your content mix. And finally, and I'm going to suggest this even though it hasn't actually worked for me because I know that it has worked for other people, if you have the trial reels function then make use of it. I haven't seen great results with this feature, but what trial reels have going for them in terms of account growth is they are only shown to people who don't already follow you. So it's a good way to boost the number of non-followers you get in front of without actually having to make any more content than you're already making. Simply duplicate your reel that you've already made before you post it and then repost the copy to trial reels only and then you'll guarantee you to reach some non-followers. Even if it doesn't work terrifically well, you're probably going to reach a couple of hundred or three hundred people who don't already follow your account and you never know it might actually work for you in a way that it hasn't worked for me, but it has worked for other people. So it's worth giving it a go. So those three types of posts are somewhere for you to start if growth is a priority for you and your Instagram account. But there are some other things you might also consider layering in to your activity and adding in to your content mix. Another strategy that you can use to grow your account that I have seen work brilliantly is to take part in collaborations. There are different ways of doing collaborations. You can do a giveaway, a drink giveaway with somebody else. You can guess post on somebody else's sees account. You can do an Instagram live where you might interview somebody or you might both talk about the same thing or they might interview you about something or perhaps even the collaboration can take place off Instagram. So for example, you could run a workshop for somebody else or you could appear on a panel, but the event is promoted on Instagram and therefore directs people to your account as a result. So collaboration is something that can be a really great driver for growth. Another great driver for growth is to use wheels, which is sometimes the last thing that writers want to hear from me because you are words people, you are not video people, but it is genuinely a really great tool for discovery. However, word warning, it's not as simple as churning out any old video and waiting for the followers to flood in. You know, effective video content doesn't have to be super polished to bring you growth, but it does need to be relevant to your ideal readers. There are ways to optimize your wheels with hooks and trending audio, but to reach new audiences, you really need to dig down into who are you trying to reach and what is going to keep them engaged because you need to think about what is going to make people watch more of your video. How are you keeping your audience engaged for more than the initial three seconds? And to figure out that, you need to first of all understand who your ideal audience member or reader is and I know I talk about this all the time, but that's because in my experience, trying to post effectively on Instagram without doing the work to understand who you're trying to reach. It feels a little bit like trying to fix a leaking roof by hanging new curtains. It just isn't going to work in the long run. Another overlooked element of growth is to make sure your whole account is clearly communicating with new people what they can expect from you. If you're doing all of this work to reach new people through collaboration or through reels and then they come to your account and they can't really tell what they're going to get from your account if they follow you, you are going to lose them before you've even started. Use the real estate of your bio, your profile picture, text on some of the posts on your grid so they can see it, a glance, what kinds of things you are posting. Use all of these places on your account itself to communicate what you are going to be posting about, what your book is about and what your audience is going to get out to follow your account. Because this question of what's in it for me is central to growing your account. When new audience members come to your content and come to your account, they need to understand what is in it for them if they are going to bother following your account and engaging in your stuff. So another way in which this question of what's in it for me is really important when it comes to growth is when you're thinking about shareable content. To make a post that is shareable, you have to tap into a feeling that is shared by many of your ideal readers. Maybe it makes them feel so seen that they feel compelled to share your post so that their network can know that thing about them too. Or maybe you boss to come and miss that makes that person think, oh my god, I never knew that and that makes them want to share it with their own network because they want to be the person to bring that piece of information to their own followers to their own community. But if they don't go out and actually do the sharing, don't be disheartened, simply treat that as data for yourself. Use it to go back to the drawing board. It might be that the idea you've posted about is shareable but you need to frame it in a different way so that your audience can kind of see themselves in it. So sometimes it's not that the idea isn't shareable. It is more that the framing you need to look at it through a slightly different lens. Shareable content is genuinely quite a difficult not to crack. So I would just encourage you to keep experimenting and keep having a go at it. So another thing that you can do and this doesn't rely on you creating any content at all but it will help you with your account growth is to be an active Instagram citizen. So there are different ways of doing this. One of these ways is to share other people's work, to share your platform with other people rather than just talking about yourself all the time. This makes it more likely although I will say not guaranteed you shouldn't be going into it expecting other people to do this for you but it does make it more likely that other people will return the favour. And you might also like to get involved in something that I call outreach engagement which can be broken down into three really simple steps. Basically every single time that you log on to the app what you should be doing is engaging for 10 minutes on your feed, engaging for 10 minutes in your stories and then possibly engaging for 10 minutes with hashtags or accounts of what there's in your field that you look up to that are having the conversations that you want to have because the people following them should be following you too because you were talking about the same kinds of things. So those are three things that you can do take you half an hour a day, maybe you do it every other day and I know it sounds super simple because it is but it's also an effective way to gain visibility and get in front of your target market without relying on the algorithms. And then finally the biggest thing I think I would like to say about pursuing growth is that it's really important to give it time. For most people most of the time Instagram growth is steady and slow. If you don't attract hundreds of followers in your first month please don't give up, you have not given yourself enough time at that point to work out what are the kind of posts that your ideal readers are going to respond to and you haven't get even given the algorithms the opportunity to figure out who it should be shown your posts to. I work with writers who are adding anywhere between 25 to 500 followers each month and that very often depends on their niche, the genre they're writing in, the topics they're talking about, their personal capacity to spend time on content creation and activity on the platform itself. It also depends on their personal preferences for what kind of content they create, their skill level in creating that content. All of these things play their part in how quickly your account will grow. It takes time to understand all the buttons and levers, it takes time to understand what your audience will respond to and it also takes time for you to understand what your own preferences might be. It's an inconvenient truth that you can't rush this. So hopefully you've heard some practical advice and are going to go away and try out some of these things. But before you go I want to say something about how prioritising growth might make you feel about Instagram because this is important to factor in. In my experience the fastest way to make Instagram feel like sure, only rewarding at best for straighting or even depressing at worst is to prioritise account growth for long periods of time. Back in the spring I ran a growth sprint with members of too much Instagram which was a month long because I know it can make you feel really really weird. And the feedback from that cohort of members who took part in the growth sprint was that they were actually quite relieved when the month came to an end because it had felt quite intense and uncomfortably high stakes. You know it's tiring and not really very fulfilling at all to pursue numbers all the time especially when as writers and authors you have other projects that are demanding your creative energy. Now you might be in a position where you need to prioritise account growth for reasons that I talked about at the beginning of the episode but I would recommend dialing this off and down to make Instagram sustainable for the long term. With that in mind in those in between stages where you are not focused on account growth in terms of how many new followers are you adding to your follower account. I'd like to invite you to think about expanding the definition of growth beyond accumulating new followers. Other ways to look at growth might be to think about growth in skills. You know perhaps you're adding new formats to your content mix by experimenting with reels. Perhaps you're going to do a live for the first time or maybe you're going to record yourself talking to camera to the first time. All of this is growth even when you're not adding new followers. You might also think about the growth in connections with potential readers and actual readers and there's a story that I love to tell and there is something Catherine May said at Hey Festival in 2024. She was on a panel and as part of the interview she was talking about what it means to be on social media as a as a writer and she made a comparison to the oral tradition of storytelling and how storytelling used to take place in community face to face with your audience and the siloing and pedestalling of authors is this relatively modern phenomenon that is cooked storytellers off from your audiences and in some ways with one careful eye on the pit balls of parasocial relationships. Social media has actually stepped into the gap that is opened up between storytellers and your audiences. Platforms like Instagram can actually facilitate that reconnection and conversation between authors and their audiences that otherwise would not have a forum. It would not happen now that storytellers are no longer regularly face to face with their audiences. Another way writers can grow when we're not thinking about follow a growth is in your understanding of what that audience that existing audience really wants from you. What do they respond to? What do they engage with? Can you create content that they enjoy and that generates that sense of commonality and community that that relationship between storyteller and audience used to look like? And then finally the final two ways that I think we can think about growth is this feeling of a growth of confidence in stepping into your own voice and really saying what you mean and a growth of confidence in taking up space and being more visible. That now brings me to the end of today's episode about growth. Whether you're going to go away and try to apply some of the practical tips and strategies that I've mentioned during this episode or whether you're going to reframe growth and perhaps be a little bit kinder to yourself about the numbers of followers that your account is growing by because maybe you are gaining in other ways. I hope you found something useful today. Feel free to get in touch with me to let me know if there's anything you've heard that you're definitely going to try out or maybe if you're now thinking differently about the nature of trying to grow your Instagram accounts and what that means to you. In today's episode I did mention the two and which Instagram membership a couple of times because this is the membership that I host on Substag where I support writers and authors who are using Instagram to build a platform or to find readers with weekly check-ins, fortnightly content, creation, co-working sessions, monthly ask me anything advice clinics and also lots of resources like the growth sprint that I mentioned. There's a series in there all about how to make reels. There are banks of post ideas for you to try out and there's always more being added in. I will put the link in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself to see if it's what you're looking for to help you get started or keep going with your Instagram book marketing. In the meantime, please keep listening, reviewing and subscribing to this podcast wherever you listen. You can subscribe to Too Much by Nikola Washington on Substag if you want every episode to land directly in your email inbox and of course you can find me on Instagram at Too Much on Discord Social. I'll be back next week with the fourth installment of #it'sSummer but in the meantime have a great week.