How we added 10k new followers in a quarter of the time it took to acquire the previous 10k

In September of 2020, we launched brand new social channels for one of our clients. They had no social media presence previously, so when we created an Instagram account their total number of followers was zero.

After a little over two years, the following on Instagram eclipsed the 10k mark. It took almost 600 posts, stories, videos and Reels to get us there, but the account had reached a significant milestone. The next 10k came much quicker than the previous 10k, as we reached the 20k follower benchmark in just seven months. Not only that, but we achieved that feat producing a mere fraction of the posts it took previously.

Between September, 2022, and March, 2023, we posted 250 times on Instagram. Of those posts, 90 percent of them were in the form of IG stories or Reels. Why is that important? Because in August, 2020, the platform made a significant pivot towards pushing Reels in an attempt to compete with the rise of short-form video platform, TikTok. Over the next few months, Instagram feeds would take on a whole different experience.

The growth that we saw in the past six months is likely a direct result of catering our content to the platform’s recent changes. While both engagement and impressions dropped year-over-year — common for most accounts on the platform after IG’s changes — our number of followers soared. Six of the last seven months, we added more than 1,400 new followers to our audience. It wasn’t that more people were seeing our content, it was that our content was being consumed better by people interested in what we produced. Because we were producing Reels, the algorithm better served our content to people with similar interests. Our Reels were showing up in people’s Feeds and in the Explore page because we had optimized the content for the platform. 

One of our five non-negotiables for social media at IOI is ‘No comment or DM goes unresponded.’ As leaders in the social space, we’re constantly looking for ways to get our followers to engage with our content. So when they do, we have to re-engage with them.

Small-business brands don’t have the luxury of an ESPN or Nike or Netflix that draw thousands of comments, responses, retweets and shares simply by hitting ‘post.’ For those of us with a more niche audience of 200-300, or even a couple thousand, any engagement is gold. It should be treated as such, whether those comments are positive or negative.

No engagement is bad engagement, in my book. Someone responds positively to your post and says, “Yes! I love it.”… Great! What specifically do they love about it? Them expanding upon the post in their own words adds more substance. “Oh this sucks”…I’m sorry you feel that way, what can we do to improve? It’s an opportunity for you to go deeper into your own content. If they respond, great. Now one comment turned into three comments. If they don’t respond, at least we tried. Not to mention, the next person to come across that piece of content now sees we have the decency to respond and engage.

Social media has been tough sledding as of late. Engagement on “The Big Three” – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – has come to a screeching halt while TikTok seems to be the one major driver of engagement among platforms. TikTok is still very much in the learning stages, though, and many of us are trial-and-erroring our way through content for the platform.

I recently shifted a third of my budget towards TikTok advertising, boosting both pre-existing and new posts, and netted big, big results in a short amount of time.

With this ‌client, our main focus is building an audience on social media. That will eventually lead to site traffic and lead generation, but the primary focus is growth. Growth on TikTok almost relies on “going viral” and hoping one of your videos blows up to 10K, 50K or 100K views in order to have any significant type of impact on followers and engagement. That can be quite the challenge to find the secret sauce in what makes one video pop and another flop.

As new and fresh as the platform is, TikTok advertising is uncharted waters for many of us and there’s much to be learned in terms of what works, what doesn’t and how to maximize success on varying budgets. What I did to help boost engagement and impressions was simple: Boost some of our best-performing posts from the past while also putting resources behind any new content we shared. I found that a little bit goes a long, long way!

83K views, 96K views, 159K, 221K!! We had good content all along, but organic reach just wasn’t quite taking off like we had hoped. Sprinkle in some paid, and posts started erupting. Our audience grew by 10 percent, profile views spiked, shares shot through the roof. The account was finally gaining some traction on the platform with very little monetary resources behind it.

Now, CPC and conversion numbers look grim on the surface. But remember, none of our paid ads were geared towards driving people to a site or lead generation (yet). No links or landing pages were included in any of our paid ads. The motivation was strictly audience growth and awareness. We certainly didn’t have an end goal in terms of registrations, purchases or form fill outs (yet).

Now that I know a bit more about TikTok advertising as a whole and the ROI it can produce, the focus can shift to those other metrics. I can spend the next few months benefitting from the overall awareness of the account, and use future ads that are more geared towards linking back to our site, driving leads and purchasing behaviors.

Continue to push the envelope of digital media and marketing with IOI Ventures today!