For most Instagram accounts growth is good — more followers are better than fewer followers. More followers allow you to reach more people which helps you grow your brand, sell more products or achieve any other goal that is depended on reach. This is obvious. The less obvious part is how you go about growing.
Do you use hashtags, do you only make posts within a very specific time window, do you try the latest trick you heard that will help you be in favor of the algorithm. What do you do?! While the strategies above and countless others may have merit, I am just going to walk you through one strategy that absolutely works. I’ll go over what it is, why it works, examples of it working and how to execute on the strategy.
The growth hack is dead simple — it is to repost viral, relatable tweets to your Instagram. These are tweets, which can be just text, an image, or video that have performed well on Twitter, which you then screenshot and repost to your Instagram (best practice is to tag the person who made the tweet in the post — almost all of them also have Instagram accounts). For this to work best, it is important that the viral tweet is relatable to your audience and there are two kinds of relatable tweets.
The first is a tweet that is relatable to a niche audience — the tweet will likely have anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand likes and will only be appropriate to repost if your account also touches on the niche that the tweet is about. For example, if the tweet is related to veganism, your account should also be somehow related to veganism. The second kind of relatable tweet is the type that transcends categories and is relatable to most people. A tweet like this will likely have >50,000 likes and should be paired with a comment/caption that contextualizes the post to your followers. So long as you are able to contextualize the post most accounts can repost tweets like this.
Reposting viral, relatable tweets to Instagram is an effective growth strategy because it is highly engaging content. The more engaging your content is the greater your reach will be and reach is the name of the game in growth. There are a few reasons why tweets make for highly engaging content, but the short answer is that it is already validated content — it performed well on Twitter so it will also perform well on Instagram. You can find a more in-depth answer here.
Reposting viral tweets is such an effective strategy that it has become a whole category of Instagram accounts, where that is essentially all they post. Some of the biggest accounts that do this are Fuckjerry, Buzzfeed, Kale Salad, and Girl With No Job. That is not to say that this strategy only works for these type of accounts — it works for everyone. Your account could be related to veganism, personal finance, organization, motivation or any other topic. For further evidence, check out how many likes the linked posts of tweets got versus their other posts — the reposts of tweets almost always outperform.
Example of a vegan Instagram account reposting a tweet
Hopefully, you are now convinced that reposting viral, relatable tweets is a great and simple way to grow your Instagram. Now that last thing you need to know is how to execute on this strategy. Ultimately all that is required is finding/creating a stockpile of these tweets that you’d like to repost. This is most commonly done using a combination of the following three methods:
- Browsing Instagram and Twitter for this kind of content
- Getting an intern to browse Instagram and Twitter for this kind of content
- Using a tool like xZeitgeist.com that automatically finds and categorizes tweets like this (full disclosure, I am a founder of xZeitgeist)
Once you have done this you will always have highly engaging content ready to post at a moments notice. Regularly posting this type of content will go a long way in helping you consistently and organically grow your Instagram.
If you end up using this strategy I would love to hear how it goes! You can always reach me on Twitter.
I hope this helps and wish you all the best in growing on Instagram 🎉📈Jacob
P.S. email [email protected] for a discount on xZeitgeist 😉