Podcast: When It Worked | Host: Julian Leahy – 11/29/21
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Description from John Leahy podcast interview with Terri Nakamura
“I made a concerted effort a few years ago to grow my following. I would try to find somebody who posts similar content to me and I would follow them. I would see the kinds of people they were following and if you look at their list you can kind of tell if somebody looks like they’re kind of in the same niche that you’re in. If you follow those people there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll follow back and that’s kind of what I did for about a year trying to grow my following because I was stuck at 3 500 for years and years before that.
On Automatic Instagram Tools
“I did it manually because I think instagram really frowns upon people who use apps and services to get there. They can tell somehow, so I don’t advise you to try to cheat.
“The big shortcut is buying followers and they can definitely tell when people are just fake followers. On instagram you can end up actually losing your account if they figure out that you’re doing things like that.
“I was just doing it by hand. I would follow like 20 people a week or something like that so it wasn’t wasn’t highly efficient or fast but it was faster than if I did nothing at all.
‘At least with follow backs you know they are real because you picked them out and followed them in the first place. If you just do nothing but follow back those who followed you, you will just end up following bot accounts which are useless.
What Is Blogging On Instagram?
“It’s a disruptive approach to blogging. If you have spent a lot of time trying to develop a blog from scratch you will find that it is a lot of hard work. You basically have to cultivate a mailing list and subscribers in order to have any kind of traction on a blog.
“However, with instagram it’s completely different. Let’s say you have 100 followers on instagram it would take a long time for you to develop 100 subscribers on a blog.
“You already likely have this audience on instagram and that audience is very amiable to see what kind of content you’re posting. So you have this channel where you have an automatic audience.
“It’s pretty unbeatable access to your audience because they really want to be there. They’re not having to be cajoled into clicking a link or making a big time investment because there is a 2200 character limit on instagram. You’re not going to ever be required to read 5000 words of a blog post. Instagram keeps things to a pretty magic manageable length.
Why This Works
“It just cultivates a lot of engagement. The engagement part of it is what’s really unique because it’s like there’s a dialogue that takes place between your followers and you and makes them feel more connected to your brand.”
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