Have you ever wondered what it takes to get an Instagram post to go viral?
Well, in today's video, I am going to do a case study and break down one of my Instagram
posts that went completely viral and got over 170,000 likes.
And I did it all organically with no bots or any shady tactics.
And the crazy thing is that I did this with an account that had less than 2000 followers.
So if you want me to break down the success of this post step-by-step, so that way you
can do that too for your Instagram posts, then keep on watching.
So with Instagram and all of the algorithm updates and changes over the years, people
are increasingly frustrated saying things like, and yes, I totally get it.
I've had tons of posts that I put a lot of work into and they really go nowhere.
So I understand that the Instagram algorithm can be frustrating.
However, one thing that I have learned about the Instagram algorithm is that you hate the
Instagram algorithm until the Instagram algorithm starts working for you.
And then you love the Instagram algorithm, right?
So here is my account, it's called Rotoscopers.
Basically it is a place for animation addicts, people who love animated TV shows and films.
It's a place where we can all come together and talk about animation, which we love.
Now as you can see at the time of recording this, this account only has 5,000 subscribers
and before this post went viral, it had around 2000 subscribers.
So that is myth number one is that you have to have hundreds of thousands of followers
in order to have hundreds of thousands of likes or to go viral.
That is not the case.
So here is the post and basically it shows Elsa in all of her different outfits that
she has worn throughout the Frozen series.
I use concept art from the art of books or that had been released online because I really
think the concept art is super beautiful and I put this all in Photoshop and I had to move
some heads around and so it definitely took a lot of work.
But I love seeing a visual development and costume design.
So I thought this would be a post that others would be interested in.
So now let's jump into the insights tab.
Now you have to have a creator account or a business profile in order to have access
to insights.
And if you are against that, because you've heard that Instagram doesn't promote your
posts as much and that you're not going to have as much reach that is completely false.
There is no difference between business or creator profiles and personal profiles.
The only difference really is that you get so much more analytics and data that you can
use to help you understand why things are performing well or not performing well, which
ultimately you can use in creating even more posts.
So I say absolutely sign up for this.
It just takes a few steps and a few things that you need to integrate.
It's pretty seamless, but it is so, so worth it.
So let's jump into the insights right now.
So you can see on the insights have for an individual post, it shows a few things.
At the very top.
It shows some of the key metrics such as likes, comments, shares and saves.
These are the four main engagement metrics that Instagram looks at when they're deciding
whether to further promote a post and to put it in the explore tab or to put it in front
of more users.
So as you can see, this post had over 101,000 likes, 511 comments, 3,553 shares at 49,043
saves, absolutely crazy numbers.
Other metrics that show up are right below this are profile visits.
So these are people who when they look at your posts, they're interested enough that
they want to check out your profile to see, Hey, what does this account about?
We had 6,311 profile visits.
Now you'll notice that my profile visits and the number of interactions were the same.
Now this is because I didn't have any other action that people could take.
If you click on this little information button, it breaks down more.
What exactly are the three components of interactions?
Now it's profile visit for website clicks and email clicks.
Now let's jump down to the discovery section.
So basically by clicking on the information tab, you can see that it has three components
as well.
It has impressions, reach and follows.
Now one thing to note under this big reach number in the middle, it will let you know
what percentage of accounts were not following you.
And that's really important because you want to get this post in front of new people, new
audience, you want new followers, hopefully following you engaging and if you're a business
buying your products and at the time of this post we had around 2000 followers.
So it does make sense based on the engagement that we had that the majority were coming
from people who weren't following us.
So follows is pretty self explanatory.
It is the number of people who ended up following your account as a result of seeing this post.
In this case we had 1,228 new followers as a result of this post.
See the difference between reach and impressions.
They are similar but they are not entirely the same.
Impressions are the total number of times that your post was shown to someone and some
person may have been able to see your posts five or six times in their feed.
Maybe they were looking at different hashtags and they're able to see your posts in those
different places.
Now reach is the number of individual users who see your posts, so even if they did see
it a total of five times, they only are counted once in reach and reach actually is the more
important number because impressions is more of a vanity metric.
You can have tons of impressions, but if no one's actually doing anything or engaging,
that's not great.
Now the reach of this post was nearly 2 million.
It's still completely blows my mind that this post was served to nearly 2 million people.
All right?
Impressions.
Now I know I said impressions is more of a vanity metric and that may be true compared
to reach, but we're just seeing, okay, the number of total eyeballs that saw this post,
how did they see it?
And thankfully Instagram does break it down into four categories for us so you can see
where were people finding this post.
So the first one is explore.
So we all know the infamous explore tab.
So many people think that the explore tab is the end all be all.
If you appear on the explore tab, you are golden.
But you can see on this example 22,859 of the impressions came from Explorer, which
is not even that many.
It's maybe 1% the majority, these impressions did not come from Explorer.
And I'm not saying that I'm not appreciative for the 22,000 times this appeared in the
explore tab because every little bit helps, but I'm just showing you that it's not necessarily
the explore tab that is suddenly going to make your posts go crazy viral.
Next up is hashtags.
So many people spend so much time on hashtags and they just completely stuffed their hashtags.
And I think
"I have always all these hashtags and it's going to be so amazing because all these people
are going to see my post because they are going to click on my hashtags!"
and guess what?
People do follow hashtags and they look at hashtags.
That in this case was not necessarily the reason for the success.
This only appeared 13,000 times and the various hashtags that I use now, if we go back to
the post, you can't see that I did have a significant number of hashtags and the hashtags
were very relevant to this topic.
They weren't random hashtags that had nothing to do with the post.
And that is very important when you are doing your hashtag strategy that you need to make
sure that the hashtags you're choosing actually relates to what your post is about.
So you can see in this instance I had a whole bunch about Frozen, Frozen 2, Disney princesses,
Frozen Fever, frozen Fever, Elsa.
Then I have some more general ones just about being a Disney fan, Disney lover, and then
I go into Walt Disney animation.
So I kind of have these three different buckets of categories for what I do.
You know I have concept art in here because this is concept art.
So people who are looking for concept art will see this and then maybe they'll want
to save it for future reference.
But you can see that I don't have random hashtags in here.
Like #d#disneyland . Someone looking up at Disneyland hashtag wants Disneyland's content.
So if I put a Disneyland hashtag here, no one's going to click it because they're going
to be able to tell it right away.
This has nothing to do with Instagram and Instagram actually is not going to appreciate
that I am kind of lying about what the post is about.
They want us to be as truthful and honest as possible in categorizing what our post
is about.
All right, so that is hashtags and already you're seeing
Wait, I thought hashtags were the key to success?
I thought the explore page was the key to success.
[Nope.]
Next up is homepage.
Now this is where you see it appearing in people's home pages.
So this is for people who are your followers already.
So you see in our 2000 ish followers, it appeared 1,649 times.
So it didn't show up in every single one of our followers, but it did show up in a good
majority.
And so that number is more or less going to match your follower account.
All right?
Now it is time for the big kahuna: the "other" category, which I will say is a very frustrating
title because other is not helpful in any way, shape or form because what does that
mean?
Now you can see here basically 99.9% of the 2.2 million impressions came from other sources.
This other section really was the reason the post did so well and for me these actions
really are the most important things that I'm trying to do and trying to get users to
do in order to make my posts be seen by more people and hopefully go viral first up in
the other category is the shares.
This is something that is newer to Instagram in the past few years and it is where people
can share it to their Instagram story or they can share it to another profile through DM.
The way people share a post is they click on the little airplane icon and it allows
them to do one of three things they can share to their own Instagram story.
They can share it via direct message to a friend or they can also share it to a direct
message group.
And even though the shares isn't broken down here under other, we can see the number of
shares up at the top where we see the little paper airplane icon and this happened 3,353
times.
So people either shared it to their story or shared it with their friends and that is
an indicator to Instagram that this is shareable content, that this is good stuff, that people
are liking this.
Now next up is saved and it goes along with stories saved.
It's basically bookmarking the post for future reference.
It's kind of like a mini Pinterest.
Within Instagram you can have different collections or boards where you can put things and in
our case this was saved so many times, 49,000 times people save this.
This may be people in the industry or artists who wanted to save this for future reference.
I have no idea.
But all I know is that there was something about this post that people wanted to save
so they could come back to it later.
And Instagram loves this.
That means it is a good post that they like and they want to remember.
And come back to next up is tags.
Tags are the thing that if someone tags you in a post and then you go to your tag section,
you can see all the different posts that you have been tagged in by other people.
So if users are looking at another user's post and then they click on what else have
they been tagged in, your post is going to show up there.
I actually did not even do this for this post.
I didn't tag any other people and that's okay and it goes along with our next one, which
is mentions, mentions happen on other people's posts or videos where they tag your handle
or your Instagram username in the caption where people will then click on you, see your
profile and then click on your post and have an impression on that post.
That way it's a bit convoluted, but think of it as it's telling you the sources of how
people eventually find your profile and get to that post.
Now last up is notifications.
These are people who have the notifications turned on for your posts and that is how they
get an impression for that post.
They get a notification, they click and they see the post.
Now the last part of this insights tab is promotion.
If we wanted to promote this post, we would have additional data on how well this is performing,
but we did not do that for this post.
This was 100% organic.
Now scrolling back up to the top, you can see how those four main metrics of engagement
really did help this post be seen by more people, more eyeballs, likes and comments
are no brainers at this point.
People know that you have to have likes and you have to have comments on your posts, but
these newer metrics of saves and shares also really do weigh in the algorithm as to whether
Instagram is going to continue promoting and showing your post.
This post actually performed really well for a number of months.
It's not like it did this all in a week, although it did have incredible numbers within the
first week, but it continued to be shown to more and more users in November and December,
even through January, which I think is absolutely insane and awesome and really goes to show
the power of the Instagram algorithm if you use it correctly.
Now a few other things about this post that I want to point out.
If we look at our caption, I made the caption very simple and easy and I had a call to action.
I said, "All of adult Elsa's dresses in Frozen, which one is your favorite?"
And instead of having people to type out what their favorite one was, because if you look
at, again, these are kind of hard to describe and that's a lot of work for people.
So I tried to make it very easy for people so they could very easily comment, letting
me know what their favorite was.
And I said, leave a black heart for the, do you have to go dress, leave a crown for the
coronation dress and yada, yada, yada.
So all people had to do to engage was just to leave an emoji of their favorite one.
And you'll see in the comments that people actually really liked this.
They just put a quick emoji or they would put their favorite emojis that represent their
favorite dresses.
They of course still had regular comments where they let us know how they were feeling,
what they tagged friends.
But all of these things helped with the engagement of the post.
Because one thing about human nature is you want your opinion to be known.
So if someone asks you a question, a lot of times, if it's a good question, you want to
let people know.
And in this case you had a variety of cool dresses to choose from.
And I wanted to know what is your favorite.
I also had a call to action in the caption itself, or they could follow us and I called
specifically by following us.
This is what you're going to get to.
You're gonna get more animation, Disney and frozen fun.
So I kind of made it very niche specific so they know, okay, if I click here, I'm going
to follow and this is the type of stuff that I'm going to get.
Now some things that I could have done to increase this post even more is I could have
added a location so that way people who are clicking or looking for a certain location
could see my posts show up and I could have tagged other users on the post.
Normally I do that, but for this post I didn't and you can see that's okay.
But again, those would have given me a another opportunity to get this post in front of other
people.
Now one last thing about why I think this post did so well is because this was right
before frozen two was coming out.
So I did anticipate trends.
I knew that frozen two was going to be huge, just like the original frozen movie was.
I knew there'd be an uptake of people searching for frozen content, being interested in frozen
content, looking at those hashtags.
So for about a week or two before the post came out, I did a variety of frozen posts
that did equally as well.
You can see this one had 21,000 likes, which at the time we were just freaking out about
how well this post was doing.
This one has about 10,000 this one right here has 26,000 and all of the other posts that
we did had varying degrees of success.
This one right here had 28,000 likes, and so we continue to build this momentum and
that is really, really important.
We were showing Instagram that, Hey, this is the type of content that we are posting
on a regular basis.
We were doing it basically daily and so Instagram knew that it could count on us for helping
to further the platform.
They want to promote people who are continuing to put new content out for them, which ultimately
helps Instagram.
It helps keep people on the platform and they see more ads as a result because again, Instagram
is a business.
They want to keep you just glued to their content.
And so by the time this posts finally did come out, we had proven to Instagram that
we had really, really great content that people loved.
And so we really benefited from the algorithm for that way.
So I think if we would've just done this post as a standalone post and we hadn't done the
previous work with the other frozen posts, I do not think it would have done this crazy
well, especially since we kind of took a break on our Instagram in the month after and the
posts that we have done, even though some of them are frozen related, they don't even
have a thousand likes.
And that is me being open and honest with you guys.
I could have and should have continued to put more and more and more content out there
because we had that momentum.
That momentum is so important because now our posts really aren't doing as well as they
were back in November.
And if we just start posting daily content again and we start building that rapport with
Instagram again, no doubt we'll be able to get back up to where we were, but we had a
good thing going with Instagram and then we stopped posting.
So Instagram was like, Hmm, okay, maybe not.
All right, so this is my Instagram case study on a post that had over 2 million impressions
and 170,000 likes and all those other crazy numbers and I really hope that by breaking
this down, this helps to demystify the algorithm a little bit.
But really what it comes down to at the end of the day is you need to be promoting content
that is informative, educational, interesting, engaging things that people want to see.
If you're posting pictures of you and your lunch and it's not getting anywhere, maybe
that's because people don't really care about you and your lunch post about something that
people care about and are really invested in and become an authority in those things.
In this case, it was all about Frozen 2 baby.
If you found this case study interesting or helpful, be sure to give it a like and subscribe
and let me know in the comments below what you thought was the most interesting or surprising
about a post that had over 170,000 likes.
That's all I have for today.
I'll see you next time.