- Instagram is one of the most powerful
and accessible platforms for building your personal brand
but a lot of you tell me
that you're struggling to grow on Instagram.
Well I'm gonna tell you five reasons
that you might be struggling to grow on Instagram
so we're gonna talk about that real quick
and give you some solutions that could help you
just grow a little bit faster.
Let's get into it.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake,
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
For the new people here, first of all, welcome,
my name is Roberto Blake, I'm a creative entrepreneur,
public speaker, and today I want to talk to you
about how to grow an Instagram
and I wanna specifically get into five reasons
that you are not growing an Instagram
and what you can do about it.
So the first reason that a lot of people
are not growing an Instagram
is that they're just getting started.
You don't have enough content yet.
Content is king, we've said it over and over again,
and you need a little bit of content to build up traction.
You also need the right type of content.
So what I would suggest is that you start out
with being patient and you try to see if it's possible
for you to put yourself in a position to front-load
a lot of content early on so that as your content improves,
there's a still a nice deep enough back catalog of content
so people have something to look at,
something to scroll through, and they get a sense
of what your overall page and profile is about.
Speaking of which, that kind of leads us into number two
which is a lack of a consistent theme.
If you want people to commit to you,
if you want people to follow,
if you want them to come back and engage,
comment, like, share, do all of the things,
then you have to have a consistent theme
and you have to post on a regular basis.
There's really no way around it.
If you're doing this very sporadically,
then you're not entitled to ask anyone for a commitment
because you have not made a commitment
to the content or to your audience yet.
So think about what the theme
and message of your page is gonna be overall,
try not to deviate from that.
If you want to do something else,
you just really need to start another page.
So keep this very simple and also try to post
with some kind of regularity, if you want to grow faster.
If you're growing slow and your reason
is I don't have enough time, then don't expect anything.
That's just the reality that may sound really discouraging
but it's the way it is, people want consistency.
Number three, think about the actual quality.
Think about the quality of your post,
not just the image quality
because not everyone's a photographer
but if you're doing you know memes
or if you're doing a motivational post,
think about the overall quality of you know
not only the visual part of it but also the emotional value,
and really think about your post.
I am what you might call an Insta blogger,
I do long-form post.
I do it and I write out things that I think are thoughtful
and it's kind of the form of a blog, but done on Instagram.
And that is what keeps my audience coming back
and engaging and spending more time with me
is that expectation is met
and for me it's what represents quality to them
which means that I have a little bit more leeway
in the actual visuals but I still need to tell a story.
Try to really figure out and hone in
on what quality means to you and to your audience,
and if there's a profile that you really admire,
then you can use it not to compare yourself
but to set a standard for what quality
might represent for you and then that is a goal
of trying to make things that look
and feel as good as that makes you feel
when you interact with it,
try to replicate that for your audience
and you know use it as something to aspire to,
but don't compare yourself and have the expectations
of getting the same likes, engagements,
and the number of followers, that's not the point.
You want your quality of content to belong
right next to that if it shows up in someone's feed.
Number four, this one's really important,
I think this applies to any social media platform.
Most people don't grow because they lack an actual strategy,
they just keep throwing stuff
and hoping that something sticks for them,
hoping that something pops, something goes viral.
Going viral is not a strategy.
What is a strategy is you know having that consistency,
what is a strategy is having your theme,
what is a strategy is having your posting schedule.
There are a lot of components to strategy
and I actually have a strategy
for you getting 10K followers in Instagram
but it's gonna require a lot of hard work and consistency.
I refer to this as the coffee table strategy
and the reason I call it the coffee table strategy
is you're addressing your Instagram profile
the way that you would
if you were publishing a coffee table book.
If you look at a coffee table book
you can go and you can find a lot of them,
one of my favorites is Humans of New York,
definitely would recommend it,
I'm gonna link to it in the description for you
but like, if you look at a coffee table book,
every one of these pages is beautiful
and you have consistency, and there's a recurring theme
and expectations are set and exceeded.
It is fantastic.
If you printed out your Instagram,
would it make for a good coffee table book?
If you printed out the captions,
would they make for a good book of anecdotes,
or stories, or you know a good book of one-liners?
Really think about that because if you're not curating
a powerful cohesive brand on Instagram,
then again, you're just throwing things out at random
and hoping something happens and that's not a strategy,
and it could be a real reason that you're not growing.
So I highly recommend you check out that video,
I'm gonna link it in the info card
and the description down below on how to get
10,000 followers on Instagram using the strategy.
I'm also gonna talk about it in some future videos.
And finally, reason number five,
and these aren't the only five reasons
people don't grow on Instagram, there are a lot of them
but these are the five that stand out the most to me,
and this last one is really important.
A lack of engagement.
If you have people who are liking your post,
people who are commenting on your post,
and you're not responding to them,
you have people and you like don't even reply
to even half of your DMs, then don't expect to grow
because you're not committing to people,
you're not engaging, you're taking and you're not giving.
And what you wanna do is you always wanna be in a position
where you can know that you're adding value to people.
So like I said, if you wanna grow, you need to engage.
A lot of times, if you engage a couple of minutes
before you post something on other people's posts,
you're much more likely to get traction,
I've seen this time and time again.
If you like and reply and respond to people,
you're more likely to get traction,
you're more likely to get loyalty,
when people come across you in the feed,
they remember how they felt
about what their last interaction with you was.
So really just double down on engagement.
If you're getting 10 comments,
there's no reason not to reply back to those 10 people,
it's gonna take you a couple of seconds at best.
So really think about that
and take responsibility for your growth on Instagram.
So there you go, those are five reasons
you are probably not growing on Instagram
without blaming the algorithm.
Again, I think you can take responsibility for your content,
I think you can take responsibility
for the relationships that you build in this platform
because that's what having a personal brand is
at the end of the day.
I've done some other videos talking about personal branding
and how to grow within social media platforms,
you'll definitely wanna check some of those out
so I'm gonna link some in the info cards
and I'm gonna link in the description for you guys.
Also, question of the day, question of the day.
What do you think is the best strategy you've ever heard
for growing on Instagram?
I'm really curious about this
so let me know in the comment section
and for those of you who don't have any idea,
what you can do to grow on Instagram?
I would love for you to drop me a question that you have
about Instagram or social media
and I'll try and see if I can cover it in another video.
Anyway, like this video if you like it,
don't forget to subscribe,
check out the other awesome stuff here on the channel.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget, go out there
and create something awesome today, take care.