- The classic strategy to grow on Instagram is reach out
to influencers, have them mention your channel
or your product, and grow like that.
The standard process for doing that is
to cold email the influencers, build a relationship,
and grow organically like that.
But I found this company recently called
Shoutcart that promises to get you mentions
with these Instagram influencers
for very little money, like 15 bucks,
five bucks for thousands of followers on the account.
So I tested it out, and here are the results.
First, let's start with some baseline numbers.
Here's my Instagram account.
We started this experiment on March 15th.
Our Instagram followers were at 3,062,
and our Twitter followers were at 3,096.
Originally, I thought I'll pick a couple channels
on Shoutcart, and we'll send the same picture.
So I chose this image, which, on our Instagram account
got over 100 likes when we posted it a couple months ago,
and I figured let's have three or four accounts post it
at the same time, same sort of caption, and see how it does.
Here are those posts on Shoutcart.
What's interesting here is Shoutcart will let
you rank by rating, and I figured ones
with higher ratings would have more results.
So I sorted the list only by that rating
and spent about $50.00 on this campaign.
So results from round one, measured on March 22nd,
we ended up with the following: 3,116 Instagram followers,
3107 Twitter followers, so we gained 54 Instagram followers,
and 11 Twitter followers.
Not impressive at all.
No leads were generated in batch one
for any of our companies.
Because of the way Shoutcart works,
we had a few dollars left.
They refunded the amounts for the two or three accounts
that didn't shout us out, and so we had about $30.00
to play with, so I wanted to go in for round two.
This time, instead of posting the same image
to all the accounts, we decided to go
into each of these influencer accounts and create
an image, similar to what they post, with a shout out
to the Alex Berman Instagram channel.
So for round two, we bought three shout outs.
The first one was with a profile called Deep Ambitions.
Here are their most engaged-with posts from the last month.
Both have about 29,000 likes.
And you can see the first one is two emojis,
and the other one is a quick quote.
We found a post on Google that was similar
to what Deep Ambitions posts with two emojis
and calling out Alex Berman 1
with the phrase "caption this."
The second one is an Instagram account called Luxurious Man.
Here are their two most popular posts in the last month.
One's about a black R8 in the snow
and asking people to name the actor.
That one has over 3,000 likes.
And the other picture is of a first-class cabin,
also with over 3,000 likes.
So here's mine, a red Ferarri,
and it's a picture of Michael Fassbender,
asking the same thing, can you tell who the actor is?
And the last one was for a page called Success Diaries.
Here are their two posts, one with 2,400 likes, and one
with 2,516 likes, and it's a quote with a quick message.
Of those three channels, Luxurious Man didn't post,
so we're gonna get a refund on that.
The other two did post, and here are our final results.
On March 26th, we ended up with 3,148 Instagram followers,
and 3,111 Twitter followers.
And zero leads.
All in, is Shoutcart worth it?
I would say no.
I am interested in experimenting
more with Instagram influencers.
We'll most likely do another test like this based
on emailing them, doing real collabs, and growing like that.
Right now, I wouldn't recommend Shoutcart,
at least not for what we do.
Total growth over the experiment, in two weeks,
we gained 86 Instagram followers, and 15 Twitter followers.
So not worth it, well below the average.
What do you think, what has been the most effective way
you've found to reach out to influencers?
I'd actually love to take a look at any
scripts you're sending out, if you want
to post them down in the comments below.
It could set us up for another good experiment.
If you found this valuable, I would love
if you would share it with a friend
who also might get value from it.
We're trying to hit 100,000 subs this year,
and every share counts.
Also, if you want marketing support
for your digital agency, maybe someone
to help run through experiments like this
with your company, check out Experiment27.com, thanks.