For Maximum Growth via Instagram, Create a Secondary Account
By: Sebastian Juhola
Tags: Instagram, Marketing, Growth Hacking, Social Media, Growth

How to Build One

Your first task is to come up with the theme of the account. Remember the recipe: something visual and something that attracts your target audience.

It’s difficult to give out general advice for this part, but if you leave a comment below and describe your business, I can give you some ideas.

As a side note, you don’t even need a business yet to apply this strategy. You can build your audience first, and start your business later. That was my original plan with The Minimalist Wardrobe, when I set out to build an audience for a clothing brand I wanted to start. I ended up scrapping the idea of a clothing brand pretty quickly, but The Minimalist Wardrobe turned into a business of its own and kickstarted my personal career.

When you’ve decided on your theme, and have come up with a good name for the account, you need to find content. At this point, you need to consider yourself as a content curator, not creator. Creating can come later, but now you just want to get things going and find what works.

Look for bloggers and influencers in your niche. Find the best posts by them. Check Unsplash and other stock photo sites, just avoid the stock photo aesthetic. Remember to credit properly.

Read blogs and form opinions. You need to be able to actually curate the content you’re reposting. It’s not just about compiling stuff. It’s about presenting content from your point of view. Not everyone will like it, but not everyone has to.

Post a handful of posts, write a descriptive bio, and promote the account with your main account, if you have one. If you don’t, or if your main account doesn’t really have a following yet, start following a couple hundred people in your niche. That should give you some early traction. Know that Instagram has strict measures against mass following, so don’t bank on it being a sustainable growth strategy down the line.

You’ll grow with collaborations and the strategic use of hashtags — both of which require interesting content to work.

I have a part about collaborations in my article “How I Grew an Instagram Account from 4000 to 190k in a Year”, but essentially you try to find fair cross-promotion opportunities with other similar accounts.

Remember to think outside the box: you don’t have a big audience in the beginning, so a story feature by you doesn’t give a lot of negotiating power, but what else can you offer? Can you send them one of your products? Could you find a way to feature them on your main brand account naturally, in exchange for them promoting your new account? You need to be creative.

Getting eyes on your new account is in many cases much better than getting your main account featured because you’ll convert many more followers that way.

Hashtags are highly misunderstood and require an article of their own, but in a nutshell, the idea is to figure out what most people want to see when they search for a certain hashtag — and only use it if your post actually fits the bill.

This means that you have to research relevant hashtags and look at what kind of posts Instagram is giving traction to within those hashtags. In other words, it’s not up to you to decide that “this post could easily count as #fallinspo, imma use that.” You have to first check if #fallinspo has similar posts as top posts, and only then use the hashtag in your post.

Growth is going to be slow in the beginning, but it does get easier, and you’ll get better.