In my last post on my challenge to grow from 0 to 10,000 followers on Instagram, I showed briefly what was wrong with the current profile page and the overall account – in general. In case you didn’t read it, here’s the tl;dr.

1. I don’t post regularly
2. The image quality isn’t very good
3. There’s no consistent branding
4. Engagement is super low
5. I don’t use hashtags effectively
6. The overall profile sucks!

So today, I’mma fix it all.

“Good artists borrow; great artists steal.”

Pablo Picasso, Steve Jobs and many a more

But, the idea here isn’t to steal. Instead, take a look at some of the people that are doing Instagram well and learn from them. I’ve been following some accounts since I launched Instagram as well and I’ll analyze some of these.

The idea isn’t to look at huge accounts, rather look at micro and small accounts with reasonable following. Two key things I’m interested in are:

• Anywhere from 10k to 200k followers
• Good engagement (comments, not just likes)

Let’s take a look at some up and coming Instagram accounts and see what they’re doing!

Here are some things they are doing absolutely perfectly:

1. Profile Image

They are selling via personal brand. To sell to your audience you need to put your human side of the company first. People buy from people. Especially unknown brands.

Profile photo is a clear head-shot with simple background (optional) and border (optional). Anyone scrolling through their feed will recognize them easily.

2. Nail the descriptions

Anyone looking at this profile will know exactly what #thesenuka does! He helps you grow and make sales using Instagram. Cannot get any clearer than that! No fancy, meaningless titles. Followed by simple results and call to actions.

Username:

Brand name or as close to it as possible.

Name:

<Title or name > | <How you help your audience | What you talk about>

I’m going with this:

Jag • Social Media Marketing • IG Growth • Content Marketing

…because that’s what I’ll be talking about and that’s ultimately what I’m trying to help users with (even through Imvidu).

Bio:

Use bullet points (emojis) followed by exactly what you do in the least amount of words or result that you can offer. Here’s is one of the above examples:

🚀 Helping you grow on Instagram
📈 100k followers in the last 12 months
💬 DM for IG management
👇Work with me

Let’s break it down:

• Point one: <What you do? (should hook your audience in – think why does it matter to my audience and not just what you do as a title!>
• Point two: <Achievement or result you can guarantee | what value do you bring to their life? >
• Point three: <Why does it matter to your audience | what value do you bring to their life?>
• Point four: <Call to action i.e. what should your follower do or click on next>

Here’s what I’m going with:

🚀GROW your social media through content
📈From 0 to 10k followers in 3 months
🎯Helping you crush your IG goals
👇Create engaging content – fast
https://imvidu.com

For now I’m just redirecting users to our home page. The plan is to change this to a different landing page very soon.

3. Using Highlights Effectively

@imvidu_app: the new profile – @imvidu_on_social

So taking all the above into consideration, this is the before and after. Note I’ve changed the username as the first thing. I don’t want to create content that pushes our platform all the time:

In short, I’ve done the following:

• Updated the username
• Updated the name to also show what I will talk about on the page
• Updated the profile pic: my attempt at merging our brand and personality/individuality
• Updated the description as per the
• Interestingly followers increased since my first post. Woohoo! small but noiice.

Behind the scenes, what you don’t see:

I was following over 260 people last week! I’ve un-followed a lot that are not associated with my target audience! Gutsy move. Hopefully it pays off.

HOWEVER, and this is a BIG however. At the end of the day, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is great to attract followers and get them engaged with your account and brand. But driving them to your profile… that’s gonna be the big challenge.

Actual growth will happen through three things:

1. Quality of content
2. Consistent posting
3. Engaging on platform

Okay, I’m off to a good start. Next up – Highlights (if you paid attention you would’ve noticed I haven’t updated the Highlight section on my profile). And then…… CONTENT!