How To Grow Your Instagram Followers Fast With Meta Ads

GROW YOUR INSTAGRAM FOLLOWING FAST

Want to grow your Instagram followers fast and your current organic strategy is a little slow?

Posting on social media day after day, week after week, with very little results to show for it, can be a little tiresome especially when there are other techniques to achieve this goal at a much faster pace.

With billions of users across Instagram, you’re destined to find your dream followers (and buyers) fast on the platform using this simple Meta Ads hack.

4 REASONS TO GROW YOUR INSTAGRAM FOLLOWING

Before we dive into how to grow your following on Instagram, let’s touch on a few reasons why it may be important to you as a business owner:

1. Increased Sales and Growth

The more followers you have, the more people you have to sell to. A larger following can lead to increased engagement, traffic and ultimately more sales or bookings.

2. Credibility and Authority

A larger following can enhance your credibility and authority on Instagram. Potential customers or clients view a higher following as more legitimate and are much more inclined to purchase or book with a brand that appears more established. 

3. Collaboration and Monetisation

A higher following can increase opportunity to attract brands seeking partnerships, influencers, affiliates, or sponsored content leading to monetisation of the platform. 

4. More Retargeting Capabilities

The larger your following, the more people you can retarget on Instagram with Instagram leads and sales ads.

OUR BUSINESS GROWTH AND SCALE RECOMMENDATION

Disclaimer: organic social media doesn’t always move the needle fast, but it can offer the above advantages. At TDE, we recommend setting up your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for business growth and then implementing a paid ads strategy to scale your business.

It is worthwhile to have your social media platforms set-up as an online presence and to nurture your audience but we wouldn’t recommend relying on it for traffic, leads and sales.

HOW TO GET MORE INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS USING ADS

There are two ways to grow you following using Ads.

You can boost an Instagram post or you can create a campaign in the Meta Ads Manager.

We have tested both ways numerous times and in our experience the boosted post generally performs the best.

Why?

The ad shows a call to action button that says ‘View Instagram Profile’ encouraging the viewer to click through, scroll and follow.

Disclaimer: this is the one and only time I’ll tell you to use the ‘boost’ feature. Because it works!

Fortunately for you, using the ‘boost’ feature, is super simple to execute. 

All you need to do is select one of your top performing posts and follow the instructions in this super fast 45-second tutorial.

If you boost a post, make sure you do it on a desktop computer as Meta now has a 30% surchage for posts boosted from an iOS device.

HOW TO SET-UP A TRAFFIC AD TO GET MORE INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS

Let’s dive into how to set-up a campaign on Meta to grow your Instagram following.

Select the green + Create button

CAMPAIGN LEVEL

Next, select the ‘Traffic’ campaign objective and click ‘Next’

Then name your campaign. We like use to use the naming convention:

'Month, year – Campaign – Campaign Objective'

January 2024 – Follower Growth – Traffic

Then select a special ad category if you fall into one of those categories and select your ad budget.

In this example, we chose $10 a day. Start small with your budget, see how the campaign performs, then scale up.

Leave all other features at the Campaign Level on the default settings.

AD SET LEVEL

Next, select the ‘Ad Set level’.

Rename the Ad Set to who you’d like to target e.g., Online advertisers, Lookalike Audience or Broad Targeting (this will make more sense later).

For the Conversion selection, normally you’d want to direct people to your website.

In this example, you are looking to grow your Instagram following, so you want to direct people to your Instagram profile.

Select, ‘Instagram profile’.

Historically we used to recommend advertisers run follower ads within the Instagram App where they could send people directly to their profile to get followers.

Now this option is available with the Ads Manager. As an agency we have tested this new feature, and it is performing as equally as good as the Instagram in-app feature in terms of the results and cost per follower.

Building your Instagram following using the Ads Manager means you can now have more control over the campaign which allows for better results. Within the Ads Manager itself, there are many more adjustments you can make around testing and optimising your campaign.

Next, leave the Bid Control and Dynamic Creative as is.

Leave the budget as is at the ‘Ad Set’ level. We already set the budget at the ‘Campaign’ level.

When it comes to the start date of the campaign, you can set it as early as today if the ad set-up is complete.

We don’t ever set an end date to our campaigns as we like to keep them running for as long as they’re performing.

When it comes to selecting the location of the audience you want to target, you have one of two options depending on your objective:

1. Select the countries you operate in, can service (and can deliver to) or sell to. 

2. Select a mix of option one plus other English-speaking countries (or countries who speak the same language) but have a low cost per follow. For Australia, that could mean adding in countries like Asia or Africa who have a lower cost per follow.

Note: Followers from these countries won’t necessarily increase your sales but will build your immediate credibility fast (if that’s what you’re after) at a much lower cost.

Some advertisers like to use option 2 at the start to build their audience by a few thousand and then switch back to option 1.

In the example in this video, we selected Australia, United States, and the United Kingdom as this is where our primary audience resides.

To see the remainder of the instructions, please tune into the YouTube video below.

There you have it. That is how you create a campaign to grow your Instagram Following.

Interested in learning how to set-up ads to grow your leads or sales on Facebook (and Instagram Ads). Join our low cost Ace Your Ads workshop today.