Do THIS if You Have 0 Followers on Instagram | How to START and GROW on Instagram in 2024

so you're starting a new account on Instagram or you've already started your account but you've basically opened it to crickets nobody's interested or you're just ready to make this year the Year you absolutely crush it and you are successful on Instagram whatever your reason may be we in our agency have started a ton of accounts to what we would say success in the last eight plus years that we've been managing and opening social media accounts even actually technically before that because when we were employed and we were marketers at companies we were starting accounts going from sometimes zero to one hundred thousand followers or more and a lot of the principles stay the same but there are a lot of new things that have changed and it's beneficial for you now to be watching this video because you can learn from all the mistakes that everybody has made from channels like ours and bypass all that and skip the line so that you're better off now of course this is going to be work okay so nothing's gonna happen and zero seconds but if we were starting an Instagram account from scratch there are principles that we would apply that we're going to break down for you today and I want to say in this period of time where things are super weird and people are losing their jobs there's the recession all these things looming if you are making the decision to double down on yourself congratulations to you and you still have the opportunity to succeed so if people tell you that Instagram is dying whatever blah blah it's it's not for now the case people are still finding success every single day and launching new businesses on the platform so you can win on this platform and you will win on this platform so keep that affirmation going all right so I'm going to meet up with Craig we're going to get some coffee and we're gonna talk through our best tips for how you can start your Instagram account from scratch and that is actually the kettle so let's get started okay so what do you think the first thing people should be thinking about before they thank you well even really start their account or if they're looking to revisit their approach to their account definitely yeah the most important thing is to at least the first thing to do is decide who you want to show up as and what value you want to contribute your Instagram account is its own sort of world and every social media account that you have it's probably going to have a different intention so what are you trying to do here like yeah what do you want to achieve yeah it was funny we were having this conversation yesterday remember we're talking about that people are doing things without actually an end goal in mind yes so it's just pointless everything like or I want to get followers but why do you want to get followers what's the purpose of that like or I wanted yeah I want to do XYZ but why and that's the number one thing like what do you want to achieve so it just remind me of that conversation because we went into a deep hole about it we did like if we ever have a podcast this podcast would be like three hours long it'll be great but uh yeah sorry continue on no that's a good that's a really good point and that's really what it is like a lot of people are doing it just to do it because you think I don't know everyone else is doing it I guess I have to be on Instagram too but but what are you going to get out of it like if you're going to invest time energy resources into doing this you have to have some sort of a plan so you know you might want it to be your Ecom like another sort of asset aside from your website so if you're selling products on a website you can do that via Instagram and you can optimize your Instagram so that it makes it very easy for people to be able to shop from you whether it's by IG shops whether it's by the link in your bio with lots of ctas and frictionless you know you hit it once go straight to the site and then people can buy immediately whatever it is you need to just decide on that and of course we say this all the time this is the value side of it yeah which it probably trumps you need to provide value otherwise what are you doing yeah and it needs to be educational entertaining and I always forget the last inspiration inspirational I always think it's informational but that's the same as educational I can't I can't yeah yeah um either way it's very important those three things so you need to sort of consider like holistically what you're doing on Instagram what your brand represents what you stand for you know who do you want to attract who who do you think will come to your page and that will all depend on the type of content you're creating and how often you show up and what you're delivering to them if you're just selling to them with no value they're probably not going to stick around because no one really needs to follow a brand that's just going to sell to them unless you buy regularly from that brand so all of this is like the foundation for your Instagram account starting a fresh year or even if it's like mid-year and you'll have seen this video in June or something and you're refreshing your accounts that's where you need to begin the next thing you'll need to do when you're looking to start your Instagram account or restart your Instagram account is zero in very clearly on your audience so we know who our audience is we speak to business owners social media marketers and creators we actually used to start an intro like that every single time we're trying to make the intro shorter so we skipped that part okay that's a YouTube tip that we can talk about at a later time but it is so important for you to have a clear look and clear understanding of who your audience is so that when you're creating the valuable content that we're talking about you're creating it specifically for them so that they engage with it and that interaction and those engagements will help you rank higher because they're like this is for me I'm in the 100 the right place that I need to be so you do that through competitor research by actually looking at not only competitors but adjacent Brands so even if you were a cafe but in the end there is like a cool Bean Company look just coffee analogies there's a cool Bean Company that you know who's a cool roaster being company a cool roaster who didn't know would uh you didn't even correct me lentils but yeah a cool Roastery somewhere that you know has the same audience as you that's the type of research that you're gonna want to do what type of content are they interacting in what are they having fun with it this is going to help you when we're talking down the line a bit further into your content planning because you'll know what they like what they respond to what's working well for your competitors and what's not working well for your competitors and that's why the niche conversation is important because you need some form of guard rails as to what content you're going to put out because if you don't have a niche then you're putting everything out and the algorithm won't be able to understand who to serve you to so maybe after you've had that Niche you've established the audience you can start kind of branching out a little bit more once you've built that relationship but in the beginning it's going to be super super important that you have a niche you have your audience down and you're only creating content for them when you appeal to everybody you end up appealing to nobody so just focus on that person and for us we told you who our audience is but then that opens us up to kind of talking about entrepreneurship because not only are we social media marketers we're agency owners we're business owners we have other businesses as well that even gets you to maybe even talking about hellofresh one day when you're making a meal in the kitchen because it's built within your full brand and it's built within the niche and you know it'll make sense but we would never start an account and my first post would be me cooking in the kitchen with hellofresh not when it makes sense it wouldn't make sense so that's why you build that audience you build those relationships and then you start understanding more and more about what they're interested in but it all comes with knowing your audience first the next tip is to decide on your handle or username now even if you've already started your account you can change your Handler username and I believe we've said this on multiple occasions but it does bear repeating because we see it all the time the consistency of your handles and with your web domain is so important as you hear at the end of our videos you're like follow us everywhere at High season code because it's high seasonco. com the email addresses are at High season Co every single social media YouTube Pinterest LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Instagram all of that is all High season Co everything even here on YouTube so keeping the handles consistent is just it makes your life easier and it makes the life of your potential clients or customers easier because they don't have to even figure out how to try and find you it's not high underscore season dot Co online and High season 1988. yeah yeah we're just adding other things and I understand that it's difficult sometimes but when we came up with this name we were like oh we need something else yeah High season was taken Everywhere by of course people who weren't using it for the most always it's always that way every it happens to half the people yeah so we were like all right well we need something else so it is a bit of a challenge but it's worth spending a little bit of time on and it's not expensive it's just a matter of research like you can just actually check a website if it works and then you know High season was taken so whatever if we get code seeing people use code before so we added code.

com oh that doesn't exist all right cool let's check Instagram oh it's not there so and so forth and once we got them all we're like let's go that one made sense for us so very important it's kind of very foundational 101 but it's going to make everything else a lot easier and avoid all the underscores like crazy the underscores the periods the three underscores or the long make it easy you know make it easy and make it make sense so that when people were typing it in even if they didn't know your username it would come up because they were looking for your company and it's clear that that's your company yeah the next thing you want to consider when you're looking to open or refresh your Instagram account is to set up a professional account so it should not be a personal account that means you're actually setting up the account as a professional in these settings and the reason that you're going to want to do that is because if you're taking your account seriously you need to have access to the insights and all the options and the features that the professional accounts provide that the regular personal accounts don't so that's like the call to action buttons the insights I mentioned which are super super key um and then when we think about whether or not you should have a business account or a Creator account one thing we will say is have the account that makes sense for what you're doing on there whether you're a business or Creator however a bit of a pro tip is that the Creator accounts are the ones that get the trending music where business accounts don't unless you specifically title yourself as an entrepreneur so that becomes really complicated and weird to have if you're not um an entrepreneur and you're an actual business because then it gets labeled there and you have to take the label off it becomes too complicated so I would say consider a Creator account if you want to access trending audio and we all want to access trending audio because that's what helps us increase our reach with Instagram reels so that should be a big consideration into that question and then another question we get often around this is should I have a separate personal account my feeling and I feel like you would agree here too is that yes you should the worst thing that you can do to your business account is start posting random things that have nothing to do with your account at all just you picking your kids up from school on an account where people are going to try to get value from or some level of entertainment so if there are things that you're so burning for you that you want to post on Instagram leave that for your personal account with your friends but your professional account needs to be optimized consistently with the content that's going to attract the audience keep the audience and let the Instagram algorithm know who you are so they can help you find a new audience so that is the the summary of that question because that's something we get really really often okay next up profile optimization we have done multiple videos just about this but this is something that obviously matters to your success on Instagram it really does have an impact so first thing hit the about the point I'm sitting on the opposite side I don't even know so I think it's the videos are up there yeah the card is probably about yeah another video that just talks about this but we also have a link in the description of our Instagram checklist which you can follow to make sure it's totally free and you can make sure that you're doing all the right things in your profile so I'll do a quick summary of it now of course you've got your uh you need to clean clear attention grabbing profile image and high res as always your name in bold there is SEO friendly so whatever you put in there can be searched what does ours say hi Susan curve social media agency there we go so it's got the name in case people search for the name because people are familiar with us on YouTube so if they come to Instagram to find us if they don't already realize it's High season go it'll you know you can search for social media agency and will likely come up pretty high in that search because of that in the bio itself you're going to need a solid at least a one-liner or what we typically like to do is have the Emoji bullet points of what the account is about like what are you you know we're a social media agency that does this this and it's um you know you might be uh store an online store that sells this this and this whatever it is that you're doing make it abundantly clear if people come to your account and they have to wonder what your account's about they're not going to stick around you pretty much already lost them it used to be cute to be mysterious but it's not that's not a look let people know what you're about yeah it was like a cool branding thing and it's like no they need to know that they're in the right place and that one liner as you mentioned that says it like yeah we serve ex-people by doing X keep it straight straight forward exactly and give as much or as little information as people need to understand what it is that you do so in our recent video about features and I just sort of realize it's I think it's over there it's the uh Chris said is the card that video would we talked about new Instagram features we talked about some accounts now have been rolled out to already but have multiple links in the bio I know my personal account has two but it's Facebook like you can only show your Facebook and it's already linked and then something else so I use Link tree so you know make sure that the link in a bio whether it goes direct to your website or whether you have link tree we would typically suggest some sort of a link tree like service that would um like a social landing page so that people can go to multiple things from one tap that is super key so just having that profile optimized and then the final thing of course is your stories highlights anything like if you go to a menu if you're a restaurant make your menu in in the highlights so people can see it and put photos of the food that's the one thing when we're going on like Uber Eats or whatever yeah and if they don't have photos of the food and they don't really know what the dish could look like it's it turns us off even I have to throw on the dice and I would love to add another part there pinned post now so take advantage of that new feature and when we're going to get into what you would do when you're first starting your account pin key posts you're going to do a set amount to get yourself launched but the one that's the explainer video or the wrap up of your menu or anything that you know is really going to drive the what we talked about again the objective that you have those are the posts that you're going to want to pin and you can pin up to three posts at a time super game so that's really the profile optimization so make sure you cover that once again this is all pretty foundational but it's going to make a difference As you move into the more complicated stuff it's like building a house the foundation is super key if you want to have a steady sturdy long lasting home so after you've gone through and really set that Foundation that we're talking about your Instagram profiles pop in you know who you are who you plan to serve and you started researching your competitors so you have an idea of who your audience is you're going to want to start talking about content the main thing so what you're going to be putting out there for everybody to see and before you even get to that you need to have content pillars or content categories developed and that means that all the pieces of content that you create are going to ladder up to these pillars they're always going to match the things that you said that you're going to talk about because that's what your Niche is about so for us for example ours is business education business inspiration and social media marketing so you're watching this that's social media marketing we're giving you tips and that's one of the pieces of content that is under that pillar is that we serve tips the other thing is business inspiration so you might see a beautiful quote of us doing something fun or like us just inspiring business owners or we might just straight up be giving you business education tips so you know like how to we could bring a tax Planner on for example it would make sense because we we went through this so like you had to plan your taxes how to blah blah blah anything that has to do with business would make sense under that so that's what you should have too so whatever your Niche is you're going to create content pillars underneath that and every time you create content it's going to ladder up to that pillar and if it doesn't ladder up to that pillar it doesn't make sense and you shouldn't be posting it and then when we think about the content pillars then we start moving into the content types so what types of content are we going to use is that going to be an Instagram real use reels make sure that in that reels are part of your strategy that's just no question about it that's just the day that we're in is it going to be reals is it going to be carousels are they going to just be images how are how is the content ideas that I have going to come to life and that's where the content types come in so with that something you need to think about are the tools that are at your disposal and we're going to get into content Creation in a bit in order to know what you're going to be able to create so that way when you're ideating it makes sense and again if you are watching this video and you actually did start your post but you need to refresh you actually have insights that you can use to let you know what your best types of content are that you should post and if you don't have that because it's actually starting from scratch use your competitor knowledge and those in your industry to kind of inform what your content is going to look like and then you want to talk about your posting frequency so how often are you going to post this is something that is pretty important to figure out from the beginning because you don't want to be inconsistent and that consistency is very important so so if you're like you know every day for the first two weeks then you disappear for two months and then just post one time that's not good it's not telling the algorithm that you're going to be there regularly and it's not telling your followers and your audience that hey you can rely on me this is going to be someone who's going to turn up regularly so commit to something that you can actually fulfill from the beginning so if you know you know and it's almost better to under promise yourself and the promise yeah it's over deliver exactly so if you like you know what I'm gonna aim for two posts a week so I think I could probably do that maybe I could probably get three and then you could bust out a third if you ever get it around to it or if it works for you maybe you'll get into a rhythm because you go into when we talk about content creation and batch creating and planning ahead then you probably will be able to because you have enough content because you plan to head for that and then the next part of that is hashtag so we did a video a little while ago and uh you know we sort of found through our research from one particular client and from other sort of more qualitative experiments that closer to 30 hashtags performed much better than the three to five that Instagram suggested that uh we use so we stick with that we suggest you do the same thing test it out on your account how many hashtags work the best try different ones have different batches of hashtags for every different content pillar so for all the different ones you want to make sure you have these different hashtags so that they are specific and you're not just being General and it's putting the right type of content on the right type of hashtag to enhance the uh the search ability for everybody there and a pro tip with that is to leave those 30 hashtags in your notes app and have them exactly placed as the content pillars that you have so you can just copy and paste easily and if you actually end up using one of the softwares like a later they will have those hashtag banks in there for you easily that you can save I think Unum which is the visual planner that we use that allows you to do that as well yes now if we've saying all these things to you and it's feeling overwhelming because we do understand that it can feel that way we actually just launched our first Suite of digital products but I'm waiting for Dan to like put some like confetti or something like that and this Suite of products are the same products that we use in our business there are some that are a bit more intensive and some that are a bit more chill you'll see them all up there but in there we do have a Content planner one that is super clean and super easy for you to lay out all your content so that you know what you're Distributing when you're Distributing it and also if it fits into your content pillars you'll easily be able to see that there we also have all the social media holidays outlined for this year for you in there as well so if you are interested in checking that out I'm sure we popped some screenshots on here but if you do want to learn more about that you can head over to our shop on our website at High season co. com slash shop and then let's get into the other part content creation so when we were talking about the tools this is the biggest part of this so once you've decided on your content plan you need to understand what your Arsenal is so what you're going to be using so when we talk about that if Graphics and Design are part of your inspirational content for example or you want to make carousels so they're part of your educational content you have to have the right tools so we did do a video right here that will pop up so you can watch about our favorite tools for growing on Instagram and actually managing and creating on Instagram but we will say canva she is a beauty we've used her forever we pay for the Pro Plan we think it's amazing and we definitely recommend that you look into canva for creating the templates are stunning designers who I'm just joking I'm just joking love you designers I'm just kidding but for the people who can't afford a designer at the time canva is amazing for that another tool that you want to be considering are what you're going to be using to film uh your content so we actually did a video on that too look at us so efficient so we did a video on our favorite content creation tools but overall what we'll say with that when you're thinking about tools and equipment that you'll need all you need is your smartphone at this point you don't need more than a smartphone so don't get so overwhelmed you don't need we're filming on a Fuji camera we love it we think it's amazing it's in the description box below if you want to learn more about it's the Fuji xt4 I'm in love with it it's I'm obsessed with what it does but we could do a lot of the same content especially when we're just talking about Instagram we're just talking about social with our phones like any iPhone that you have or any Android that you have I can't say what the android model is but anything over an iPhone 11 you're gonna be sweet we film for clients on iPhone 11s when we need to because they all shoot in a high enough resolution 4K at the very least this is this is 12 we're about 12 is in 14k if you've got the new was one there you're sweet you're definitely going to be sweet and then the other thing that you're going to need is natural light so all you need is that smartphone a natural light and you are good to go to create the content you need to thrive because it's not going to matter as much of what it looks like what matters more is what you're offering and the value again that you're providing that's what people are going to be more interested in and that's what's going to keep them coming back and then you're gonna do what the most important thing is which is get over yourself okay get over any of your fears and anxieties of how you're showing up on camera and you are going to film okay and this is something that even with one of our clients it's the big always a big topic of conversation we're always our biggest critic in the end right you look great you're shining you're beautiful you're awesome you have value and you should show it and video is a really great way to do that so do that that's the biggest part of it that I want people to understand and take away and get over and with that then you're going to create dates and batch your first set of posts yes so that is 12 posts that we're recommending that you create and batch and maybe you can go over kind of like that quick batching process so if you plan you could actually use our brand new digital uh products and use one of the documents and you can plan out the topic so we have the more in-depth spreadsheet that we created that we use in-house right now with our clients where you could put there's one tab where you can put all of the topics you have to put captions or anything but just the topics so you already know what it is so that is enough to get you like all right you can map out your first 12 posts as it just said and then you can go and create them and what we would suggest is that you put aside you know one three four five hours whatever it might be to take you to do it everyone's different and depends on how complex the content is yeah and then just do it all at once the the hardest part is when you get up and you're like it's Tuesday yeah okay yeah okay no okay nothing I haven't taken a photo I don't even know what I'm gonna talk about but if you do all the things that we've talked about right now from the very beginning as much as planning out your content pillars and all those different things when it gets to mapping out the actual topics you're going to talk about it's super easy because you're basting those on the content pillars or categories and then when it comes to batching now you've got all your topics and you can if you're talking to the camera or if you're making things on canva if it's a graphics based thing if it's a bunch of photos it makes your life so much easier to have it all done in one place so you can keep all of the information in one sheet and then you can just go ahead and create and we've found that to be the most by far like Leaps and Bounds the most efficient way to approach content creation for social media and what do you do once you've created them you go to schedule them so that is obviously very very important now we mentioned in the Instagram features video that I talked about earlier that some accounts have an inbuilt scheduling function now which is pretty cool within Instagram so that might be slowly rolling out across the world or all the different accounts um a lot of other platforms I know Facebook definitely has the The Meta business Suite so you can use that to schedule so that's if you wanted to use it native if you wanted to sort of go beyond that Tiff mentioned later yeah cannoli we use Sprout social all of those are fantastic yeah there's a whole bunch of different ones so you can go and find the one that works for you that you know has the financially has the best pricing that makes them most sense based on the features that it gives you but scheduling everything out so that you don't have to worry about actually every single day now I've got to post you you would batch schedule so everything's already done you'd batch write the captions and then batch schedule so and everything I just want to say that we're talking about if you're like later all this stuff we're going to put it in the description so you'll have it there and you can easily click through and see what's going on yeah for everything that we talk about or recommend it's usually in our description yes exactly so all of those things are really important it's like the sort of the three-pronged batching attack from the creation the captions to the scheduling exactly that'll make your life so much easier so then you can really focus on the next level which would be I don't know if that a scope of this video but Community Management like talking to your followers and to your audience um ads and all those type of things to continue to grow it but yeah so this video is pretty long already as it is we just wanted you to be set up so this is like the foundational as we said what we would do if we were starting from scratch the next video that we're going to drop is going to be speaking about post optimization so what do you do to once you've set yourself up to success continue that momentum so how are you going to continue to succeed what are the tactics that you're going to implement in order to make sure each post that you have has its maximum reach so with these 12 posts that we talked about remember those are foundational posts so don't expect that you're posting it and immediately it's going to have a ton of likes that's not the point the point is that you're telling the algorithm who you are so you're feeding the algorithm with information and then you're also letting your audience know what to expect from you so that they know to follow you there are that's also the reason why you have 12 posts there because if you just have one you start interacting you start doing all these things people are going to come there's gonna be one post there's no reason for them to follow you you want to make sure that everything is there and kind of laid out and the story is starting to like be out there and distributed and you're also starting to get data so in the next video we'll talk about post optimization we'll talk about exactly what you should do to succeed on Instagram and if you do have any questions related to anything we mentioned today so any of the basic tips or any of the product questions that you have please feel free to ask us in the comments below anything else you think that's important for the people to know just get out there and do it get started and do it properly and if you follow these tips it's really not that difficult because doing it in K encompasses all the things we're talking about so it's just instead of just doing it and maybe not doing it right do it right from the beginning and you're gonna have a much better experience and your business is going to thrive because of this community that you're going to be creating online exactly all right y'all so if you enjoyed this video give us a thumbs up hit subscribe below and hit the notification Bell so you don't miss any other videos from us thank you so much for watching again you can check out our products at highseasonco.