i recently changed my account on instagram from a personal account to a business account. i had noticed a lot of other blogs doing the same thing and wanted to know what all the hype was about. basically, people do it to be able to access the “insights” page built into the instagram app. a typical page looks like this:

if you’re actually using your account to promote your business, you can see what an important tool this is! however, i am just nosy. i mostly changed my account status so i could use the “swipe up” feature in instagram stories! it’s super helpful when linking to clothes or websites, or occasionally, blog posts.

i’ve also been getting the pop up to “promote” my posts. by paying a set daily amount, ig will put your posts on stranger’s feeds. i see legitimate companies do this all the time, but more and more i’m shown posts from personal accounts who just want to gain more traffic. so i decided to try it!

when i opened up the page, instagram informed me that a blog my size would benefit from ten dollars a day for three days. this could supposedly bring around 9,000 new viewers to my post or profile, which in theory would lead to more followers. more followers equals more opportunity for friendship, brand partnership, and whatever else people use this dang thing for. here’s what the process looked like on my end! i decided to use a photo of jake and i, which are usually pretty well received on a normal day.

the first thing ig asks you is what you want out of your promotion:

their “help” is basically just explaining what the terms mean, but i think they’re pretty self explanatory. the next step is choosing who you want the ad to target. i figured that since my followers are from all over the US (but mainly in florida and california) and like disney, to just let insta do the legwork and find people who already seemed like they would be into my page!

the last step is where i had the most hesitation. i didn’t know how long was too long to run an ad, and i’m also hella broke so i wasn’t about to pay a hundred bucks for instagram to run an ad for an experiment! but as i said, the app suggested a monetary amount and duration, so i just went with what they told me.

and then i did it!! but after a full day of the promotion, the insights tab told me that only TEN PERCENT of the folks who had visited the photo had been from the promotion, so i shut it down before i wasted more of my money, haha. as of now, the stats on it look like this:

since i interrupted the promotion, i can’t see the insights from it, but i assume that’s the “other.” so maybe i jumped the gun! but until i’m really depending on growing my following for something in particular instead of just curiosity or vanity, i don’t really have a reason to try to increase it.

i get asked pretty frequently how to get a following on instagram and to be honest, i still don’t know. my follower count hasn’t gone up or down by more than a few ticks in more than two years. i guess people follow and unfollow me evenly enough that the number just appears to stay the same.

i am super grateful that some of my followers have been around for years now. they’ve seen me go through highs and very low lows, but stood by me all the same. would i like more followers? sure! everyone wants to be liked. but it’s more important to me to be authentic, and that’s what i’ve always been focused on. if i don’t feel like posting for a few days, i don’t. if i’m upset about something, i’ll rant about it on my story. there is very little i don’t share, which is occasionally gets me anonymous hate or weird comments, but the good far outweighs the bad. i love y’all right back!!

okay. i don’t know if this interested anyone but me, but i wanted to talk about it! so i did typical.

k