Add 10K Followers Per Week On Instagram, Without Buying Them

Gaining followers on social media can sometimes feel like getting stuck on a hamster wheel — a whole lot of effort to get nowhere. Chris Do, of The Futur, aims to make that effort pay off for you and help you launch your social media following into the stratosphere by adding 10,000 followers per week — without buying them. 

Hosting a live session at Adobe Max, Do discusses how he challenged his professional network — and himself — to add 10,000 Instagram followers in two weeks. The math was daunting. He'd have to post twice a day and gain 400+ followers on every post to reach the ambitious goal. 

Do breaks down for his audience how to take advantage of social media algorithms, while sparing us the technical details, and he describes how to find a target audience and align your content with their interests. He also discusses the classic marketing strategy of AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and how it relates to Instagram, specifically, and social media generally. 

The challenge portion of Do's experiment might be the most essential as it forces creators to focus on providing content to grow their social media following. As most of us know, it's easy to let life get in the way of posting on social media and research indicates that regular posting is crucial to social media success. 

Is your follower count where you want it to be? Try out some of the strategies Do recommends and let us know how it works out for you in the comments below. 

Brian Pernicone's picture

Brian Pernicone grew up admiring the coastal waters of New England and that influence is evident in much of his work, which focuses primarily on coastal landscapes, boats, New England wildlife, and water sports.

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28 Comments

Eww

There's actually some really good information in here, but unfortunately I think most people will be turned off by the preposterous premise.

Is it preposterous if the results are real? During this period to which I refer to in the video, I was averaging 10k+ followers per week.

That's nice.

Who cares. Not to be 'that guy'.... but this is the problem today with these fantasy world social media platforms. Chasing followers and likes. How about taking that wasted time trying to gain self worth and followers and instead grow your own website, improve in your craft and grow an email list to create your own little 'tribe'. Sad, wasting away all that time growing someone elses platform....

YouTubers / "educators" are snake-oil salesmen. Buy my tutorial for just the low low price $99 (valued at €500 by me!)

Their job is to create content to lure people. They are rarely ever successful at what they preach as its not their business model.

Johnny, I think your general concern is pretty valid. There are many people out there who use information based video to sell something and are making money off of people in dire need of help. Most of the content is pretty surface level stuff.

Not sure if you've watched this video, but I'm just doing my best to share what I know and what has worked. It's a "click-bait" style title because that's how the algorithm will see you. Wish this wasn't the case.

Well this have nothing to do with photography, his "instagram" is only some cheesy self help phrases.

I made no promises about this helping photographers specifically. the content I write is designed to help people in simple, easy to understand ways. perhaps you are more advanced than the audience I attract.

Serious question, why would I want a huge Instagram following if I'm not selling prints, or trying to be an influencer. I ask because if your photo business comes locally to your area, having a million followers doesn't mean much since 99.99% of those will never be clients. I do head shots, my hobby is nature photography, and I for the life of me cant figure out why I would put any effort into a large social following for my head shot work.

You know that's just a made up number to represent the fact that most, if not all, won't be clients. And the amount of effort to get those "100 clients" would be better spent almost anywhere else.

You for real? The point was, the amount of time it takes to build a massive fuckin following, is there any reason why a business who operates on local customers, to spend that time building that following?

Also, based on his strategy, 10k per week, you'd need 100 weeks, or two years just to develop 100 clients. That's pretty awful

You don't think that growing your following online can affect your business locally? Those are real people and some of them might live in your area. Besides, having a large following online may sway some to want to work with you, especially if they're models looking to grow their own following.

With the amount of work the video talks about, and for the length of time one would need to grow to a point where you hit enough people to really affect your local growth, I just question the ROI on time and effort. I'm not saying it's not worth it, I'm questioning the value vs putting in the same effort locally.

I totally understand this is a no brainer if you're selling products, any products. The ROI is through the roof. I'm coming from a place where 100% of my business lives within 20 miles of me, and targeting people who need head shots and portraits in my area, on instagram, is extremely tough.

I'm considering Linkedin to be a better option for local business, but I'm very uneducated on how Linkedin works.

Valid points, but really it's up to every photographer to evaluate their own business model and decide where their efforts are most likely to produce the highest ROI. What works for one photographer may not be relevant to another. A family portrait photographer may not need to reach a global audience, while a landscape photographer who lives in remote Alaska might find more success by utilizing social media.

Also, maybe a photographer doesn't need to gain 10K followers per week, but could apply these principles to growing their audience by 100 followers per week, without doing as much work. Knowing the quirks of the platform and how to use them to your advantage is good information, no matter how many followers you aim to acquire or how much work you want to put in.

Hi Joe. They paid a very handsome price to learn what I shared. They paid zero dollars. The video was posted on an open platform which also cost nothing.

"it's easy to let life get in the way of posting on social media" What a backwards way of living if thats how you live it.

some good info in there..... But.... very much focussed on graphic design, using multiple slides for story telling.. quotes.. ideas.. a little clickbait-ish.. with "check the next slide/post to see what happens".
which is a different animal all together.

It's not really about photography and single images, etc.

that is correct Steve. Most of our audience is graphic designers. I've been thinking about how to apply the same approach for photographers. It's a tough thing to crack but I think it's possible. The point is to get your work seen so playing nice with what platforms want to see is part of the puzzle.

The principles really apply across many disciplines, not just graphic design. Given that many photographers use social media, in general, and Instagram, specifically, to market their work, the video is relevant to many of the readers here at Fstoppers, though certainly not all of them.

I'd suggest showing process as part of the 9 images in the carousel. document how you did so that it doesn't create a ton of extra work.

Yeah. Nah.