Advertising on Facebook has become relatively easy but the same cannot be said about Instagram yet. It is quite straightforward to buy likes to increase Facebook fans but how do you do the same on Instagram?
Buying fake followers (or robots) aside, the answer is “no” if you are looking for a direct advertising solution. While Facebook is a commercial platform, Instagram on another hand is meant for interesting content curation.
We don’t foresee Facebook will make the “increase Instagram followers” objective available anytime soon, Instagram will be (should be) kept for the way it is.
But what if you are running a nice brand with solid content, what can you do to boost your content exposure and increase the chance of acquiring new Instagram followers?
While you can create an ad or boost post via Facebook Ads Manager, it will however appear as a “dark post”, which means the post is hidden from your Instagram profile.
What we suggest here is to promote an existing post using your Instagram app on mobile, as you can direct the clicks to your Instagram profile page. Hopefully, your target audience will find your content interesting and then follow you on Instagram!
Of course, you have to make sure that your Instagram profile page is interesting enough before you follow the steps below. It is always about the nice quality content on Instagram, don’t attempt anything else.
Step 1: Select the post to promote
First of all, fire the Instagram app on your mobile and go to the post you intend to boost, tap on the “Promote” button.
Step 2: Select a promotion goal
Choose the promotion goal or objective, there are 3 options available:
- More Profile Visits: To grow your presence on Instagram
- More Website Traffic: To drive traffic to your website
- More Promotion Views: To promote to a broad audience (higher impressions, lesser clicks)
We are going to select “More Profile Visits” if you wish to boost Instagram followers.
Step 3: Select the target audience
There are 3 target audience options for you to choose from:
- Automatic: This is an audience similar to your Instagram followers
- Local: You can target the audience based on a specific location
- Manual: You can define location, interest, age & gender.
Let’s select “Manual” in this case, especially if you are creating an Instagram ad for the first time. The audience you have created will appear under the “Your Audiences” section making it easier for your next ad creation.
Step 4: Define a new audience
If you select “Manual” in the previous step, you will be prompted with this screen as shown above.
Name the audience for your own reference, and set the location, age & gender range of the audience you wish to target. Tap on Interests for the next step.
Step 5: Define target interests
This is where you can enter a couple of interests, for example, “Cooking”, “Recipes” to target audiences who love to cook.
Kindly take note that these values can be modified and refined later in Facebook Ads Manager, as shown in the section near the end of this article.
Step 6: Set budget & duration
Set your budget in local currency and duration, do take note that the campaign will run continuously for x number of day(s) you set.
Head over to Facebook Ads Manager if you need to fine-tune the budget and duration details.
Step 7: Payment & confirmation
Then, you will be led to the last page for a final review before confirmation. Remember to “Preview Promotion” to check how your ad would look with the call-to-action button.
Also, double-check the payment method as you can change it to the same funding source of your ad account in the Ads Manager. Refer to the section right after this if you are unsure of how to do this.
Tap “Create Promotion” if everything is good to go, and you are done!
How to change Instagram payment settings?
In your Instagram app, go to “Settings” and tap on “Promotion Payments” under “Business Settings”, the screen below will be prompted.
Tap on “Facebook Ad Account” and you will be able to change the ad account tied to your Instagram campaign. You can also change the payment method directly on this screen.
How to change the target audience for Instagram-promoted posts using Ads Manager?
Similar to boosting posts using the Facebook app, there are limitations on what you can do with the Instagram app, especially on the target audience.
If you have tied the “Facebook Ad Account” in the steps above, just head over to your Ads Manager by using a desktop.
Go to the campaign you have just set up via the Instagram app, and you can edit the audience details as shown in the screenshot above.
You can set language parameters that are not available via the Instagram app, and also fine-tune the interests of your target audience.
Remember to set this right after you create the Instagram promotions so that you are targeting the right audience throughout the campaign.
How much is the cost per new Instagram follower?
During or after the campaign concludes, you can always go back to the Instagram post and tap on “View Insights” to check campaign performance.
While you can refer to the metrics like impressions and reach, do pay special attention to “Follows” if your objective is to increase Instagram followers.
If we refer to the screenshot above, there are 196 new followers with RM30 spent, which costs around RM0.15 per new Instagram follower.
We have executed a couple of campaigns ranging from lower to higher cost per new Instagram follower, so it really depends on the quality, relevancy of your Instagram account and content to your target audience.
One thing is for sure, you are more likely to gain genuine Instagram followers who are interested in your brand or content, not the fake ones to brag about your followers count.
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