It has been over a year since my last post about our gorgeous cat Sophie’s Instagram Account. We have made great strides and she is now at 42.5K Followers with a great engagement rate.

Now the question that I ask myself, how can I monetize having this many followers? We have been trying to use her power as a social media influencer to do very selective sponsored posts and reviews of cat-related products. That is all good however you can only have so many cat products before you start looking like a crazy cat person. So we opened up our very own Cat Product Store called Fancy Cat. The goal by opening this store is to be able to use Sophies Instagram account to promote our own store.

As a case study and learning experiment, I decided to see how much I could grow my cats Instagram account. Here is my current status

Growing your Instagram account is something that is not going to happen overnight, growing any type of social media is a long play.

4 Tips to Grow Your Instagram Account To Over 20k Followers

• Have a set targeted niche with a large enough audience
  • Having a very broad niche will confuse your visitors. A great example of this is if I were to take my cats Instagram and randomly switch tomorrow and start posting pictures of my car every second or third picture I will start to notice my followers decreasing. The reason for this is people who followed you because of the pictures of the cat, likely don’t want to see car pictures in their news feed and be confused why they are following them. Staying in a targeted niche is key to ensure you are providing the content your viewers are looking for.
  • Having a set targeted niche allows you to set an audience and target them through ads, engaging with their social media account and using specific hashtags.
• Don’t spam your audience.
  • No one wants to see the same person whether it be your best friend or the business down the streets post every hour. This is annoying and will get you unfollowed.
  • Ideally, you want to post somewhere between once a day to once per week
• Post Quality, not Quantity
  • If you don’t have any solid content don’t post for the sake of posting. Don’t feel you need to post every day or every week. If you have nothing to post then don’t post at all. I would way rather only post an Instagram post once per month and have them be quality pictures then to post a mediocre picture every week.
• Don’t start advertising your Instagram or following other people until you have at least 3 photos.
  • If this is a personal account you want to ensure that one of these photos is a photo that clearly shows who you are. If you follow me and I look at your profile and you have 0 posts. The chances I am going to follow you back are slim to none.