8 Instagram Growth Hacks — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:01] sharing with you eight secret or underrated features that are hardly used difference in your growth, [music] views, or engagement. Now, people are always looking for the holy grail and the secret cheat codes to blowing up and

[00:14] I'm going to share with you in today's episode might not be exactly that, these things that you either haven't heard of before, haven't used recently, let's not waste any time. The first one is broadcast channels. Broadcast

[00:30] channels are essentially one-to-many group chats where when you create one of whatever group of followers you want to set it to, can join the channel. And fun channel, it actually sends out a push notification to all of your existing

[00:45] followers inviting them to join the channel. But like I said, it's a one-to-many group chat, and so the power of that is that every person who joins the group can see the messages that you send. They can react or vote or like or

[00:59] emoji respond to any of the messages that you send, but they can't actually send messages themselves. That is a powerful tool. It's quite similar to email marketing but on your Instagram. It's a way that you can send broadcasts

[01:12] or messages out to tens, maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of people if that's broadcast channel, and get their attention in the place where people which is the direct messages. People spend more time in the DMs than they do

[01:27] stories, and so you can meet them where they are and grab their attention in a on Instagram, all you have to do is go to your Instagram direct messages, click on that little new message button in the upper right-hand corner, and then select

[01:41] making your broadcast channels better are: Number one, start with a clear purpose. Have an intent behind your broadcast channel. Basically, what are all the messages going to be about? Why should someone join? What's the benefit

[01:55] clear, that will help you with the second tip, which is coming up with an attention-grabbing name. Mine is called Breaking Instagram News. My third tip for your broadcast channel is rarely sell {slash} rarely send your own posts

[02:10] lot of people make when they start a broadcast channel is they just use it as another way to tell people, "I made a new post. Go check it out. I have a new feel like they're just being sold to. It's like if you flip to a TV channel

[02:23] wouldn't watch that TV channel for very long. Tip number four, similar to tip number three, is don't over send. This is a broadcast channel. You don't want announcement every single day of the week, or even probably multiple days of

[02:37] the week, because if people miss consecutive messages, then they're going to feel overwhelmed like they have to catch up. I'm sure you've experienced your phone and all of a sudden there's 47 or 407 unread messages all in a group

[02:51] really want to spend the next hour of my life scrolling through all these and catching up?" And so, prevent that by not over sending in the broadcast channel. Or, tip number five, use the unsend feature. This is something that I

[03:05] do all the time. I send a message in my broadcast channel maybe once or twice a week, but if there's messages that when I go to send a new one, I look back and important anymore. That was not really relevant. That's old news. That's a sale

[03:19] that I was promoting that ended." I will long press on the message and unsend it. message, they're not overwhelmed by having 14 to get through, they only have being said, again, broadcast channels can be a very powerful way to grab your

[03:34] audience's attention, to let them know when you do have a sale, or when you do to see. It can be a great way to just engage your audience and create kind of of followers. And again, it can be really powerful for increasing your

[03:48] views. The second underrated feature, or under utilized feature is collaborations. Collaborations represent less than 3% of all posts on Instagram, and yet collab posts are consistently the best performing kind of post. The

[04:03] best kind of post on Instagram is not a reel, not a carousel, not a story, it's a collab. Because collabs basically take two audiences and combine them into one, potential number of viewers. I think there's two main reasons why we don't

[04:18] see more collabs on Instagram. Number one, people think collabs are just between creator and brand, and that couldn't be farther from the truth. In Instagram, I posted about, "Hey, let's all help each other find collabs.

[04:31] Comment below and you can find someone to collab with." I'll even link that that you can look that post up and go to the comment section and look for people to collab with. But what I noticed in scrolling through those comments was a

[04:43] lot of times people were like, "I'm a creator in insert niche and I'm looking to collab with brands in my niche." I'm a fitness creator and I'm looking to collab with fitness brands. That's not necessarily the only way to go about

[04:56] collaborations. I think what you're thinking of, if that's how you approach collabs, is brand partnerships or brand sponsorships or brand deals, different names for the same thing. But that's not necessarily what a collab is. A collab

[05:08] is just two people posting together, essentially. And so instead of looking for brands and businesses to collaborate with, I want you to look for other creators who are just like you to collaborate with. The only two criteria

[05:21] in a similar niche, it doesn't have to be the exact same, but similar, and number two, they have a similar amount of engagement. Even if they have way they have a similar number of average views or average engagement, that can be

[05:35] fact, some of my best performing posts collaborations with my quote unquote compendlers, because I'm a firm believer that all ships rise together. And so when I collab with Marketing Harry on a

[05:48] carousel or when I collab with Modern Millie on a reel, it has serious viral potential and we have both of our creative minds coming together to educate, to entertain, or to teach our audience something. Feature number three

[06:01] that is slept on on Instagram is trial reels. Now, you do have to have 1,000 followers to get access to trial reels, but for those of you who are like, "Uh I have trial reels." If you have less than 1,000 followers, every reel that you

[06:15] post is basically a trial reel. Every reel that you post is likely going to reach a significant portion of people who are not existing followers. And so, approach every reel that you post as a trial reel. But, for those of us who do

[06:29] have trial reels, some general guidelines is that the max that you can post per day varies from account to account with the low-end max being five and the high-end max being 25 trial reels per day. Additionally, you can no

[06:42] longer duplicate trial reels. So, if you've already posted something as a normal reel or you've already posted it as a trial reel, you cannot post that a second time again as a trial reel. But, there are some cheeky little ways that

[06:54] you can work around this. You can slightly zoom in on your reel by only like 5% and Instagram won't necessarily pick up that it is a duplicate trial that will get around the duplicate detection system or you can speed it up

[07:10] by just like half a percent or down by a percent and your video will still be talking in slow motion. It also won't be like you're talking super fast. It will duplicate detection system won't pick up on it. But, when used correctly, trial

[07:25] So, I will link up down in the description below uh an entire episode latest tips, techniques, and strategies for making the most of them. Slept on

[07:37] hack number four is what I like to call upcycling. Upcycling isn't necessarily a feature that you can do on Instagram, but it is the strategy that I teach of taking any post, every post that you have ever made and posting it again a

[07:50] second time 90 days later and then posting it a third time 90 days after that. Should you only upcycle content that has performed well? No, because I the first time and the second time and then the third time it goes viral.

[08:05] goes viral the first time and then it flops the second and third time. You just never know. So, give every post three opportunities. Post it three times. Now, unfortunately, on Instagram, this isn't very easy to do. Yes, there's

[08:19] we're talking about here and that doesn't achieve the same results. So, you're left with either option A, option number one would be like save all of your videos and all of your reels in your camera roll and just like have a

[08:32] going to go back to your camera roll and find that old video and post it again and find the caption. It's really overwhelming or you can do option B, what I've been doing for five years, which is use Metricool, today's video

[08:45] sponsor, to duplicate your content and schedule it for the future. And I've got Metricool, which is the scheduling tool that I have been using to schedule all of my posts for the last five years. You can finally do the number one thing that

[08:59] everyone has been asking for, which is you can access Instagram's music library right in Metricool. For years, I've been telling people, "Schedule all of your And then people will be like, "Well, what about that one trending audio I

[09:13] specific audio, that one specific song that has to go in this video or else the I do there?" And I've been like, "Well, you could try this workaround. You could schedule it in Instagram, da da da da da." Not anymore. Now, you can schedule

[09:26] it in Metricool and you can attach the audio from Instagram right then and basic subscription, which is free to use and allows you to schedule a certain number of posts per month at no cost, or you can try out their pro features,

[09:40] their premium features with code Brock, my name, b r o c k, and I will put that in the show notes as well down below. But, like I said, it's what I've been also what I use to schedule some of my stories. It's what I use to schedule my

[09:54] trial reels. And now I can finally add Instagram audio right then and there. But, the way this relates to the idea of upcycling is from now on, whenever you make a post that is evergreen, that is a post that would make sense today, would

[10:08] make sense a few months from now, it's not like time bound, it's not like, uh, specific event that's occurring, you can, as soon as you schedule it, or as soon as you make it, press duplicate, and then click forward by a few months,

[10:21] like 90 days from now, and then pick a new date in the future. That's exactly what I do every single time I make a new post, and then I just spot check once a week. So, every single Saturday or Sunday I can just go in, I can see what

[10:33] days. I can make sure that they all make are redundant or repetitive, or none of them are just outdated. I can swap those out if they are. I can move them to a week in the future. I could delete the

[10:46] post. I can edit it, whatever I want to do. But, nine times out of 10, when I do. But, nine times out of 10, when I look at my week, I already have 14 to 21 posts pre-scheduled, regardless of what week it is in the future. The fifth

[10:58] Instagram that can be a serious game changer for increasing your views and engagement is what is called a linked reel. A linked reel, unfortunately, is not the ability to add a clickable link to your reels, but instead, it's the

[11:11] ability to add an existing reel that you or someone else has posted onto your reel, there will be a little tiny window, and if someone taps on that, it will take you to the other reel. Now,

[11:24] someone else's reels, but what we're talking about here is promoting your own your own reels. And so, four different creative ways that I've seen Linked to Reels used, and they are number one, creating kind of like a menu, saying

[11:38] like, "Hey, here are my five most recent Reels. Here are my four Reels that are relating to X topic." and putting that as the entire Reel. Basically, this Reel exists as a billboard to highlight these other four Reels. Idea number two is a

[11:52] talking about a topic, maybe at the end of your Reel, you could say, "Here's three other Reels that go deeper on this topic. Here's two other Reels where I talk about this idea in more depth." Idea number three, similarly, is next

[12:05] steps. "Hey, you just got to the end of this educational Reel, what should your click on this Reel and go to the next Reel so they can continue learning. They can progress through this journey. Maybe it's a multi-part series. Speaking of

[12:18] series, that is number four. You can link together Reels as part of a series and create kind of like a playlist by using this Linked to Reels feature. The sixth underrated hack to growing on Instagram is comment reply Reels. From

[12:32] now on, whenever you get a comment, specifically, a comment with a question, with a hot take, or even a troll comment on one of your posts, I don't want you to just reply to the comment on the post. I want you to click that little

[12:44] tiny camera button that pops up when you tap reply, and I want you to reply with a Reel. This does a few things. Number one, it's very engaging. It's very dynamic, and it's unique from what we're used to seeing in your Reels. Number

[12:57] two, it's an excuse to talk about whatever that comment is referencing dreaded lines on all of Instagram, which is, "A lot of you have been asking. I You don't have to say that anymore. You can just point to the comment and

[13:12] helps train your audience, because when they see that you are responding to comments with an entire Reel, it makes them feel like there's more of a happening, and it increases is likelihood that they will comment on

[13:26] that Reel and any reels that you post in the future. And then the seventh secret Instagram feature that you can use to boost your views and engagement is the add yours sticker on Instagram stories. When you use the add yours sticker or

[13:39] any version of the add yours stickers because there are quite literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of different varieties, Instagram gives you and it pushes your story out to more people. That being both more followers

[13:52] and this is actually a way that you can reach more non-followers with Instagram stories, which is usually something that's rare or almost impossible to do. And while you can technically create your own add yours sticker, it's best to

[14:04] use an already existing sticker. So, all you have to do to access it is open up your Instagram stories and then swipe up or tap on the camera roll button in the bottom left-hand corner and then rather than selecting a photo or video from

[14:16] your camera roll, up the top of the screen select the button that says add yours and then you'll see quite literally hundreds of templates of might not be applicable to your

[14:28] them aren't going to be applicable to your business or something that you want to post about, but if you find one that you could add yours to, that you could add your own version of, that is one that I would recommend using and add

[14:40] yours stickers kind of operate the way hashtags used to. And what I mean by that is when you use an add yours sticker, number one, you kind of lump your story in or categorize your story with everyone else who has used that

[14:54] reach people who are using that same sticker or to get discovered by people who are looking at other people who have used that sticker. But additionally, preferential treatment. Like I said, it kind of boosts your views or helps you

[15:09] reach more of your followers because they want to reward you for using this feature. It's a very interactive feature and if you select an add yours sticker that your followers see and And they want to create their own, they want to

[15:22] add their own version of this story, then it can really have a multiplicative effect and your Instagram story views can really skyrocket because of it. The eighth secret feature that I see hardly anyone using, but it can be a really

[15:34] powerful way to boost your Instagram is what's called early access reels. Early access reels are basically secret reels that are only visible to your followers. So basically, the way that early access reels work is that when you post them,

[15:48] followers, but if any non-follower clicks on your page, it will be kind of blurred out and it will have a call to action encouraging them to follow you in think, well, why would someone want to see the reel? Wouldn't that only be

[16:03] popular if I was like already a celebrity? Maybe, but I think a really powerful hack for early access reels is that if you ever have a reel that's going viral, or you ever have an influx of profile visits, people visiting your

[16:16] page, you can post a few of these early access reels and it can kind of make it like, "Ooh, I want to see what these reels are." It makes the people who are visiting your page more likely to want to click follow because curiosity killed

[16:29] the cat, right? It makes them curious to want to see what it is you're posting. existing followers feel bit more special, a little bit more exclusive reels before anyone else. If you learned anything new in today's episode, don't

[16:42] forget to hit that thumbs up button and I want to let you know that I literally, personally, me, read every single comment that is left on this page. So, if you want to help this page and help my mental health and help me enjoy

[16:55] making these episodes for you, feel free to leave a comment. If you have any sort that you want me to cover in the future, any topics you want me to go deeper on, and I would love to chat with you down there because again, it's not an AI

[17:09] responding, it's not a member of our team, it is literally me reading and thank you so much for watching today, and as always, [music] happy networking.