We’ll show you how to attract followers to your blog or commercial accounts using official Instagram ads for those who haven’t worked with targeted ads before.
Facebook believes that attracting followers is not a priority for marketers. The social network believes in the power of algorithmic feed and calls for paying attention to reach, not the number of followers. Therefore, the tools for promoting an Instagram account are so inconvenient, there are not enough statistics and metrics.
And while Facebook’s algorithms are right, followers still have value – even though not all of them see posts in the feed, but still, the more followers there are, the more potential free coverage you can get. Also, the following expresses loyalty, and working with an audience that is already definitely interested in your profile is much easier, even if you will post in the feed.
Profile or Advertising
The first choice at the start of the promotion is to launch targeted Instagram ads from your profile or a full Facebook advertising account. The first option seems simpler, but it significantly reduces functionality.
We recommend doing this:
In your Facebook advertising account: prepare your audiences and launch campaigns to attract followers to your profile.
On Instagram profile: raise posts on already created audiences.
How to manage your Facebook account from your phone?
The prospect of working through Facebook is inconvenient for those who are used to doing everything from mobile devices. The Facebook advertising application will solve the problem. It doesn’t have such wide opportunities as the desktop version, but you can quickly manage advertising campaigns – turn off unnecessary ones, change budgets, adjust the display schedule and much more.
How to exclude your followers?
Users that follow bloggers complain that they see ads in the feed. To avoid this, configure audience exclusion.
Go to the Facebook advertising account, go to the Audiences section in the main menu.
You need to create an Individualized Audience with users who interacted with your account.
It’s impossible to exclude followers, so you’ll have to exclude all people who have logged into your account or seen publications (in ads or recommendations). In some cases, this is a significant minus – for example, followers who are already familiar with the profile would be more willing to start following. Also, when increasing the coverage of posts, you need to remind yourself and followers who missed the publication because the news feed algorithms did not add your post to the results. You can buy 20 real likes on Instagram to make your post more popular.
Click Create Audience – Custom Audience. Here, in the sources, select Instagram Business Profile.
Select the type of interaction (logged into the profile, interacted with the publication and advertising, sent messages, saved publications).
This audience should be excluded from those audiences to which you launch the targeted advertising. An audience can be created in Advance in the same section, or when creating a campaign, at the level of the Ad Group (in the same place where you specify all the targeting – gender, age, place of residence and interests).
To create an audience in the same section, click Create an audience – Saved audience.
Here, in the Custom Audience section, click Exclude, and in the drop-down list, select the created audience of people interacting with your Instagram profile.
How to create an audience in Facebook where you can launch ads from Instagram?
All the audience created inside Facebook will not be displayed in the Instagram account. Through it, you can only choose the audience that you created in it. But in the opposite direction, it works differently – audiences created on Instagram are displayed in the Facebook advertising dashboard.
Therefore, to exclude followers when launching targeted advertising from Instagram, you need to edit the audience. To make this possible, the campaign should not be launched at the moment. We explain the steps:
- Go to Instagram, select a post for promotion, click the Promote button.
- Go to the Audience section. Select Create your own.
- Enter the necessary parameters, click “Finish”. You will be returned to the general campaign settings page.
- Now, without clicking the “Create Promotion” button, which will launch the campaign, exit this section (click on the arrow in the upper left corner).
- Go to the Audiences section of the Facebook advertising account. Here you will see the created audience, marked Created with Instagram.
- Click on the name of the audience, then click on the “Edit” button. And exclude the audience interacting with your user profile, as described above.
- Now you can return to set up targeted advertising in your Instagram profile and complete it.
How to create a Facebook follower campaign?
To test different audiences, run a campaign to attract followers in your advertising account.
Purpose
Facebook does not have a following goal, so use the Traffic goal – the system will optimize your ads to get the maximum number of conversions to your profile. And the conversion to following will depend on the quality of your account.
Target
After choosing a goal, set up your target audience: choose gender, age, interests of your potential followers.
On Instagram, you can’t follow followers of another account, even if you have a list of id or nicknames. Therefore, work with the interests of the audience.
To better understand the target audience, it is important to use advanced analytics data on Instagram.
Placements
In the Placements section, select the “Edit Placements” option and leave only Instagram.
If you do not have an advertisement for the Stories format, disable it as well.
In the future, try to test different placements (launching at the same time feed + Stories, just feed, just Stories).
Budget
Indicate the amount you are willing to spend on targeted advertising. If you have a small budget for promoting on Instagram, minimize the cost of the day so that you can adjust your advertising campaign before you spend all the money.
However, setting a budget of fewer than 10 dollars is not recommended – the system simply will not have the opportunity to “promote” your ad, show it the right number of times to select an audience that wants to click.
If this is your first time setting up targeted advertising for Instagram, leave the rest of your bidding and budget options as default.
Format
Choose an advertising format – for promoting Instagram, photos or videos in the feed, photos, and videos in Stories, a carousel in Stories.
Note that the photo is shown for 7 seconds, and the video is 15, so if you do not have the opportunity to make a video, add at least a simple animation.