This is an odd title around here, right? Oh well. Ever since I got my iPhone on christmas I have been an avid instagram user and the last few months I took it up on myself to discover the mysterious laws of instagram follows. So now I’m gonna rant about it.
Turns out you don’t really need to be an exceptionally good iphoneographer to have loads of followers. I’ll give you a few examples:
weloveunicorns.com – Beautiful photos and Dulce is a beautiful person. Same goes for Diana on everydaystories.net.
The Barcelona based couple that takes wonderful photos, salvalopez.com and anacuba.com.
Two professional and Portugal based photographers whose photos always make me wonder if they have filters for awesomeness on their eyes. Honestly, I usually walk around the same places and never see anything interesting and then they come along and bam. Awesomeness. davidclifford.net and xanato.net.
{side note: surprisingly all these six photographers also follow me back, and when they like one of my photos I get so happy I do a little dance!}
They are all amazing photographers (incidentally they are all professional photographers, meaning they take photos for a living) and have less followers than I have. Why? How? by all means, I am in *no way* better at photography than any of these people, nor do I consider myself a good photographer, or even a photographer… but I have made my way around instagram on different ways than they have. I’ll get to it in a minute.
You can also find the good photographers who by being known for their website or because they just are that good or because their photos are the new trendy stuff, they have a ton amount of folowers without having to do much. Few more examples are:
Alice is the girl behind lingered upon, a blog that I have recommended before because she has beautiful photos and is just a really nice person. Her blog gets tons of visitors everyday, so it’s only natural that at least some of those followers follow her on IG. And of course when you start getting some attention it’s a snow ball effect.
Dearleila (this is a cute coincidence between these last users, the dear before their names!) is none other than Leila Peterson. If you check her website you’ll know why she has so many followers (hint: her photos are stunning).
Kei Yamazaki is a japanese designer who only takes photos of her breakfasts. Why all the fuss? Have you seen her breakfasts? yeah…
Dearclaudia, a portuguese girl now based in Berlin, takes simply beautiful photos. I know she still has a little to go to reach the 100k mark that other users have, but she has reached 1000 followers with just posting beautiful photos… and that’s what I admire.
Now we can get into the details. None of these four IG users use any kind of tags. Meaning they don’t actually promote their stuff, people orbit their way because they are good and their photos are interesting. Your photos can be also interesting but you may haven’t yet found the right audience for them. So start tagging your photos. Get them out in the IG world for everyone to see!
I have also experimented with tags. I started off by using just a few tags, like vsco, vscocam (because that’s the app I use for editing) and other tags that would apply to the picture, like ‘breakfast’ ‘food’ if it was a photo of my breakfast.
I did get a few more followers, but it wasn’t anything near 500 followers or more (I did get a lot more likes on my pictures, though)! There had to be something else you could do to attract people to see your feed and actually follow you because they thought you were interesting enough. Then I started to try to figure out which tags were the more popular, and alas, there’re lots of websites that can tell you which tags are it, mainly webstagram and quite a few others. But if you don’t want to spend a shit load of time going through all those tags and writing it on the photo you just uploaded on IG, just use the instagram tags web app. Basically it generates the most popular tags and you can copy and paste it on IG…
But tagging will not get you more and more followers. It brings attention to your photos so you will get more likes but not that many followers. So what does?
The double tap secret. Yes. All you really have to do is go around and like other people’s photos. Pic a tag and see which photos you like and start double tapping on them. If you like pictures indiscriminately you are sure to get many followers. But I don’t advise that. Just look around and like the pictures that you actually enjoy. That’s the way to go.
Conclusion: to get more followers like other people photos, engage with them, and tag your photos. Basically put yourself out there.
Getting more and more followers on IG is not a bad deal! It’s a great way to promote your website, your work, or your blog… but it’s also not a reflection of what people are as photographers. The 15 year old girl who takes the same self portrait everyday in a skimpy dress is bound to get more followers that the 30 year old photographer with his landscapes shots. That’s just how it works. It’s life!
Hope you enjoyed this one… and for those who didn’t I’ll be back to normal tomorrow. Have a nice wednesday!
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