I want to let you know that buying likes, or automation (bots) is never the way to go to the explore page! It’s not worth the money! You really should never ever buy likes! Because a lot of services promise real likes and that you will hit the explore page and the engagement on your account will be sky high, but this isn’t true at all. Most of the accounts are fake and it’s a temporary boost for your account. I will tell you what you should do instead!
I will explain you how to understand the algorithm works.
Instagram wants to make sure that their users are on Instagram as long as possible. (When you click a link, you are still on the IG app). So to make sure you stay around for a long time, Instagram is tracking how much users are engaging with a certain account, and when more accounts engage with this account, the account will be higher up in the news feed. (So if you like a picture, you give Instagram a signal that you like this account and this way you will be longer on the platform)
Instagram also uses this information to show you similar accounts on the explore page, because you showed that you like the account. This will make sure you are longer on the platform. Get it now? ;)
Second of all Instagram has a niche categoriser which means that when you start your Instagram account the algorithm will start tracking all your actions in order to categorise your account:
- what posts you comment on
- what posts you view
- what posts you like
- what people like your post
- what people comment on your post
- who you follow
- who follow you
- what type of content you post (this is calculated by their pixel calculator, so Instagram actually knows if you post a Lamborghini or a lipstick or anything)
- what type of captions you use
- what hashtags you use
- and a lot of other things
All this information is being used to categorise your account and put you in a certain niche (for those of you who don’t know what a niche is, a niche is a specific type of something like luxury, travel, photography etc.) You have 2 types of accounts; instagram users and instagram influencers.
These 2 types of accounts are put into the same niche box if they have the same interest, so if you’re a luxury Influencer you want to end up in the luxury niche box in order to get seen by your targeted audience that’s been proven to like luxury content. So what you want to be doing if you’re an influencer:
- Like, Comment & view content within your niche
- Follow other influencers in your niche
- Post content in your niche
- Use hashtags in your niche
If you do this right Instagram will categorise your account in the niche box you want to be in order to get engagement from your targeted audience, because when your targeted audience (the users) starts engaging with your account your account will spread on the explore page of the niche you’re in.
Third thing I want to discuss is getting on the explore page. Many people find this difficult to do, but there is a secret formula you want to be using and it’s very simple.
In order to hit the explore page and reach your targeted audience there’s a few things you want to do/get:
- Get influencers in your niche to engage with your content, here’s an example: If you have a luxury account and you get liked by another luxury account that for example has 100,000 followers and 20,000 users that are actively engaging with that account, the post that got liked by that account will show up on the explore page of their 20,000 active users, however if the account for example likes 1,000 post per day of luxury accounts those 20,000 people will get divided by those 1,000 posts which means your content will only get shown to 20 people hence you want to get as many accounts in your niche to engage with your content so your content shows up on the explore page of as many people in your niche as possible.
Now you got on the explore page however, there are so many posts the user can choose from so you want to be using viral content. But you might be asking, how do I find viral content?
- Find a page in your niche that’s already performing really good then calculate the average likes of their recent 12 posts, so for example if 12 posts got a total of 94,547 likes you do: 94,547 likes/12 posts = 7,878 likes on average, now put 30% on top of that so 7,878 x 1,30 = 10,242 likes… Find all pictures with more than 10,242 on that page because your targeted audience already showed you that they like that picture more than the other pictures which gives you a higher chance of going viral.
So why should you never buy likes!
The average account you get likes from when buying likes has 100 ‘followers’, ZERO engagement, super inactive, like 10000 posts every day which causes them to be categorised in 100’s of niches because they like so much different content in different niches every day… Just to come back to all the sections above and put it all together:
- Getting likes from those fake accounts screws the categorisation of you account and makes it harder for Instagram to put you in the correct niche box and you won’t be able to reach your targeted niche box to get the engagement from your targeted audience.
- You’ll never ever hit explore page by using these likes and here’s why: These accounts have ZERO active users and they like thousands of posts every day, so lets say they do have 2 active users and they like 5,000 posts every day which means your post will be on 2/5000 = 0,0004 people’s explore page IF they are in the same niche box as you which they’re not so just equals 0,0000000000000000000001 people….
- it hurts your goodness score because Instagram tracks EVERYTHING, Instagram literally stalks you… Instagram actually knows when an account is fake and it also knows when you’re receiving fake likes which causes your goodness score (score that gets calculated by instagram by tracking all negative and positive activity data on your account) to go down drastically because Instagram doesn’t like fake likes…. So what does it mean if your goodness score goes down, it means that Instagram will favour other accounts in your niche over yours, which causes that the audience you actually want to target to end up on a competitors page…
Conclusion of this: you should never ever buy likes and don’t believe people that tell you they will help.
So how do you want to actually get to the explore page, it’s quite simple:
- Get categorised in the right niche box using the methods described above
- Get likes from accounts in your niche (by getting into engagement groups with accounts in your niche, if you need help with those engagement groups, contact me :))
- Be consistent, so post on the same times every day so your audience know when to expect a post from you
How to get most engagement from the explore page:
- Post Viral pictures and use engaging captions with a good CTA (‘click to action’, so put something in the caption like tag 3 friends … )
- For content creators: Find an account that is similar to yours and that is already performing really good, like Picasso said: good artist copy, great artist steal, I’m not saying you should steal their content, but steal their content strategy and make it even better
Why didn’t I mention hashtags:
- Hashtags don’t get you to the explore page, hashtags are a tool Instagram uses to categorise your account which eventually plays a big part into getting to the explore page and you can leverage hashtags in order to make people find your content through them searching on certain keywords in Instagram’s search bar. Make sure when you’re using hashtags that you don’t use the biggest possible when you’re just starting out and have low engagement, see it like this: Using big hashtags is like whispering your message during the Super Bowl, no one is going to hear you, same goes for when you don’t have a lot of engagement, your post will float down the hashtag feed within seconds, use smaller hashtags when you don’t have a lot of engagement on your posts yet in order to get some attention to your post.
All credits to Sem Buit and his team! <3
posted by SevenForces