Instagram Follow-for-Follow Events: Legit or Too Good to Be True?
I tried it and I'm sharing the inside scoop 🤫
👋 Hey, I’m Casandra. I share research-backed business ideas to help you start and grow a business. This is a 🔒 Premium Edition 🔒 of Really Good Business Ideas.
The first rule of joining an Instagram follow-for-follow event is: don’t talk about the Instagram follow-for-follow event.
They’re secretive, and they demand loyalty! You risk being banned for life if you talk about it or join a different event. And they’re not kidding. After I joined one, I received a list of accounts I should block for going against the rules of the event.
However, after joining three successive events, I grew a secret Instagram account from 200 to nearly 2,500 real followers who engage with my content. My average engagement rate is around 3-5%, which is typical for this niche. And since I’m only creating enough mediocre content to keep the account active, these results are fantastic.
Today, I’ll share exactly how follow-for-follow events work and how you can get even better results.
What is an Instagram Follow-for-Follow Event?
An Instagram follow-for-follow event is a tactic where a large group of Instagram users agrees to follow each other in an organized, structured way.
But unlike informal Instagram follow-for-follow, it’s quite sophisticated and usually involves a large team of managers, administrators, and groups.
Informal Instagram Follow-for-Follow
Most people who have tried to grow an audience on social media have come across follow-for-follow tactics. The basic idea is this:
You follow other accounts that seem like a good fit for your target audience.
Accounts that follow accounts similar to yours.
Accounts that use specific hashtags.
Accounts that engage with specific content.
[Optional] You also engage with the accounts you follow by liking or commenting on their content.
Some accounts you follow and engage with decide to follow you back.
After some time, you unfollow the accounts that don’t follow you back and start the process over again.
I do not recommend informal follow-for-follow as a growth tactic. It’s an extremely slow way to grow, and you probably have much better things you could be doing with your time than sitting around following and unfollowing people.
Although there are some tools that can help automate this process, using them is extremely risky. They used to work quite well, but these days, Instagram can spot them easily, and you risk getting your account restricted for weeks or even banned entirely.
But an Instagram follow-for-follow event is a whole different ballgame with a higher potential reward.
Why An Instagram Follow-for-Follow Event Is Different
Unlike the informal version of follow-for-follow, an Instagram follow-for-follow event has a much higher success rate:
Everyone agrees to participate ahead of time, so they are likely to follow you back.
Participants are already aggregated for you, so you don’t need to spend time figuring out who to follow.
Participants are all from the same niche, so all the accounts you follow will be generally relevant to yours.
Because your new followers are in your niche, they’ll likely keep engaging with your content once the event ends.
But similar to informal follow-for-follow, it’s still a lot of work. You’ll need to engage with and follow hundreds or sometimes thousands of accounts over a few weeks. Then (if you care), you’ll need to spend additional time unfollowing all the accounts that didn’t complete the event.
But here’s the secret: follow-for-follow events work like a pyramid scheme. While the people at the bottom do all the work, those at the top get most of the benefit.
Follow-for-follow events are run by teams of owners, managers, and admins who don’t have to follow everyone to get followers in return. Instead, they focus on recruiting the participants for the event and running the event operations.
This means that the best way to grow using follow-for-follow events is to run your own.
Follow-for-Follow Events: A Detailed Blueprint
Today, I’m breaking down exactly how follow-for-follow events work and sharing screenshots from the ones I participated in.
Why am I taking a risk and doing this?
I have a portfolio of projects for testing different ideas and tactics. The account I used for this experiment is not directly associated with Really Good Business Ideas, so it’s unlikely that the people who ran the event read this newsletter.
Getting discovered by someone from this event and losing a test account won’t be the end of the world, but I’m still taking precautions. I’ve removed any identifying details from the screenshots, and the rest of this newsletter is paywalled, so only my inner circle of premium subscribers can access it.