so it seems like photographers have this weird LoveHate relationship with Instagram most photographers deep down would love to have a large following have more eyeballs on their work because they know it leads to opportunity but simultaneously they hate Instagram because they believe the platform is working against them most people complain that Instagram doesn't even show their photography to their own followers and anytime in the past that I've talked about Instagram one of the biggest criticisms that I've got is that I'm out of touch with these creators my account on Instagram has over 170,000 followers and people believe that I don't have the same struggles as everyone else I can't relate to the person who has a small account who is just trying to grow and be seen but I've done something about that earlier this year at the beginning of 2024 I started a completely new Instagram account this Instagram is called Evan ramp photo and my motivation for this account was simply to share one photo every day but I thought it was a great opportunity to experience all the struggles that smaller photography accounts are having right now and my goal became to figure out how to grow this new account and solve all these problems for y'all because one of my goals with this YouTube channel is to help as many creators as possible I want to see photographers live the best life they can and if growing an audience on Instagram is part of that dream or that Vision I want to help you all make that happen now something interesting has happened with this account in under a 100 days I have managed to grow this account to over $10,000 followers and that number is even surprising to me but early on with this account I actually wasn't experiencing a lot of growth I was honestly concerned with how low my follower count was considering I have 170,000 people following me on another account but over the course of the last few months I've paid attention to certain trends that I've seen with Instagram and with the content I'm sharing and I've noticed there are some definite things you can do to help grow your small account now before we get into all these growth observations to help y'all out I have two quick housekeeping notes one is a big thank you to our sponsor Squarespace we'll talk about them a little bit later on in the video and two is the fact that I have a free starting point guide to Instagram reels for photographers in growing this new account I wanted to give back to y'all and share the format that I'm using to create these easy Instagram reels to help photographers get into reals now this will not be ready until the end of the month so if you want to get an email when that is available you can go to my website Evan ramp. com you can download the free Instagram guide which is more of a mindset guide it's the way I think about Instagram it's the philosophy that I've used to grow this new account you can download that you'll be added to a list and when that free course is available you will get an email with it it's completely free it's about an hour long I break down the mindset to scripting these reels and I also break down how to edit them and just put them all together and post them in a way that can help you get the most potential growth as possible now a quick disclaimer it is important to acknowledge the fact that I do have a large following here on YouTube and on my other Instagram account so when I launched this new Instagram I did mention the fact that I was doing this daily photo challenge here on YouTube as well as on my other Instagram now early on my account only grew by I think 1,500 to 2,000 followers it really wasn't a lot of people but you can apply that grain of salt to this entire video there was a little bit of a jump start here because people do know who I am and there's no way for me to avoid that unfortunately if I could start like a completely Incognito faceless Instagram I would but it wouldn't align with my goal of sharing a photo every day but the promotion of this page has been very minimal so the first growth observation that I noticed was the fact that when I was posting just individual photos every day it seemed like my follower count as well as my like count was staying completely stagnant it seemed like for about a month I was just getting around 300 likes on each photo sometimes it was a little lower sometimes it was a little bit higher but that was clearly this base that I had established from my previous following here on YouTube and my other Instagram honestly it's kind of pathetic that I could only get like 1,500 people to follow this new account but that is the nature of social media I guess until you prove yourself people don't really care which now that I'm thinking about it that's something that I wasn't even planning on including in this video but there is some social proof element to social media accounts the more followers you have the more important people think you are so that first couple thousand followers is definitely going to be the most difficult even if you're someone like me who already has a following people are just not going to jump on board so I completely understand anyone out there who struggling under a th000 followers that is definitely the most difficult but keep at it but anyways back to this observation so I was posting individual photos every day and I started trying to post Carousel photos and with these carousels I didn't have enough photos to post like 10 or anything crazy a lot of times it was three four maybe six at the most I think I did have one post where I included all 10 and I noticed that these Carousel posts performed much better they were getting a lot more likes and I would assume that's because Instagram was showing this post to more people because people had to spend more time on the post to scroll through the images so if you're looking to have your photography be seen by more people Carousel post is definitely a good starting point for that that's the first observation I saw but if I'm being honest these Carousel posts just boosted the engagement on posts it seemed like they got more likes maybe they got more comments but I didn't see any growth in my follower count so that prompted me to start experimenting with very simple Instagram reels and this is actually what the free course I'm making is all about it's how to create these really simple 8 to 10c Reels that can help improve your reach on Instagram and when I started posting these reels I noticed they acted as essentially a top of funnel meaning more people were finding the real just because they have more reach on Instagram and those reals were feeding people into my Carousel and my individual photo post so when I started having reals that gained a little bit of traction I started to see an uptick in the engagement on my photo post so I was no longer just getting 300 likes on photos I was getting sometimes 400 500 600 and I have to attribute that to the fact that now I was having this broader audience find my page from these very basic Instagram reels and that leads us to the third observation I've seen in growing this Instagram if you are looking to grow on Instagram you have to understand that the algorithm is essentially like a Snowball Effect if you start being seen by a real or a post and people engage with it they follow you because of it Instagram is going to show them more of your content so if you have a real do well and you follow that up with a photo set or a photo that aligns with that real basically it's not something random like a plate of food it's still something photography based you are most likely going to have that photo be seen by these new people who are engaging with your content and this just snowballs over time and it's what has allowed my account to grow so quickly so what I did from here is something that I recommend to everyone using social media if you realize something is working double down on it and iterate on it and try to make it better and that leads to the fourth growth observation that I've had which is the fact that when you deliver on value your view count goes through the roof so if you make a piece of content that people deem valuable which is something else I talk about in this free course but if you deliver on education entertainment or inspiration people will share this content and the view count goes up tremendously so I created a short Instagram reel where I showed a shortcut on my keyboard for Adobe Lightroom I was literally just editing a photo did the shortcut and thought you know nobody knows about this I bet I can share this and it will help a lot of people out and I did and it got over 2 million views over half of the growth on my Instagram is because of this principle right here and it's one that has helped my other Instagram grow as well if you give people content that has some type of value does something for them they are more likely to engage with it leave a comment like it potentially follow you and they are more likely to share it and if they do any of those things your account will start to trigger that algorithm snowball that I just got done talking about now I've already mentioned this free course a few times so this is a great time to mention today's sponsor Squarespace because without them this free course would not be possible Squarespace is the platform that I use to host my website Evan ran. com and they are a massive part of my photography business they allow me to contact my customers with email marketing they allow me to sell things like my preset and my photo book and they now allow me to host a free course now this is the first time I've used Squarespace courses and I got to say it's extremely impressive these course templates are so easy to customize it's very simple compared to other course platforms I've used and if you're a photographer out there looking to share information with an audience Squarespace courses is an amazing option for you and Squarespace has introduced a new feature called fluid engine which allows you to easily customize your website in a way you've never been able to do with a Squarespace template it's literally just grab drag drop move things around the page and you can custom your website giving you a look to your page that is unlike anyone else out there and on top of that Squarespace has introduced tools that help with SEO making SEO easier than ever for artists like you and me who have no understanding of it now if you're looking to build a Squarespace site and you're a little overwhelmed you don't know where to start one of my recent videos was a breakdown of how I built my website fmr.
com and how I use that website to make money off Instagram so I'll go ahead and Link that in the description down below so you can follow that video you can go to squarespace. com / EVR to start a free trial and you can use code Evan ramp to save 10% at checkout when you're ready to send your site or domain live that's squarespace.
