How I gained 5k followers in one week on Instagram

I try *really* hard to not care about my numbers and metrics on all platforms; YouTube, TikTok, & Instagram - but when I see confetti on YouTube or my Instagram Reels reach the 600ks - I can’t help to feel this rush of happiness, this dopamine hit that motivates me even harder to create content that will give me that same experience again. I am always experimenting with new strategies on Instagram and though sometimes they don’t work - sometimes they do, and this time specifically - it helped me gain 5k subscribers in just one week. And now I want to share this secret sauce with you! Let’s do this!

Discover trends (and make sure they fit your niche)!

I mean, you had to know this one was going to make the list, right? Being aware of the trends on Instagram is one very important piece of the puzzle. This could be trending audio, topic, movement - you name it. It’s important to find these trends and figure out if this is something that would relate to your current audience and help you reach new folks too!

One big mistake I see people doing on Instagram and following a trend that doesn’t relate to their niche. Let’s say there is a trend going around where creators show their best homemade bread recipe. This wouldn’t be something that would really fit my niche - so though I might enjoy partaking in homemade bread, I am not about to create a Reel where I share a recipe. Right?

Let’s talk a little bit about how to discover trends on Instagram.

The best way you can find trends is by joining my weekly newsletter the Creator Letter. We give you 3 trends that you can follow every week. The sign-up for the newsletter will be in the show notes. But, beyond that - to find new trends on Instagram, you can just scroll through Reels. If you see a specific theme repeating, it’s trending. If you hear an audio clip or song multiple times (and it has the up arrow in the left, bottom corner of the screen), it’s trending. You might also notice some other folks in your niche all posting a similar trend and realize it might be time for you to jump on it too!

You can also take inspiration from TikTok. You can open up TikTok and type “trending sounds” in the search bar. Filter videos to “this week” and you’ve just unlocked TikToks from creators sharing the top trending sounds and how you can use them. Then you can cross-reference these on Instagram and see if it’s being used for any Reels. If not, bookmark it! TikTok trends usually show up on Reels a few weeks later, so bookmark your favorites to be ahead of the curve.

Here is a good example of me jumping on a trend that was perfect for my niche - I was seeing the trend where creators shared their income in a short, 10-15 second Reel. I was hesitant, which we will talk about in a minute, but after seeing this trend do really well for others - I decided to give it a shot. And wow - I am so glad I did. It immediately took off for me and helped contribute to my quick growth. It also continues to gain reach even a month later - it has over 600k views currently and honestly, I normally get around 3-5K views, 10K is normally really good for me, so this was huge!

Be willing to talk about stuff that others aren’t willing to talk about!

I am sure some of you have heard people suggest that you create “polarizing content”. Polarization is, essentially, the willingness of a brand or business to take hard and fast stances on certain topics that possibly divide or further niche their audience. The idea of creating “polarizing content” is to create content others are a little less willing to speak up about - and doing that, will help generate more views. This is the same idea. Create content surrounding topics that other creators might not be willing to talk about. This can be something like money, body image, or even some of the topics that in general seem “boring” - but aren’t talked about a lot. Let me give you some examples.

Going back to the Reel I recently posted talking about my income throughout the year of 2022. Honestly, I wasn’t going to post this at first - I felt nervous and awkward but I had seen this trend and new videos like this were performing well.

I feel like this is a great lesson in the fact that when you are willing to share what no one else wants to share - usually, you’ll be rewarded with a lot of reach and engagement. A lot of people don’t wanna talk about money - but they wanna hear about it - so if you’re willing to do the talking, you’ll often get a lot of reach because of that. The same is true for other taboo topics as well.

As I saw this Reel doing well, I thought - why don’t I create a follow-up? I had lots of questions that basically amounted to “how” so I thought I could explain my business more with income streams. So I made a similar style Reel with trendy audio, text on screen, and some different cute b-roll and this video has now got over 272K views. This capitalized on the attention I was already getting - and it was a format that I’d found obviously worked well, and a topic that I knew there was interest in. But the thing is, you can’t just post different versions of the same Reel over and over again and expect to keep growing. You might get reach - but your current followers are not going to stay very engaged if that’s the content they see from you all the time. So how do you find balance?

What is a good Reel strategy?

It’s all about balance here - you need to be creating content for reaching new followers, and content for nurturing existing followers. Sometimes, you’ll have a bit of overlap - but often times you need to balance both priorities by creating different kinds of content.

I like to aim to do 3 solid pieces of original content per week (for me this means talking-to-camera tips, advice, or opinion pieces about social media growth and content creation) and 2 pieces of more trendy-style content (music-based, using trending audio, highly visual, I’m still using the money theme because that seemed to work well for me the first time - so like “what I spent” and I’ve also tried some travel related ones) it can be hard to predict what might pop off with trends, so you need to experiment a little bit.

And I think for me, it’s hard to deny how big of an impact it was to just take the pressure of myself a little bit. In 2022, I was so caught up in how I could grow more, faster, better - and I was constantly letting myself down because I put too high of expectations on myself. I think it was a huge game changer for me to just have no expectations, and say, I’m just gonna create for the sake of making what I like to make, what I know my ride-or-die followers will appreciate, and go from there. And so far, it’s really working out well for me. If you want to learn more about how I edit my Reels, I just recently launched a Reels editing workshop and it’s only $25, you can grab it in my show notes or just head on over to www.katiesteckly.com/shop!