I had heard about the banned hashtags but I haven’t bothered to look which ones they are. I’ll have to look that up. And yeah, we have to remember to enjoy the experience instead of just trying to “get more.”

Yes, that always helps. I would say even engaging with accounts that are similar but slightly bigger than you might help as well. But also don’t neglect smaller accounts that may be starting out since they could end up being allies in collaboration later on. Thanks for your comment!

Unfortunately, I can believe it. I think it’s a behavior that comes from the old days of Twitter. And to be fair the optics of having more people follow you than you follow do make it look better. But it should happen naturally, for example, I don’t follow everyone that follows me because many are bots, or totally uninteresting to me. I will check out their account when they like my stuff, leave the comment or follow. The thing I don’t do is follow 100 people, wait for them to follow me back and then unfollow. You know my feeling.

Yeah, the giveaways are tricky. I find that if you are just starting to grow your audience, giveaways are a hit or miss because so many people are just looking for freebies. Also it matters where you advertise the giveaway. If you keep it strictly to your existing following, you’ll have better results. The Twitter thing… manually or automatically the key is making it enticing for people to come to IG, if I post the picture then they have no incentive. If I only post the link then the caption needs to be amazing.

Well your site is beautiful and clean, so if your IG is in par with that I’m sure you’ll get a great following, you’re already at over 2000, so that’s good, and your work is great. I know that sometimes it’s time consuming and involved, but engaging with people is good, especially since it’s “social” media. Thanks for your comment & thoughts!

Honestly, I’ve only been using Instagram for a few weeks, but I finally decided to get serious about it. Will check out some of the apps you recommend.

Here’s my ig: http://www.instagram.com/awmyposh

Sam, thanks for the comment and I agree. I look at it the same way, or rather I have been looking at it the same way. For the most part, I’m doing the same thing as you, but maybe just a bit more agressively. Back a couple years ago I wrote a little script that would do the heavy lifting for me, then I would just follow up with each person that my script would find. It worked out great to go from the mid 100 to about 500, then it broke and I stopped fixing it. Now I’m back at IG trying to grow again. I think I figured out most of the hashtags I want to be engaged with and now I’m figuring out which ones work best. Feel free to drop your IG link in a comment too!