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Who here loves Instagram? Well, we sure do and we are keeping a close eye on the platform’s feature development and how it affects our online communities!

For this experiment, I am working with my own personal brand account, @aharveymills (Hi!). My account has around 500 followers at the time of blog writing, with a slow-going growth due to the fact that this is just a fun personal account.

@aharveymills Instagram Followers and Profile - can consistent Instagram stories increase your follower count?

HYPOTHESIS:

Instagram created stories as a way to get more in-app interactions – so how can we use this feature to generate more in-app interactions? Looking at follower counts from stories over the last year, does more consistent story posting generate more followers?

My hypothesis is this: by posting 3 times a day to my stories, I will generate a higher rate of followers than previously.

THE DATA:

Before I started a concerted effort of posting to stories, I posted to stories frequently but not consistently. I post approx 1-2 times a week on stories. I post approximately five times per week to my Instagram feed.

From March 2018 to February 2019, I got 30 follows FROM content on my page.

When I started posting consistently on stories in January through February 2019, my follows from content went up!

  • From March through December 2018, I got 22 out of 30 follows from content on my page.
  • From January through February 2019, I got 8 out of my 30 follows – so about 26% of my total follows came from those two months!

THE RESULTS:

The growth in follows and interest in my page went up, so my hypothesis was correct! However, it did not go up at the rate I thought it would.

It is hard to remember to post EVERY DAY for stories – they are very in-the-moment and have to be done every single day. I thought that for the effort involved I might get a higher rate of follows.

However, during my experiment, I did not make any rules around using hashtags in stories, tagging locations or tagging other accounts in my stories. Also, I did not make any rules around hashtag use on my regular posts – and hashtags are a big factor of getting discovered by new accounts on Instagram.

NEXT STEPS:

I’d like to focus on the use of hashtags, and a bit more on pre-planning for stories. My stories were spontaneous without any forethought, but I’d like to see if there is any way to spur engagement and followers by planning stories ahead of time that are targeted at specific niches.

Adrienne's Instagram feed post boasting high engagement and lots of followers