How To Grow An Instagram Art Account In One Year - My Story to 25k Followers

[Music] hello everyone it's been one year since i started taking my instagram account seriously and posting out consistently and in that time i've grown organically to over 25 000 followers which is a lot of people to me i don't claim to know the secrets of the instagram algorithm but i will share with you what i've done in my account to help me grow without spending a penny if you want to just get straight to my instagram numbers you can jump forward to this time code number one the first thing i think has been really key for me was understanding why i was starting an art account on instagram and for me there were two main reasons the first was to improve my art skills by having accountability and a purpose for practicing my art and the second was the grown audience that i could share my art journey with and teach what i'd learned along the way notice that neither of these things were about getting to a certain follower milestone and although this video is about growing my instagram account i don't want you to think that follow account is the most important thing here because it really isn't community in my opinion is far more important having a strong foundation for why i was doing all this would give me a clear motivation for staying consistent i also lay some ground rules that would be the basis for my whole account and guide my content and engagement with others they were be genuine treat other users with kindness they are people after all not just numbers encourage the creativity of others post five times a week whether it's a quick sketch or a finished drawing let go of expectations about my drawing abilities and share what i learned to those who want to know everything i've done on my account has been guided by these principles and every time i've felt confused or demotivated or doubted myself i've come back to these and they've helped me get back on track number two now the second thing that is really important for my account is building trust straight away and i mean making a profile that people feel comfortable following because they understand who i am and what i do from very early on i made sure that people who are visiting my profile could see that i was a real person that i was illustrating how often i was illustrating and why i was illustrating i did this for a combination of my profile picture which has always been an illustration of me my account name which has always included illustration my bio which tells people i'm illustrating monday to friday story highlights that tell a bit about me and why i'm drawing and also my feed itself first impressions count and people will decide very quickly whether they want to follow you or not so the nicer you can make your feet look and the more critical information you can give in your bio the more chance you have that the person who visited your account will follow you because they want to see more number three the third thing that i think has been really important for my account is building a positive community instagram is a social media platform it wants you to be social and engage with others for others to engage with you and it wants people to stay on its platform for as long as possible i've made an effort with my account to be an active member of a positive art community and coming back to principle number three encourage the creativity of others if i can be a cheerleader for other artists in my community not only am i making them feel good but i'm also increasing my chances that they will also want to be a cheerleader for me there's not a finite amount of engagement to go around so supporting and sharing the talent of other artists does not take away from the growth of your own account be selfless in your interaction with others and it'll go a long way number four point number four is to participate in challenges and this comes back to being involved in a positive community there are so many art challenges and prompt lists on instagram and they all have an engaged audience i mostly participate in draw this in your style challenges but there are also things like mermaid inktober or witchtober and one-off prompt lists that groups of artists will make once my account started growing i started hosting my own art challenges and they are such a good way to engage with an active community and be seen by new accounts and it's also so cool to see the creativity of other artists recreating something that you've drawn i love it number five the fifth thing that has been really key for me is posting consistently i set myself the challenge a year ago to draw something monday to friday every week and except for a handful of missed days i've done that i know that not everyone can commit to drawing almost every day but from my experience if you can it will accelerate your growth every post is a new opportunity to be found by different hashtags and people who haven't yet discovered you so the more you can create and provide value the more opportunities for growth there are in saying that though you want to make sure that you're able to create content you're happy with on the schedule you choose and you certainly don't want to burn out or make it a chore so choose a posting schedule you know you can reasonably commit to number six this brings me to point number six and that is to create original content that people engage with obviously i only ever illustrate things that i want to draw but i've also kept in mind what will engage well with others and how my content provides value to them i want my drawings to cheer people up and put a smile on their face and if i can sometimes do that with a subject that is popular and more likely to have high engagement then that's even better my highest performing posts almost always include girl characters cats or a cozy cottage pay attention to which posts seem to be doing well for you and try to understand why and how you can recreate that in a different way in the future so to recap here are my tips for growing your art account on instagram 1. understand why you want to grow an art account 2. build trust by making a good first impression three create a positive and engaged community four participate in or host art challenges five post consistently with an achievable schedule and six create original content now i'm going to show you the outcome of these lessons on my account over 12 months i want you to keep in mind as i share these numbers that everyone is at a different stage in their creative journey so don't go comparing your follow account to mine or anyone else's for that matter followers are just one metric of growth so make sure you also consider things like what you've learned from sharing your art or the amazing creative progress you've made and the community you've built on social media i bet you're doing a really great job so don't let comparison bring you down i started drawing in mid-may 2020 and already had about 47 followers because i had a few posts had made the year before but my account had been dormant for months after one month of posting consistently my account was at 185 followers and it took until the 1st of july before i had 250. if you feel like you're putting in a lot of time and effort into your content and the growth is slow that's okay things take time and if you're on an upwards trend then that's a positive thing i hosted my first ever draw this in your style challenge at the end of july to celebrate 300 followers which gave me a little boost and less than two months later i was hosting my second one for 750 followers i put a lot of love and energy into my content up until this point so when i hit the big milestone in october of 1 000 followers i was super chuffed that was five months of posting five drawings every single week that's a lot of energy and content so it's important to remember to be patient when you're growing your account i was starting to gain some momentum now and found that i was getting more shares from other artists as my account grew while my first 1000 followers took me five months my second thousand followers took half that time at two and a half months i hadn't really changed what i was doing through this time i was just staying consistent improving my art all the time and engaging with my community as much as i could although it was a lot of work it was also something i was really enjoying doing so the followers were not beyond endor january 2021 is where growth took off for me and the only thing i had done differently is that i took a few extra days off around christmas and then came back with participating in two draw this new style challenges back to back which both had an engaged community already and then i put an extra effort into being active on instagram in general my posts were suddenly getting double the reach of the ones in the weeks before and the extra reach was coming from the explore page which exposes you to people who aren't yet following you now instagram wants to show users new content that it knows to be good but instagram doesn't have eyes so the only way it can know whether one drawing is going to be liked better than another is by how engaged users are with it if i can make drawings that immediately had good engagement and stood out i was increasing my chances of being found my third 1 000 followers took one month to reach and then my fourth took just seven days so it took five months to get from zero to a thousand and then just seven days to get from three to four thousand that's just nuts to me i realized here that i had traction and i just kept posting as i had always done and kept engaging with all of these lovely new people who wanted to follow my art journey at this point i was getting around 200 followers a day so by mid-february i hit another milestone of 10 000 followers this was really huge for me and it was really gratifying to know that all the work i was putting into improving my art and fostering a positive community was having an impact my growth since january has overall been quite consistent with allah when i wasn't focusing on engaging illustrations because i was busy with some other things and that's totally fine and another lull when i took a mini break for two weeks and just posted a couple of times when i came back from my break though i made sure i came back strong and put out lots of stories engaged with lots of people and posted consistently again and sure enough after doing that for about a week my growth came right back up to about 200 followers a day so that's where i'm at right now i don't expect my growth to stay like this forever nor does it matter to me if it does i feel like i've achieved what i set out to do because i now have an amazing instagram community that i can share my art journey with every day i've also improved my art skills so much and i do talk about that in my latest video so go and check that out if you haven't seen it already i hope you found this video helpful i'll leave my instagram details in the description below if you'd like to join me over there and of course i'd love it if you subscribe so i can share more arty videos with you okay bye bye you

Channel: Mimimoo Illustration

Views: 63,788

Rating: 4.9811049 out of 5

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Id: gWXF6yz7Wx0

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021