How to revive a stagnant Instagram account

I hear it all the time - ‘it’s impossible to grow on Instagram’. Now, firstly that depends on your idea of growth. If you’re chasing 100k followers  yeah it’s hard work but if you are chasing a genuine following of actual customers it takes work but it’s not impossible. The first step is to retrain the brain - followers do not = sales. 

I see businesses with lower numbers of followers booking and selling out and accounts with huge followings not doing so great behind the scenes. The gold that we are actually looking for is not a number but a community of brand fans that like, know and trust you and buy in to whatever you are selling.

If your account has gone cold, here are some questions to ask yourself. 

Who are you following? 

For starters, go to your following list and click on the ‘least interacted with’ option and go through and check if the account is still active and if so engage with the content. Have a scroll through and unfollow any accounts that haven’t been active in years. 

Then, go through your followers and engage! Likes and emojis count as engagement however to have real impact you want to relate your comment to their image or caption and ideally keep it open ended with a question or something that they can reply to! 

Who is following you? 

Sure they add to you follower count but if they are just a number that doesn’t engage with your content they may get you to some magic number like 10k but they will also keep you there and drag down your engagement. Go through an remove anything that looks like a fake/bot or unused account. Just do a few at a time so you don’t get in trouble! 

Is your content resonating? 

Are people commenting? Liking? Saving? Sharing? What are they reacting to? What do you get in your DMs? 

Look at your insights and identify the topics that get the most attention and repeat it. Break up Instagram into sections - stories, video and feed. Now think about where you spend the most time. Could you give stories more attention? Are you being consistent in your feed posts - once a week is better than six posts in a day every three months! 

Reviving a stagnant account is all about engagement and connecting with your audience. Remind them why they followed you in the first place and if the same old thing isn’t working anymore, shake it up and test some new content!