OP 30 July, 2020 - 07:02 AM
I have developed an effective, reliable, and methodical approach of growing a meme page on Instagram. This method has been extensively tested and researched by yours truly and many other people I’ve been inspired by. I have the method organized into six subcategories down below for your convenience.
CREATING THE ACCOUNT
Some eminent examples that follow this aforementioned pattern are “fuckjerry’ (15.5 M) and “daquaan” (15.3 M). Also, from personal experience, I can attest to this. My own meme page used to be called “ziypi" changed it to “littletitbitches” and my follower count began to rise at a remarkably faster rate than when I was using the old name. I had DMs of people telling me they followed just because of the name. (Also the account @littletitbitches is a brand new account I used to own fatbitch but it got banned from the ban wave)
Unofficially, there are two main kinds of meme pages:
With that being said, here are some general guidelines for good content:
This is the most vital aspect of growing a new meme page. You should focus on exposure if you want reliable growth. Although exposure grants you new followers, you have to sustain them by posting good content. Think about it like this: in real life, how would anyone be popular if they never met new people? No matter how interesting of a person they were, if they only lingered around a small group of people, they would probably never be anything greater than relatively unknown. And also, they would lose the friends they did have if they never engaged with them or if they bothered them. As a meme page, the same principle applies. You have to proactively find people to meet because people aren’t searching for you. Then you have to post quality content for them to sustain the relationship.
Here are some strategies:
Hashtags don’t help as much as people seem to think. I would say they contribute to roughly 10-20% of the followers on a page. However, they are useful enough to invest in them. Here are some hashtag guidelines:
Captions are an important way to differentiate yourself from the vast majority of meme pages and establish a personal connection with your audience and new potential followers. Here are some ideas:
Be careful of not violating these guidelines or your page will be deleted, action blocked, or shadow-banned. Pages are more susceptible to punishments when they’re new. Also, remember that Instagram is a left-leaning platform that is known for censoring or hiding politically charged extreme right-wing content and offensive content. My page isn’t political or extremely offensive, but it’s something all meme pages should consider.
Stay away from these kinds of posts at all costs, especially as your page gets bigger:
Another warning is to never give your account information to anyone. Hacked accounts may try to DM you, and trick you into revealing your password. The safest bet is to never click on any hyperlinks from untrusted accounts.
Here are some related terms, in case you didn’t know what they meant:![[Image: Amusing.png]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.cracked.to%2F%2Fimages%2Fsmilies%2FAmusing.png)
Thanks,
CREATING THE ACCOUNT
- When you first create your account, the name of the page needs to be:
- Short, for the sake of your followers. (Trust me this is important.)
- Easy to remember, complicated or confusing names hurt your growth, this means avoiding too many spaces and periods
- Memorable, the power of just the name alone garners followers
- Don’t include the word “meme” or anything like that, because for whatever reason people don’t engage as much with accounts that use that word in their title. It comes off as distasteful. Also, when people try to recall your page they have to sort through the millions of pages with the word “meme”. That word is far too saturated in the business.
- Make sure the name abides by Instagram’s Community Guidelines (No discriminating slurs basically).
Some eminent examples that follow this aforementioned pattern are “fuckjerry’ (15.5 M) and “daquaan” (15.3 M). Also, from personal experience, I can attest to this. My own meme page used to be called “ziypi" changed it to “littletitbitches” and my follower count began to rise at a remarkably faster rate than when I was using the old name. I had DMs of people telling me they followed just because of the name. (Also the account @littletitbitches is a brand new account I used to own fatbitch but it got banned from the ban wave)
- Set your account to “business” or “creator” mode. There are exclusive tools there exist in these modes that are specifically designed to help the user grow their page.
- Create a funny, memorable bio. People follow if they read a good bio, myself included.
Unofficially, there are two main kinds of meme pages:
- “Edgy” meme pages: In short, these meme pages post darker, more offensive memes. These accounts often antagonize Instagram’s “Community Guidelines” and, as a result, they are more likely to get deleted or hindered in some way. But they definitely grow much faster than “normie” meme pages initially. One reason is that they’re less common. They also generate attention, albeit good and bad. In terms of growing a page, a common notion is that “all publicity is good publicity”, which “edgy” pages use to their advantage. As “edgy” accounts get bigger they often resort to switchin their account to “private” mode to avoid getting deleted. Ironically, their edgy nature becomes undoing as they get more popular, and therefore more likely to be reported.
- “Normie” meme pages: these meme pages, in contrast, post more family-friendly and less offensive content and avoid the grunge culture of the internet. Their accounts are generally treated more kindly by Instagram, and their odds of being deleted are low.
With that being said, here are some general guidelines for good content:
- Regardless of what kind of meme page you are, the content you post should ideally target some kind of specific niche. (For example, my follower base wouldn’t respond well to “tennis memes”. Although my meme page isn’t about tennis, I’m a tennis fan in real life. But when I post something about tennis, it gets a very low engagement rate.)
- Your memes should make you laugh in real life. Trust me, quality over quantity helps differentiate your page. Think of the millions and millions of meme pages you’re competing against. You probably won’t make it if your page posts the same generic, unfunny things.
- Use the “insights” tool on your “business/creator” profile to analyze your share to like ratio per post. A general guideline is that your post is successful if the number of people sharing your post is at least half of the number of people that liked that post. Note that probably around 3 out of every 10 followers a good page has comes from their followers sharing the page’s post to others, which in turn caused the others to follow the page.
- Your posts need to stay within Instagram’s Community Guidelines. If you keep posting things that go against their guidelines, they will either temporarily “shadow ban” your page or even delete it.
- Don’t post more than 7 posts a day. If you post too much, people will unfollow and you might even be detected as spam.
- Don’t post too infrequently. If you are inactive or don’t post enough, you will lose followers. In my opinion, It’s fine to not post for a couple days for even a week as long as you don’t make a habit of it.
This is the most vital aspect of growing a new meme page. You should focus on exposure if you want reliable growth. Although exposure grants you new followers, you have to sustain them by posting good content. Think about it like this: in real life, how would anyone be popular if they never met new people? No matter how interesting of a person they were, if they only lingered around a small group of people, they would probably never be anything greater than relatively unknown. And also, they would lose the friends they did have if they never engaged with them or if they bothered them. As a meme page, the same principle applies. You have to proactively find people to meet because people aren’t searching for you. Then you have to post quality content for them to sustain the relationship.
Here are some strategies:
- The “Follow and Unfollow” Strategy: This strategy gets a lot of flack. The main idea is to follow people and unfollow them later. It comes across as deceiving and shallow. you can also do like for like which can get other people from other pages to view your page because of instagram algorithm
- The truth is that this is the most effective strategy a new meme page almost always has to rely on. Hashtags are unfortunately not enough, as your page will grow very very slowly or even regress. I would estimate that The “Follow and Unfollow” Strategy covers about 80% of a new meme page’s growth. Even medium and semi-large pages (0 to 5,000 followers) rely on this bread-and-butter strategy.
- As a new page, you should follow/unfollow no more than 50 people in an hour. Instagram keeps track of the number of follows/unfollows an account does in an hour and in the day. If you follow/unfollow too many people in an hour or in a day, your page will either be action blocked, shadow banned, or detected as spam. But 50 people an hour is a safe number to pursue so don’t worry. My advice is to follow 50 people an hour, three times a day. It’s very safe and effective. When your page gets older, the number of people you can safely follow in hour and per day increases, as Instagram’s algorithms realize that your page is run by a real person trying to grow a legitimate page rather than a robot trying to spam or scam people. Eventually you can do 100 or maybe even 150 interactions per hour.
- Don’t unfollow people until at least a day after you follow them. They aren’t notified when you unfollow, and that’s the main reason why this strategy is so effective.
- Find the people to follow from an active and popular page to yours that posts similar content. The idea is to maximize the chances of finding someone who likes your page. Find a recent post and follow the people who liked the post.
- Or find people by following the active people that recently posted on a hashtag that suits your content.
- Your page must be public. Note that later on some people decide to make their page private when they’re satisfied with their follower count. And that can even be more beneficial for them than being public if their account is big enough. This is because if they’re private, when their followers share the page’s memes to their friends, the post appears as private. This means the friends of the follower must follow the private page. I don’t recommend new meme pages to be private, however, since they have a relatively small number of followers.
- Comment and like the posts of accounts you haven’t met yet and the accounts you follow. Comment something likeable, clever, relevant, and funny. It’s considered as distasteful to come across as spammy or shallow (fishing for followers). Don’t like and comment too much or Instagram’s algorithms will detect you as spam.
- Use stories to engage your followers. Ask them meaningful or funny things through the polls and Q&A’s. Take their advice and give advice of your own. Think of it as a community of people you are fostering and trying to get close to. If you want some ideas for engaging stories, check out my highlights on “bitchcuck”.
- “Shoutouts-For-Shoutouts”: The premise of this strategy is to DM other accounts and ask them to shout you out on their stories and/or posts in exchange for you to do the same.
- Find a community of fellow meme pages. Growing a meme page with people is far more beneficial to growing a meme page alone. Start a big group chat and help each other. You should do things like tag each other in posts, like each other’s posts, and give each other shout-outs.
Hashtags don’t help as much as people seem to think. I would say they contribute to roughly 10-20% of the followers on a page. However, they are useful enough to invest in them. Here are some hashtag guidelines:
- Use hashtags that are relevant with your post. If you don’t, people won’t engage with the post and might even report you. People actively look for specific hashtags.
- Don’t use any more than 30 or less than 20. Instagram’s limit on hashtags is 30. If you go over 30, the tags don’t work. I use 25 personally. Using less than 20 is just lazy on your part.
- Don’t use hashtags that are too popular (like #memes for example). The number of people posting on very viral hashtags is so frequent that as soon as you post something, it’s drowned out by all the other new posts that occur. No one will see it.
- Don’t use extremely obscure hashtags (like #extremelyobsurehashtag). Although people like to see specific hashtags, the vast majority of people of course aren’t searching for extremely obscure hashtags. No one will see it.
- Use hashtags to find with and engage with similar accounts to yours. Like their posts and follow them.
- Don’t spam the same hashtags. Doing so can get you “shadow banned”. Mix them up on every post.
Captions are an important way to differentiate yourself from the vast majority of meme pages and establish a personal connection with your audience and new potential followers. Here are some ideas:
- Write about yourself, but keep it short and to the point, to retain their interest. If you come across as annoying or distasteful, they might unfollow.
- Write something clever, funny, relevant, or memorable
- Prompt the audience to discuss something with you. Ask them engaging questions. The followers like to be engaged. Also, comments are good for exposure. But be careful, if you fish for comments solely for the sake of growing your meme page, you will come across as shallow and they will hold you in distaste.
- Find a way to get the followers to tag their friends. But be careful, if you do this too frequently or come across as shallow, they will hold you in distaste.
- Although it can be engaging to be somewhat controversial or provoking, don’t say anything that will legitimately piss off your followers. It’s good to facilitate a post that gets your followers talking to not only you, but also with each other. With that being said, it’s probably for the best not to be toxic.
- Deleting your follower’s comments or maliciously attacking them can cause you to lose followers. Besides, if your followers are devoted to you enough and you’re in the right, they’ll deal with whoever’s heckling your page in the comments for you.
Be careful of not violating these guidelines or your page will be deleted, action blocked, or shadow-banned. Pages are more susceptible to punishments when they’re new. Also, remember that Instagram is a left-leaning platform that is known for censoring or hiding politically charged extreme right-wing content and offensive content. My page isn’t political or extremely offensive, but it’s something all meme pages should consider.
Stay away from these kinds of posts at all costs, especially as your page gets bigger:
- Nudity (unless it conforms with certain standards; but if you're trying to grow a meme page then it probably doesn’t)
- Real deaths
- Excessive Violence
- Domestic violence (especially woman or child beating subjects)
- Rape jokes
- discriminating slurs, especially the “hard ‘R’ n-word” and slurs that target the LGBTQ+
- Rape jokes
- Animal cruelty
- Impersonate a real person
- Maliciously bully someone, even as a joke; because if someone reports it and Instagram thinks it’s legitimate, your account will be punished.
- Scam anyone
- Spam
Another warning is to never give your account information to anyone. Hacked accounts may try to DM you, and trick you into revealing your password. The safest bet is to never click on any hyperlinks from untrusted accounts.
Here are some related terms, in case you didn’t know what they meant:
- “Shadow ban”: A temporary ban that is imposed on an account if they abuse the same hashtags too much (because Instagram detects that behavior as spam), post something that too many people report, or if they post something that goes against Instagram's Community Guidelines. Instagram usually warns an account if they post something that comes into conflict with the Guidelines. If the account persists, it will eventually be deleted. When a shadow ban occurs, the user is NOT notified. It lasts about two weeks. During this time, the account’s posts and comments are passively hidden from their followers, and the account is unable to use hashtags. If the user is shadow banned too many times, their account will be deleted. (There is a timer in which the shadow ban counter is reset, but the user isn’t notified. It’s speculated to be around 3 months or so. Treat shadow bans seriously.)
- Action Block: When an account follows, likes, or comments on too many accounts in a certain amount of time, a message will appear to the user that informs them that they are “action blocked”. This lasts less than a week (usually) and inhibits the account from interacting with other accounts (No more liking, following, and unfollowing for a day or so). If the user keeps getting action blocked, they will be shadow banned.
Thanks,
