How to grow your Instagram followers?🤳 - A quick guide for all GenZ brands!

Growth Jan 5, 2021

Our Instagram hit

10K followers on the auspicious day of Diwali and
20K followers this New Years!

and we can’t help but wonder if the Goddess Lakshmi had a hand to it! Now if you’re wondering why numbers on Instagram is one of our goals, the answer is simple. FamPay is India’s first neobank for teens. It's a way for 250M teens of India to get access to the fast-growing digital payments (UPI and Card). And teens have overwhelmingly chosen Instagram to be their most preferred social media platform with an average of 3-4 hours spent on it.

Now while we can’t say how providence works, we can tell you our mortal journey into hitting our goal.

Aesthetic Layout 🔅

We dove into Instagram on the 23rd July, 2020 and the first thing we focussed on was maintaining an aesthetically pleasing feed.

Our potential followers, the GenZ teens whose attention span is just about 8 secs, make a judgement as soon as they land up on our feed and we want to wow them immediately.

This is why we created brand guidelines just for Instagram detailing the colour palette to use, fonts, placement of our logo to the tone of voice to use.

Community Initiatives 👩🏻‍🤝‍👩🏻

At FamPay, we’re really big about building India’s first GenZ community & give teens a platform to learn, earn and grow; irrespective of their hobbies, interests and passion. And our community of amazing teens aren’t limited to the app or a page on the website but are an active part of our Social media.

Creative and Community go hand in hand and the latter helps in growing followers and the former does for engaging teens!

Good examples are our flagship Teenfluencer and Teenpreneur programs for teenagers where a lot of activities were social-media-based such as helping teens to make good Instagram stories and building a brand online!

Another great example is FamJam- India’s first digi-fest for teens in which we not only used Instagram to promote the fest but also build contests around it such as a Reel-making contest, video advertising on Posts/IGTV.

Contests 🏆

While contests and giveaways are something almost every brand uses to gain engagement and followers, we can claim that we’ve used them quite well.

Just like nobody can put baby in the corner, nobody should put all teens in a box! Sorry for the millennial pop-culture-

the point is that not all teenagers are the same and it’ll be foolish to categorize them all as Instagram loving tech freaks.

We did some research with our community and identified the myriad of things teens are into and built our contests around them! This means we had a photography contest, an Instagram filter contest, IPL-related ones, an artsy doodling contest and a '12 days of Christmas' contest!

While we banked on our community to get the most participants, we imcreased the reach by running Facebook and Instagram ads and using specific targeting to reach the right teens!

Give them what they like 😍

As I said, the attention span of a GenZ is eight seconds which is slightly better than Dory’s from Finding Nemo! So it immediately became clear that any content needed to be short, sweet and snackable! We all love snacks right? They’re easy to eat, don’t require a lot of prep and give us instant gratification.

And that’s the goal of our Instagram to be short, sweet and instantly amazing! Instead of using a lot of text, we prefer telling a story through video. Instead of professional photos in studios, we prefer taking photos of teenagers in their normal lives! And it doesn’t hurt that we truly love memes, after all, what’s more snackable than a meme?

Un-Filtered Thoughts 😏

However much we spend on advertising or amazing videos, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to capture the attention and engagement of our viewers. But you know what can do a pretty good job- AR Filters!

While more than a billion people are already using Spark AR filters, they are bound to get more popular and viral as they are by their nature a shareable form of content i.e. if you use a filter and take your picture, you would want to show it to your friends. Hence, using a filter, with minimal spend, you can leverage the emerging tech and become a part of your user’s memories and they can become your brand ambassadors giving you a limitless reach.

A well-designed filter can not only gain the user’s full attention but also incentivize them to engage by clicking photos, trying different angles or making faces. And at FamPay, we added the element of virality and gamification with our Friendship’s day filter which got teens to play a game and tag their friends. To date, we have around 5 lakh organic impressions on it!

And another popular filter is our virtual FamCard which lets users see the aesthetic of our card which has received almost a 1000 captures.

User-generated content 🤳

We value the recommendations of our friends and family much more than a celebrity and that's why we banked on user-generated content to grow our Instagram. I’m not being biased when I say this- FamCard is attractive and its unboxing experience is amazing and premium-looking - meant to be shown off!

When teens receive the much awaited delivery of the FamCard, the majority of them make an unboxing video or a picture and share it on their Instagram. This creates a virtual word of mouth effect and helps us gain followers and users organically.

And because FamPay is a one-of-a-kind payments product for teenagers, they are genuinely excited to share their experience online. This reflects in a steady stream of organic UGC content of Instagram stories/posts of screenshots of transact with FamPay, teens wearing the FamPay merch or winning cashbacks or even simple selfies with the FamCard.

Collaborations 🙌

It’s no secret that influencer collaborations work really well and most of the time even better than traditional advertising.

But we didn’t want to have cliched pictures of influencers holding the FamCard. This is why our partners were not only really cool influencers like Tanmay Bhat, Slayy point or PCMB memes, each collaboration had elements of the influencer’s personality and storytelling.

In fact, one very successful collaboration saw FamPay being advertised through Akshay Kumar memes!

Playing the algorithm 👩‍🔬

While no one can claim to know Instagram’s algorithm for sure, what we found is that Instagram prioritizes building relationships which means engagement! This means all our posts/stories are built to have a relationship with teens through increasing comments, likes, saves, shares, and for video posts, views. For example, a meme post is likely to get more shares and a product explainer is likely to get a lot more saves.

It’s no secret that Instagram wants audiences in India to forget Tiktok existed and the way it’s achieving that is with Reels. Instagram has been promoting Reels massively with the explore button being replaced with Reels also. At FamPay, we take advantage of this and post reels regularly.

We also use hashtags to gain relevant audiences, to categorize events and also curate User Generated Content with branded hashtags like #GetFamPaid!

Product Marketing 💳

While all of the above add an extra boost to engagement and following, the most important goal is to promote the product! So while you’ll find memes, videos and fun stuff on our feed, you will also gain a thorough understanding of our app and FamCard. You’ll find explainer videos, show screens of the app and fun creatives to explain the uses of FamPay and FamCard.

So is it possible to grow any account to 20k in 6 months following our tips? Sure it is. The growth strategies aren’t difficult to emulate.

But before you dive in, make sure that you have a valuable product —great marketing without a great product may not work as well as you hope. And that’s something I don’t have to worry about with FamPay!