How a beginner artist reached 10,000 Instagram followers in nine months
Buckle up, my friends, because this is going to be a long one.
First of all, let me just say that I certainly did not expect to be writing this post in early 2021. The last time I wrote a post about Instagram followers was when I had my first 250 followers in July 2020, and then I took a few months away from the blog and bam all of a sudden here I am with more than 10,000 followers and it’s still growing everyday.
On New Year's Day this year I had just under 2400 followers. Two weeks later I had just over 3000. Two weeks after that I was approaching 6500.
So what on earth have I done to grow so quickly? Well I don’t claim to be an Instagram expert or to know any secrets of the algorithm, but I am going to share with you everything I do on my account and maybe some of these things will work for you as well.
In about 6 weeks from New Year’s Day to when I hit 10k followers, my account grew by nearly 8000!
Lay foundations
The first thing I did for my account was to set a foundation of my values and expectations of myself. These were things that I wanted my account to be and they would help guide my content and engagement with people.
They were:
Be genuine
Treat other users with kindness (these 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
Share what I learn to those who want to know
When I find myself feeling demotivated to draw or not wanting to engage with others, I bring myself back to these things and remind myself of why I started and what my values are. More often than not this changes my attitude, and if I still don’t want to post or engage then I don’t have to.
Post as consistently as possible
I’ve posted five times a week for the best part of a year now, and I’ve been able to stick to it because I do it for myself before I do it for others. I wanted to improve my drawing skills and incorporate creativity into my daily life, so when I committed to making time on weekdays for illustrating it wasn’t about forcing myself to draw and post, it was about allowing myself to, and that mentality makes sure that the habit is not a chore.
Consistently creating art has also been a huge help in developing my art style and improving my skills. I’ve found that having a schedule for posting gave me accountability and motivation to draw during the week when I otherwise would have just watched tv (or sometimes I draw while I watch tv and get the best of both worlds!).
Find your reason for being creative, and figure out how much time in your schedule you can allow for your art without burning out or making it a chore. Everyone has different commitments, so you might be able to draw once a week, or once a day. I personally can’t handle the idea of having a commitment to illustrating every single day without a break, so five days a week is an achievable challenge for me.
My art style has developed so much from drawing five times every week!
Provide value
After wanting to draw for myself, I also really wanted to provide value to other people by sharing cute illustrations and also sharing what I was learning about illustrating for anyone who was on a similar path (which is why I have this blog). I make sure that I provide value through my art five days a week, and I’m slowly building other content like YouTube videos and my blog to provide additional value to other artists.
I think that it’s easier to grow when you’re committed to helping others to grow as well, because Instagram is a platform that rewards community. If you’re on Instagram solely for your own gains and aren’t willing to provide any value or support to others, then don’t expect to grow quickly or receive support from others.
The more value you can provide the more reasons people will have to follow you, engage with your content and stay with you.
Build trust
This is important: I try to make it as easy as possible for others to trust that I’m worth following. Beyond just having my feed of art posts, I make sure I let people know who I am and what I stand for as soon as they arrive on my profile. I tried to make sure from early on that there was plenty to see on my profile that showed people I was active and would be creating often.
From the beginning I’ve had some variation of “illustrating Monday to Friday” in my bio so that visitors can see straight away how often I intend to post. I’ve always had highlights available from my stories to show things people might be interested in and that could build their trust in me as an artist (a bit more about me, or behind the scenes etc).
If I expected to see a bit more traffic to my profile (like if I’ve participated in an art challenge or have been featured by someone) I’ll make sure that I post some stories that day so that visitors can see that I’m actively posting not just to my feed but to my stories as well. All of these things build trust that I’m worth following because I’m a real person and I post content (and provide value) regularly.
When someone visits my feed they can see straight away:
a) what kind of art I post
b) who I am
c) how often I’ll be sharing with them and
d) that I share additional content through YouTube and my blog.
I don’t know the science but it doesn’t take long for someone to decide whether they want to follow you or not, so make it easy for them and create a beautiful profile that doesn’t give them any reason not to follow you.
Engage with others and promote a positive community
Instagram is a social media platform, so be social! The great thing is that you can engage with others without all the awkward small talk that comes with meeting people in real life. I always follow artists that I like, comment on their work with genuine comments and spread the word about them.
Send a DM to someone you admire and just let them know that you like what they’re doing. It makes my day to receive encouraging and kind messages from other accounts, so I try and do the same for others and encourage their creative practice as well.
Don’t forget, encouraging others and helping them to grow doesn’t mean less growth for you. Promote a positive community and it will support you.
Participate in challenges
Hosting or participating in challenges is a really nice way to engage with other artists.
The art community on Instagram is full of challenges like prompt lists and DTIYS (draw this in your style) challenges, and I enjoy participating in them for a bunch of reasons:
I don’t have to come up with an original concept to draw
It’s fun to see what other artists make with the same prompt
They typically have quite engaged hashtags
They’re good exposure for the challenge host
They’re good exposure for the participants
I generally do about one art challenge a week because I like to create lots of my own content as well, but they’re great for driving engagement for the host of the challenge and also for exposing you to lots of other artists who are participating as well, and they’re such a hub of creativity!
Use hashtags
I include between 20 and 30 hashtags with each post and try to mix it up so I’m not re-using the same hashtags every time. I have a few lists of general art hashtags I can grab from as I need, and I’ll also write out some more specific hashtags that are applicable to each individual post.
I’d recommend using a variety of hashtags with different weightings; some more competitive and some niche, less competitive hashtags. Large hashtags (with lots of posts) have high engagement and lots of eyes on them, but are super competitive so you’ll quickly be swallowed up by them, while smaller and more niche hashtags have fewer people seeing them but are far less competitive and you might even be able to land a spot in the ‘top posts’ section of that hashtag. I use a mix, with more focus on middle-of-the-road or small hashtags (when I can be bothered to do the research).
Pay attention to what’s working
Every week or two I look back over my posts and pay attention to two things:
What I either liked about my art or want to try and improve on
What my audience engaged with
I use this to help direct what I’ll draw next, both for myself and for my audience. If I have a post that has had much higher engagement than my others posts I try and understand what was different about that post and I trawl through my Instagram analytics for clues. Perhaps the hashtags performed really well, or maybe I had posted it at a different time of day. Or most often, it’s just that it included cats and the internet loves cats.
Pay attention to what is working for your audience, and if you like that content too then make more of it! I had a post that performed twice as well as the others around it, but I didn’t love how I’d drawn it so a couple of weeks later I drew a similar piece with some of the same elements and hashtags and that post alone has brought in 1025 followers to date when at the time I posted it I had 5563 followers.
Listen to what people are engaging with and incorporate more of those elements into your content.
The post on the left had high engagement compared to other posts at the time, so I drew the similar image on the right two weeks later and it has my highest reach to date.
Be patient
Lastly, give it time. It took me 6 months to gather my first 1000 followers, and I put a lot of time and effort into my content in those 6 months. I put a lot of energy into supporting others and commenting on posts, hosting art challenges and sending genuine DMs.
And then all of a sudden in January my Instagram analytics for exposure on the explore page started to go up and up.
Perhaps Instagram decided it could trust my content and that others would engage with it. If that’s the case I can only assume that it’s because I’ve spent a long time cultivating a positive community, providing value to others and being consistent. Being exposed to the explore page has definitely helped a lot with my growth, because it’s showing my work to a group of people who aren’t already following me. You can see in the graph below the sharp uptick in my follower growth when my art started consistently being shown on the explore page.
I don’t expect this trend to last forever, but I’m so grateful that it’s allowing me to share my art with lots of new people, and I think that’s pretty cool.
Lastly
If you’re trying to grow your Instagram following as a beginner artist, ask yourself some questions:
Why do I want people to follow my art journey?
What am I providing to others?
How can I support other artists?
What am I trying to get out of being on Instagram?
Remember that it takes a lot of time to build an audience. I don’t have any secret hacks or shortcuts for you, but these things have worked for me and I hope that it’s given you some ideas and motivation to continue sharing your art practice on Instagram and to grow a community that you enjoy engaging with.
I've made this 2 week workbook for both beginners and anyone who needs a little boost to their creativity!
You'll find 10 activities with different drawing prompts and exercises to help kickstart your drawing ideas, and each activity will have some extra guidance or examples to give you a helping hand if you'd like some support.
Check Out My Latest Youtube Video!
