Private Instagram Accounts Get More Followers?!

Happy Tuesday beautiful people and welcome back to The Instagram Guru Blog.

Today I want to talk to you guys about a topic that I actually made a post about a couple weeks ago and it really blew up. I got a lot of follow up questions, so I figured I'd address them in a blog post.

Should I go private to make my account more successful? I'm going to start off by explaining what going private means and why some people do it. Then I'll follow up be explaining whether or not you should actually do it to get more followers and to grow your account.

Okay, so what does it essentially mean to take your account private? A lot of accounts when you land on them you can see all their pictures and all their posts. Private accounts, however, are just that. They're private, you can't see any of their content. The only thing you can see is their user name, their name, and then their profile picture. If you want to see their posts, even if you want to share their posts, watch their Instastory, you have to follow them and they have to approve you.

Now a lot of people go private just because it's their private account, they don't really want to share, they're not trying to grow. But a lot of other accounts, and really really big accounts, will go private as well. I'm sure you've seen this. There are some meme accounts, there are some funny video accounts that have like a million, two million, 10 million followers, and you land on their page and it's all private. Or your friend happens to follow them and they send one of the posts to you as a story, or they tag you in it, but you can't see them because the account is private. The only way for you to see their posts is to actually follow them.

Now I know you guys are probably thinking is a great method because if I share good content and other people tag their friends in my content, those people have to follow me to see my posts right. Then also if someone lands on an account and you have like a million followers, or half a million followers, they're going to be curious, like ooh what is this account sharing that I'm missing out on, and so obviously they're going to follow. This is kind of the, I guess the thinking behind why you should go private. Now, this works really great for a big account.

If Kim Kardashian went private, or if a big meme account with over a million followers were to go private, this would work really, really well for them. But now, let's assume you're a business account. Let's say me. I have 253,000 followers on Instagram. I'm not a small account by any means, but I'm definitely not a larger one with millions and millions of followers. If I were to go private and I wanted people to follow me to view my content, that would not really work for me.

Here's why. If I were to go private, people really wouldn't hit the follow button. The reason is because people decide to follow me after they read my posts, after they read my captions, after they view my Instastories and my highlights. The way I know this is because I'll see people will like the post and then they'll probably comment on it, and then they'll follow. You can see the trajectory of how they decide to follow you. Very rarely do people just land on my page and hit the follow button. Usually it's they're consuming my content first, and then they choose to follow me. That's kind of the way that a lot of accounts work. You'll see that when people land on your page they'll scroll through your posts, sometimes they'll go way way back, to see what it is your page offers, whether or not they really want to hit that follow button and commit to following you and staying on your page.

If you're a business or even a personal account and you're trying to grow, going private is really not the way to do that. There are much, much better ways to grow. I cover them in my YouTube videos. You guys can scroll through and check some of those out. I also cover my extensive growth method in the Instagram Guru Course, which is linked below. Obviously if you guys are a business account, or a private account and you're trying to grow, I wouldn't go private. I would stay public. That is the best way to get people to land on your page, consume your content, interact with you, engage with you, and then decide to follow you. That also makes them a very, very loyal follower as opposed to people that will follow a memes page just to see what the content is and then unfollow because they're probably not that interested.

I hope that helped. I hope that made sense to everybody. As always, if you have any questions, make sure to drop a comment below and send me a DM if there's anything that I haven't addressed. I'd be more than happy to answer it and help you guys out.

Thank you guys so much and I will see you all next week.