Upleap: Your Instagram concierge

Do you need an Instagram concierge? There is one. It’s called Upleap.

But before we get into that let’s chat about Instagram and what you absolutely shouldn’t do to grow your account.

Use the follow / unfollow method. It’s pretty self explanatory: you follow people, they follow you back, then you unfollow them. People just get angry when you do this and unfollow you back, so you end up wasting your time. Also, many people that advertise on popular sites like Fiverr do this.  You also don’t get real engagement with this method.  It’s also wrong to buy followers and wrong to misrepresent yourself as having followers that don’t engage with you at all. While people have differing opinions on comment pods that drive up engagement are, in our opinion, okay. It still falls within Instagram rules.

Next, let’s chat about Instagram’s algorithm. A couple things to know about their latest update:

• You must respond to comments within one hour for your comment to count.
• Hashtags must be in the description, NOT in your comments.
• Your posts are only showed to 10 percent of your followers. If they “perform well” according to Instagram, they will then show it to more of your followers.

As influencers, we know that Instagram is the hottest social media network that brands are obsessed with. One of the first questions a brand wants to know is how many followers we have on the popular social media network. Growing a following is time consuming and involved lots of hard work. Not to mention we are also supposed to be coming up with creative new blog posts, recipes, food stories, culinary travel stories, etc for our blog.

Is it possible to still do all of this? Yes, provided you 1.) Do not have any other commitments (job, family, etc) other than your blog and social media related to your blog or 2.) Do not require sleep. If you do fall into one of the categories above, congratulations, that’s wonderful. If not you need help.

So here are some tips to save some time.

One thing that helps is scheduling your Instagram posts. You can use these tools to write and schedule your content so you don’t have to think about it. Here are some scheduling tools to use. Remember, you should always use tools that are Instagram approved.

Instagram Scheduling tools

Planoly (Free) easy to setup and can drag around images. I don’t like that the images in Planoly cannot be adjusted to autofit the space for Instagram.

Later (Free) There’s a feature where you can click and drag future posts to see what your feed could look like.

Tailwind – While it is a nice compliment if you are already using it for Pinterest, it is a bit unfair they don’t offer a discount to add Instagram too. Still, they do offer great analytics and learning the best performing times for posting.

What else can you do? Hire an Instagram concierge.

I tried Upleap for 30 days to see what it is like. Concerned my Instagram concierge would employ the follow / unfollow method, I kept a keen on eye on how many people I was following and it never changed. This means they most certainly were NOT doing the follow / unfollow method. So, that’s great but you need more than just followers. You want targeted followers within your genre. I love that upleap allows you to pick out accounts similar to yours and target their followers. They even let you to determine which hashtags you want to target. Once you set it up, you are good to go.

What you can do when you setup your account with Upleap:

• Target Hashtags
• Target followers of similar accounts
• Target locations

My gains ranged from 9 to 20 followers per day, so if you are looking for the “Get Instagram Followers Fast” method, this ain’t it. However, if you are struggling to grow your following, Upleap does offer legitimate help. But it doesn’t come cheap. The most inexpensive is $69 per month.

Note that Upleap doesn’t post on your behalf. And that’s a good thing. I want my Instagram account to have my brand and voice associated with that. So, I am still posting my own pictures, captions, hashtags and comments. However, if you really don’t want to post your own content,  you can pay more to your Upleap concierge to have post Instagram content for you.

You can sign up for Upleap here.