How I Grew on Instagram: My Dirty Little Secrets

I have around 12k followers on Instagram for street photography, which is… pretty decent. When people see the follower count, I can’t help but read their expressions — a flicker of disbelief, maybe. Sometimes I wonder if they think I’ve bought my followers, especially as my account is lucky to get 50 likes on a post these days!

Honestly, I only wish I’d bought them — instead of spending hundreds upon hundreds of hours accumulating them.

So how did I get them?

This article isn’t about the usual tropes: “engage organically”, gimmicks like giveaways, or any of the other nonsense that influencers espouse. That’s a bit like the Liver King claiming he built his massive physique purely on an “ancestral diet” of liver and copious amounts of meat — with a light sprinkling of growth hormone, as we later discovered.

Make no mistake: anyone with a huge following has probably taken a few shortcuts, or indulged in some fairly cynical behaviour along the way.

Anyway, if you want to know how I did it… read on. I’ll ease you in gently.

Hashtags

This used to be a good way to get your work seen by a lot of people. These days, I don’t think they’re particularly relevant.

I used to keep a list of hashtags that I’d swap in and out depending on the photo I posted. I’d track how well each one performed, ditch the ones that didn’t work, and keep refining the list. The idea was to have a mix: a few very popular hashtags where, if you did well, you were off to the races (rare, but it happened), alongside medium-popularity hashtags, and so on down the ladder.

Back then, everything fed into hashtags. Get them right, and your photos could be seen by a genuinely large audience.

Reciprocal Engagement

This is probably the biggest way to rack up likes and comments on your posts. There’s a spoken — and sometimes unspoken — rule on Instagram: people form little cliques and will like, comment on, and sometimes even bookmark each other’s posts. Some do this with literally hundreds of accounts.

It’s still a valid strategy today. I regularly see genuinely terrible photographers pulling outrageous numbers on whatever they post.

From a purely numerical perspective, it works. But it’s utterly draining. Commenting on bad posts purely for the sake of reciprocation wears you down. I’d often default to something vague like “Nice catch”, and more often than not, receive the exact same in return.

I eventually got sick of the insincerity. It ground me down.

If you want numbers, though, this is the way to go. Some groups even turn on post notifications so they can engage instantly — sometimes sending the post around via DMs to make sure everyone piles in.

The Explore/Search Page

Much like hashtags, getting good numbers could land you on the board, putting far more eyes on your work. It wasn’t easy to get there, but if you did… brace yourself for a flood of new followers.

Follow/Unfollow

This was one line I wouldn’t cross. I’ve always found the follow/unfollow approach utterly cynical, and I never wanted to be that person.

Cultivating an International Audience

I found this a pretty useful tactic. At all hours of the day and night, I’d dive into hashtags, looking at the latest posts or country-specific ones. The aim was to build a following spread across time zones, so I could post whenever I liked and still get a steady trickle of engagement over a full 24 hours.

Sometimes this meant striking up friendships with people abroad — occasionally using Google Translate to chat when language became a barrier.

Feature Accounts

This was a great way to get in front of lots of potential followers. I’d use their specific hashtags or tag them directly in the photo, and I’d also make a point of befriending the people who ran the accounts.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know — as they say.

Mass Liking

This was one of my biggest strategies for gaining new followers, and it worked insanely well. A friend and I noticed some Stories from larger accounts where they’d publicly thank huge numbers of people for the support — likes, mainly. Sometimes it was mad: 40 or 50 people at a time.

I realised that if I clicked through to those profiles and liked a few of their posts, there was a good chance they’d follow me back. On a good day, I’d pick up 25–50 followers, sometimes more.

In terms of sheer numbers, it was rock solid. The downside was that these people weren’t always in my niche, so engagement wasn’t great and there was a higher chance they’d eventually unfollow.

To balance that out, I’d mix in street-specific hashtags and look for accounts that were either new to Instagram or, frankly, not very good photographers. I’d like three of their posts and occasionally leave a comment on an image I could tell they were proud of — and more often than not, I’d get a follow

Engagement Groups

This was a game changer — the thing that strapped your post to a rocket ship and sent the numbers into the stratosphere. Big early engagement could land you on the Explore page and push you high up in hashtags, which meant more followers and a better chance of being featured.

I tried a few versions of this. At first, some friends and I ran Instagram group chats. Whenever one of us posted, we’d drop the link into the chat and everyone would pile in: likes, comments, saves. It worked… at first. The problem was reliability — some people were hopeless at holding up their end of the bargain.

Then I discovered Telegram engagement groups, which felt like the final piece of the puzzle. These were bot-run. You’d post something like “DX10” (ten likes), followed by your post link. The catch? You had to like the last ten posts in the group, or you’d get kicked out. That solved the problem of lazy participants. There were also “30-like” groups, and separate ones just for comments.

I was also part of one on Clubhouse — the audio-only app that appeared during the pandemic. That one was surprisingly pleasant. Everyone took turns, talked about their post for a few seconds, and then the group would engage. Sometimes that was 40 or 50 people at once.

You might read all this and think: what’s the point of having big numbers on a post? What does it actually mean?

At the time, everything came down to the algorithm. If a post performed exceptionally well in the first five minutes or so, Instagram would show it to far more people — pushing it up hashtags, onto the Explore page, and beyond.

Here for a good time not a long time

Unfortunately, like all things, change is inevitable. I eventually burned out on Instagram and photography. After COVID, I developed this weird thing where I can’t look at my phone for more than a few minutes without getting a headache, which made spending hours on Instagram impossible.

With the push towards Reels and the algorithm becoming increasingly brutal, I started to lose interest. I think I peaked at around 15k followers over a few years. At one point I didn’t user Instagram for over a year which seemed to kill my account. I’ve lost a few thousand since then, but honestly… no one sees my stuff anymore anyway, so at least people aren’t even aware I exist enough to unfollow. Every cloud has a silver lining!

Less is More

When I first started on Instagram, I was posting way too much — sometimes three times a day — and it was a big mistake. Sometimes you’re only as good as your worst photos. The difference between a really good photographer and an average one is knowing what to show your audience and what to keep behind the scenes.

Every weak photo you post gives your audience a reason to unfollow you. The more weak photos you share, the more followers you’re likely to lose.

Why get big on Instagram in the present day?

The reason I wanted to grow my audience was that I felt I had the potential to become a great street photographer. I thought that if I built a following early, by the time I got really good, I’d have a ready-made audience I could leverage for print sales, professional opportunities, and so on. It was a kind of fuzzy goal, really.

They say you should start with a clear purpose — for example, I want to be a professional wedding photographer, and I want a large audience to help me get jobs. Once you have this clear goal then work backwards. Many professional photographers, of course, have small followings and it doesn’t seem to affect their bank balance.

An Instagram Senior Citizen

I really wish I could get back all that time I spent on Instagram and actually spend it reading, learning about photography, or indeed anything else!

I do miss that massive dopamine hit of dropping a post and watching the notifications pile up until they filled my screen. These days, though, I just enjoy my photography — and instead of 1,000 likes, I’m happy to get 50.

That’s the thing with social media: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — you’re always at the mercy of some algorithm change. You can work your ass off to build a following, but by the time it arrives, you need to be ready. You’re always one little code change from being irrelevant on social media and when that happens, be ready to adapt or have a career outside Instagram. That never happened for me. At some point, I realised my ambition far exceeded my work ethic and talent.

Still, I’m here — an Insta addict in recovery, taking one photo at a time. Who knows what the future holds?