It’s tough out there in the world of social media. If you have an Instagram account, you’ve probably thought more than once about throwing it in the bin and just starting all over. You’ve also probably seen people shouting about how old accounts are dead and that you actually can get crazy growth if you start from scratch. 

Yep, we’ve felt and heard it all too. So, you know what? We decided to give it a go! 

Now, the idea of leaving behind our previous Instagram account of 24,000 followers was scary. And how would it look on the brand to have a new account with zero followers? But something had to be done. We had lost a whole lot of engagement on our previous account due to a rebrand, and were desperate to revive things.  

So, we took the plunge and decided to make 2024 the year of trying things out to see what would happen. Today, I’m going to break down exactly what we did, how it’s going and our takeaways after 30 days of starting our Instagram account completely from scratch.

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The First Strategy in Starting a New Instagram Account: 90 Days of Reels

To kickstart the new account, we decided to focus heavily on Reels and committed to posting two a day for 90 days. Now, that sounds like a huge time suck – I know. However, we actually spent four weeks doing nothing but preparing and batching content to make the process more manageable. We also repurposed captions from old posts, reused successful Reels and utilised old emails to create captions. The goal was to make the process as hands-off as possible and maximise efficiency.

The Results: Slow Growth but Increased Reach

While we initially had expected followers from our old Instagram account come join us on the new one, it unfortunately wasn’t the case. After 30 days, we saw slower growth than we’d anticipated. The interesting thing was though, the reach of our new Instagram account was surprisingly higher than the old account. Despite having significantly fewer followers, the Reels were getting 30% to 50% of the plays the old account would receive. As well as some lovely DMs from new followers encouraging us to keep it all coming! 

The Next Strategy: Focusing on Value and Trending Topics

While we haven’t seen a crazy amount of growth to begin with, the favour we’re seeing from the algorithm is exciting. The next strategy we’ll be testing out is to create value-based content that people will likely share and save, which we’re confident will help attract our target audience. Then there’s focusing on things that are trending right now, like current marketing tactics and AI, to make sure we’re getting in front of more of the right people. 

So, there you have it. As we continue on this interesting path of growing our new Instagram account from scratch, we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop of what is and isn’t working. And of course, if you want to be one of our first 200 followers, then head on over to @hellofunnels.co and check out what we’re doing!