Instagram Shoutouts are very popular method of gaining exposure and growing your Instagram following nowadays. It’s actually recommended as one of the fastest ways to grow your account in a noninvasive way. Because let’s be honest, if you start your account now and you want to grow it organically it will be very difficult. The competition on Instagram is huge. The platform already hit 1 billion users in June 2018, so it’s really a challenge to start a new account from the scratch. I talk more about organic methods for Instagram growth in this article: How to grow on Instagram >>
What are Instagram Shoutouts
An Instagram Shoutout is when another account publishes your content (photo or video) on their profile and gives credit to you. The intention is to bring your content to the attention of their own followers.
Paid vs Trade
There are paid Instagram Shoutouts and there are trade Instagram Shoutouts. The second option is reserved only for accounts with similar size of the audience though. In that case, you do a shoutout for them, they do the same for you. So the benefits are mutual. If you are interested in doing that you should be reaching by DMs accounts that are in the same niche and with the audience size not more than 2x big as yours.
People with small accounts will have to pay to a bigger account to do such a service for them most of the time. The prices for shoutout can vary from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. It all depends on who is doing the shoutout and on the niche.
Time and permanent Instagram Shoutouts
We’re talking about a Time Instagram Shoutout iwhen someone posts your content for a certain amount of time. It can be a few hours or a day for example. The second type of shoutout is a permanent type of post and in this case, the content stays forever on the account of the profile for good.
Feed, story or a package
Instagram Shoutouts also vary in terms of their placement. Some Profiles agree to have your content in their gallery and some of them only agree on including your content in their Story. The best option for you would, of course, be to agree on the whole package, meaning Feed + Instagram Story.
What results can you expect?
I will tell you about my experience because recently one Profile DMed me with such an offer. I’ve decided to give it a try to have my opinion about it. I have to tell you straight away that it was not one of the biggest accounts in my niche, which is traveling. But it was reasonably big for my small account. It has around 18K followers. We agreed on a whole package (post + story) for 10 euros. The contact with that person was a very nice experience, we agreed on the date and time and form of payment (by PayPal). Below you can see how it looked in the end:
But I know that what interest you the most is the final result. So how many followers did I gain?
Wait for it…1 new follower 😉
So as you see it did not work for me at all, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t work for you. This is just my experience and I know that one experiment was enough 🙂
