Growing on Instagram when you're starting from almost zero
I've been posting my floral close-ups on Instagram for a while now, but my following is still tiny. Maybe 200 people, half of whom I think are friends being polite. I put real time into each image, waiting for the right light, getting the framing just so, and then it disappears into the feed with a handful of likes.
I know the work itself has gotten better over the years. My early shots all looked like something you'd find on a seed packet, flat and generic. Now I'm making images I actually want to look at. But the audience hasn't caught up to the improvement.
For those of you who've built a real following from a small starting point, what actually moved the needle? Was it consistency, engaging with other accounts, reels, something else entirely? I'd rather hear what worked in practice than general advice.
Something that moved the needle for me, slowly but genuinely, was searching hashtags tied to my actual subject matter and finding the people already having real conversations there. Not the big generic tags, but the specific ones where someone is actually stopping to comment on texture or composition. I started following about ten of those people a day, the ones whose engagement felt thoughtful. When they got the notification and looked at my work, some followed back, and those tended to be the ones who actually cared. It takes maybe ten minutes and it felt more honest than chasing algorithms. Especially under a thousand followers, that kind of quiet, targeted consistency built something more real than any reel ever did for me.
Juan told me to do this too!