Like all social media platforms, Instagram allows you to promote posts if you have a business profile. While I should have tried it way back in December, when my first book ‘Death & Darker Realms’ was published, as the old saying goes – better late than never.
Yesterday, which was a Monday, I decided to do a little experiment and see if paying for an Instagram promotion is worth it. And if boosting a post helps in getting your profile some visibility. So this write-up is for anybody who is interested in understanding how that works.
To be able to promote a post, your Instagram profile needs to be connected to a Facebook business page. I have a Facebook page called Writer_Jaiswal and linked my Instagram profile to the same.
The cheapest promotion offer costs a little over one dollar (Rs 95 with taxes) for a 24 hour promotion. According to Instagram, this ad is capable of reaching a maximum of 300 people. So I opted for the lowest denomination for a post that talked about my poetry book.
Here is the deal, my Instagram page is very new and had only 61 followers. On an average, a post of mine gets 10-22 likes. So it was easier to understand how much the promotion was actually helping me.
Before opting for the paid ad, I saw a video by a popular blogger, who had paid 10 dollars to promote a post and see how much it helped her. At the end of the 24 hour promotion, she gained a few followers and according to the promotion statistics, she got only 11 profile hits through the promotion. She probably gets way more than that on an average anyway.
Coming back to my post. After the 24 hours were over, I had about 595 likes. But here is a BIG BLUNDER that I committed. Instagram says that you can pause your promotion anytime and resume it whenever you feel like it. What I thought was that I could spread those 24 hours over a bunch of days. So when at one am in the night, the likes stopped coming on the post, I paused the promotion and thought about resuming it the next day. By then I had used up 9 hours of the promotion. Through the night, my promotion was paused for about 8 hours. When I woke and resumed the promotion, it showed that I had only 7 hours left to promote, not 15 hours. Which means, if you pause your promotion, that doesn’t mean you save the rest of the promotion time. So I lost 8 hours worth ad time.
Well, but that still doesn’t change the fact that I had over 500 people like my post because of the promo. That’s a lot more than Instagram estimated. And is a decent amount of visibility for an unknown user. Although, as far as followers are concerned, only 4 new people followed me after the ad.
And one person also bought my book. So that was awesome. I guess, I am going to try and do a promotional post on the weekend again.
In conclusion, I think that the Instagram promotion tool is best for beginners who want to gain some visibility.
And now for some promotion out here too – if you are interested in poetry, please go and buy my book ‘Death & Darker Realms’.
Following are the links – (the paperback is available on Amazon.com)
(Please check your country’s amazon if I haven’t listed it or just on your kindle/kindle app)