We Stopped Growing on Instagram

One reason we started this blog was to share our tips and tricks to how we grew our Instagram account. Because besides “where did you get Navy?” questions surrounding our Instagram growth strategy is our my most commonly asked question. Don’t get me wrong, we love collaborating with our online friends and sharing our social media growth strategies but over time, I realized as much advice as we gave to others, we rarely took our own advice when it came to social media. 

Let’s just consider this post a personal vent session–lol. It’s funny, as I am about to hit publish on this post, we are a few followers away from hitting 75,000 followers, and I could not care less. I wanted to write this post for awhile but each time I sat down to type, my mind completely went blank. Please excuse the rambling and jumping around of this post. I hope I was able to convey my current mentality surrounding Instagram following counts.

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Zach and I both have pretty demanding careers that are not involved in social media, advertising, marketing, or public relations. Ever since creating Navy’s account for fun, it grew fairly quickly. At the same time, mine and Zach’s careers became more demanding. The amount of free time we had to constantly create new content and engage with our online friends dwindled, yet we still had this strange desire to grow on Instagram. 

I found myself having this emotional connection with the number of followers we had, for all the wrong reasons. I’ll admit it, I got caught up in the “Instagram numbers game” that every new influencer wannabe does. That “game” where you jump at the first sponsored post offered to them, free products in exchange for posts, and opportunities to model products. It seemed like with every follower milestone we reached, more opportunities became available.

Initially, I tried to be as active as I could on the app, engaging as frequently as possible, because it seems as though the Instagram algorithm gods reward you with likes, comments, and followers the more active you are. More reach equals more followers and more followers mean more money/free stuff…right?  Let me tell you guys, the majority of the “free stuff” is not worth your time and effort. This was probably the most important thing I learned during my first year as an Instagram “dog influencer.”

I found myself getting annoyed and frustrated that other accounts were growing at a faster rate than we were. Truthfully, I got a little competitive with it. It honestly wasn’t until I discovered many of these fast growing accounts were not being completely honest with their growth and engagement. Many of these accounts I once compared myself to were not only buying followers, but also running bots on their accounts and participating in large engagement pods. Realizing this really helped me take a step back and see that even though I was playing by all the rules and they weren’t, it was okay. At the end of the day, the number associated with our account is not our livelihood, and most importantly it does not determine the relationship we have with our dogs. 

We are in a couple of group chats on Instagram and a common complaint among everyone is their lack of growth. Heck, someone in one of these groups seriously mentioned they wanted to get another puppy to help increase their engagement on social media. When we brought Duke home some had messaged us suggesting we “take advantage of him as a cute puppy” and post more videos of him in an attempt to go viral. I don’t know about you all, with the stress of raising a new puppy, snapping a quick video or photo of my puppy is the absolute last thing on my mind.

Through our platform we’ve been introduced to amazing people, organizations, and brands. We’ve also been granted the incredibly opportunity to monetize our account, travel to new places with our dogs, and give back. I wouldn’t trade any of this for the world.

Earlier this year we talked about our goals for 2019. I explained that I’d like to see our online community grow, and I had a certain number in mind. While I still have that number in mind and we are on track to hit it, if we don’t reach it, I really do not mind. With that being said, we will still continue to participate in giveaways (because we LOVE giving away awesome stuff!) and we will still celebrate hitting milestones in our follower count. Our overall mentality and attachment to this silly app has changed. 

We stopped growing on Instagram, and we really do not care.