Before the Manychat experiment, I made a goal to get 1,000 followers on Instagram before the end of the season. That was a goal we reached and even exceed.
As for how did I get them? That was something I had to get my head around, and honestly I struggled with it. After talking to a few other content creators, it is clear most people won’t follow an account unless they’re prompted to. Which really means you have to go find followers. That means sifting through the ‘likes’ on the team’s posts and following every account that falls into your target audience. Some of those will follow you back. Some will leave you on read. Some will be bots, spammers, and scammers. This was time consuming for me, and usually meant an hour a day of just digging through accounts, sending them a follow, and most importantly trying to remember which ones you already sent a follow request that they rejected.