Growing your channels and engagement on a budget

Name of Presenter
Growing Instagram on a
budget
Shirin Zaid, YoungMinds

This session covers
• How @YoungMindsUK developed a content strategy and grew
its following over a short period of time
• Lessons we’ve learnt from running low budget ad campaigns
• A bit about working with influencers
There are some slides we’ll skip over due to timing but these will
be circulated so you won’t miss out!

What do you want from
Instagram?
• Drive traffic to website?
• Community engagement?
• Deliver awareness / advice / information?
• Create engaged following of campaigners?
• Encourage fundraising?
• Reach new audience?
Anything else?

Quick exercise
• Take a couple of minutes to note down what you think your
biggest challenges are to growing or engaging your audience
on Instagram.

Our Instagram story…
• Jan 2017 – 1.6k followers
• June 2017 – 2.5k followers
• June 2018 – 10.1k followers
• Dec 2018 – 20k followers
• June 2019 – 45k followers
• Nov 2019 – 68.7k followers

How did we go from 2k to 10k in
12 months?
• We committed to Instagram as a channel worth
investing in, and added it to our digital strategy.
• We honed in on a specific audience: young people aged
14-25
• We tested all kinds of content and spent more time
curating 3rd party content to save us having to create it
ourselves.
• We started posting fairly regularly – but this was hard to
do!!

How did we go from 2k to 10k in
12 months?
• We developed something that was totally different from
our other social media channels and from other similar
charities.
• We built links with influencers who promoted us during
key campaign moments when we had specific ways
young people could get involved.
• We did a tiny bit of Instagram advertising (under £200)

We tested…
In 2017 we posted:
• Pics sent in by our fundraisers
• Posts about stuff going on in the office
• Pretty pictures
• Third party content
• Super ‘branded’ posts
• Illustrated quotes from our activists

What worked / what didn’t work?
• Insert fundraising post

• Insert office post

• Insert pretty pictures post

• Insert third party content

• Insert branded posts

5min exercise: what works for
you?
• With the person/people next to you think about what you’ve
tried already? Have you had any standout posts or epic fails (on
Insta or more generally)? Why do you think that is?
• If you don’t want to do this – instead you could take a moment
to scroll through @youngmindsuk – what do you like? What
don’t you like? Can you see how the posts have evolved over
time?

Our digital content is always…
• Reassuring
• Empowering
• Credible
• Relatable and jargon-free
If we wouldn’t say it to a teenage boy whose
feeling low and struggling with depression, we
don’t post it.

Tone of voice
We take nearly all of our quotes from our blog which is written by
young people with lived experience of mental ill health. This
helps us stay authentic – our posts are essentially by young
people, for young people.
When we edit captions we try to ask if a young person would roll
their eyes at us or think we sound like a well meaning aunty rather
than a cool older sibling.
Sounds like a teacher: We found this really relatable, did you?
Sounds like YM: Can you relate?

Going from 20k to 68k followers
in under a year
• Figure out what keeping on brand really means to you – what
vision or feeling are you ‘selling’? Hope? Love? Joy? Excitement?
• Almost every single one of our posts is designed to
communicate the idea that ‘you are not alone, and you can get
through it.’
• Authenticity is key. Each post is from one human to another.
We’re convinced that the emotional truth of your post will
always win over generic but pretty pictures.
• We like keeping a fairly consistent aesthetic, but we don’t let it
get in the way or stop us from testing new things. (We simply
try to make sure 1 in 6 posts contains yellow).

Going from 20k to 68k followers
in under a year
• We try to offer the user more than we ask from them in return,
this makes asks more powerful and more likely to be accepted.
• We use stories when we want our audience to take an
immediate action – (when you have enough followers you can
use the swipe up feature!)
• We have increasingly experimented with ad/campaigns
• We use stories and ads for anything really interactive where we
want to drive traffic off platform.
• We take the caption as seriously as the image.

Quick tip: get a blue tick
To get a blue verification tick on Insta, your account needs to be:
1. Authentic – you will need to provide a registered charity number etc to
verify you are who you say you are
2. Unique – you shouldn’t struggle with this – there is a reason your
organisation exists
3. Complete – complete your bio, but don’t include stuff that says ‘add us
on this account’
4. Notable – your organisation needs to be something people search for

Quick tip: tone
• Troll yourself!! What’s the worst thing someone could say about
your post, and do you care?
• Think about who you would NOT like to sound like.
• We would not like our posts to sound like they’ve been written
by a teacher, or a great-aunt.
• Always ask: WHO CARES?

Quick tip: read your caption out
loud
• Does your post sound authentic, boring, insincere, snappy,
longwinded, cheesy, try-hard, on-message?
• I personally find the easiest way to figure out if a social media
post hits the mark or not, is to read it out loud. If I wouldn’t say
it to a real person, then I know I need to re-write it!

Quick tip: Use photos (and edit
them on platform)
• Instagram is a photo-sharing platform!
• We’ve found the Instagram algorithm appears to be biased
towards photos over computer generated images/graphics. If
we want to use a computer generated image, we’ll print it and
take a photo of it.
• Try it out! Try posting both types of images (photo and non-photo) at
the same time each week, then take a look at your reach.
• Instagram has a tonne of editing features – it knows when
you’ve used these, or if you’ve used photoshop instead.

Quick tip: use hashtags
• Remember that the hashtags you use will help this content appear in
more people’s explore pages, based on similar posts they have liked.
• A variety of relevant hashtags will improve the post’s performance.
What type of content would you like to see your post appear
alongside? #BeCreative #HaveFun #BeInspired.
• You can use hashtags to get across key messages – think of them as
part of your post (e.g. #YouCanDoIt #YoureAwesome
#BelieveInYourself)
• What hashtags are people using organically? How are you keeping
on top of emerging trends? Try to find tags which are popular but
not oversaturated.

Quick tip: try a hashtag app
• Search ‘hashtag’ in your app store and you’ll find a load of apps
which generate hashtags for your post. It could save you time,
or get you started if you’re not sure what you’re doing.
• According to internet wisdom, statistically posts with 11 or more
hashtags perform the best.

Quick tip: follow and like similar
accounts
• If you follow accounts in your particular subject area, and like
posts which relate to your organisation’s work or message,
Instagram’s algorithm will start drawing a link between you and
those accounts, and it will start suggesting you/your content to
people who have interacted with similar accounts to you.
• (Same thing applies to YouTube! Turn your sound off, log into
your organisation’s YT account and let a load of videos related
to your field play in the background while you’re working and
YouTube will start to suggest you to users who also watched
those videos)

Quick tip: use analytics
• This will help you figure out the best
time to post – it can make or break your
post!
• Know who you are reaching – and
whether it’s who you want to be
reaching
• For me, post saves is the most satisfying
metric. It means your post has been
saved for someone to revisit time and
again, which hopefully means that it has
not only resonated with them but
they’ve found it to be of particular
value!

Quick tip: format your captions
• There are a couple of different tricks you can use to make your
captions look clean and visually pleasing.
• Some people like to add all the hashtags as the first comment
on the post.
Read more:
• https://shanebarker.com/blog/spaces-in-instagram/
• https://www.jennstrends.com/how-to-optimize-your-new-cut-
off-instagram-bio/

Quick tip: archive don’t delete
• You might want to delete unsuccessful
posts (or old posts which no longer suit
your brand or content strategy), but you
can archive them instead. That way you still
have a record of how the post performed
and you can take a look over archived
posts to see what they had in common.
• It also means that if someone has saved
your post, it wont disappear from their
saved posts.

Quick tip: turn webpages into
stories
• We have information pages on different mental health
conditions, symptoms and feelings.
• We’d like to create a story about each condition and use the
pinned highlights feature so that young people can access
mental health information through our Instagram account.
• How would you use the pinned highlights feature?

Quick tip: community
engagement
• Tone of voice and
organisational/brand values must
follow through into community
engagement.
• Validate your users for choosing
to spend their time engaging
with you!!

Consider: diversity
• Do the people in your photos reflect the diversity of your
supporters and beneficiaries? Is this important to you, and
why/why not?
• Do you use skin tone emojis in your posts? Which skin tone do
you choose and why?
• Do you need to create guidelines for your channel for all the
people creating content for your account?
• Do you have diverse opinions inputting in your content
creation/selection process? Do you go to different third parties
or the same ones?

Consider: accessibility
• Do you add alt text to your images so that visually impaired
users can engage with your posts?
• Capitalising the first letter of each word in a hashtag makes
them easier to read and is better for screenreaders
• What other accessibility needs might your users have?
• https://www.jennstrends.com/add-alt-text-to-instagram-posts/

This unexpectedly got over 20k likes
– sometimes good things just
happen ☺

5min exercise: discuss your
challenges
• Refer to the challenges you wrote at
the beginning of the session. Chat to
the person/people next to you about
these challenges.
• Can you help each other explore
solutions?

Boosting posts
If you have a relatively small following it’s hard to know if your
content is working, because you’re reaching so few people.
This can make posting feel altogether pointless. But you can
boost your posts relatively cheaply and get some really
impressive results.
The best tip I can give is experiment with small amounts. This will
help you build a case for why you should have a bigger ad
budget!

What can £15 and 15mins buy
you?

How could we have stretched £15
further?

Targeting your audience
If you target ads or boosted posts towards a general audience
(e.g. 13-65, male and female, UK) you will see results. This is
something big organisations can afford to do.
If you’re on a tight budget then minimising your cost per click
with targeting is a no brainer!
At YM, we want to reach more young people than ever before so
we’ll target people with no ‘interest’ in mental health. We are
prepared for our cost per engagement to be higher!

Case study: #ListenToAnger
• We were chosen by Facebook to work with them to run an
Instagram campaign
• We worked with a creative agency to come up with a campaign
to help young people understand the links between anger and
mental health – because this is a big topic for young people, but
something we hadn’t seen a campaign on before.
• This campaign was a HUGE learning curve - but here I’ll stick to
what we learnt specifically about running ads

• We created 3 IGTV episodes
• We created 3 sets of story ads with a swipe up to an Instant
Experience. (an instant experience, sometimes known as a
canvas is like a microsite which lives in-platform)
• 3 in-feed ads with a click through to our instant experience

Beware Facebook/Insta ads policy
We worked with Facebook on this campaign. Originally the concept was
called #OwnYourAnger… until at the last minute Facebook’s policy team let
us know that the ad campaign would fall foul of their ads policy.
You cannot target people by protected characteristics, or imply to the user
that you know they have one of these protected characteristics! Eg Race,
age, religion, gender…
so an ad saying ‘if you’re under 25 you can apply to our summer school’
would breach this policy, or an ad saying ‘if you’re in the UK sign our petition’
https://www.falcon.io/insights-hub/topics/social-media-strategy/facebook-
ad-policies-for-2018-why-your-ads-arent-getting-approved/

#ListenToAnger: what we learnt
• 13 x more young people who saw our ads clicked on our handle
to visit our profile than swiped up to view the Instant
Experience. [NB the call to action on the ads was was swipe up
to learn more]
• The FB team had never seen this behaviour pattern before!
• The audience weren’t intrigued by the ads, but they were very
keen to know who was targeting them! The campaign ended up
being great for brand awareness – which was not our specific
objective!

• Unfortunately we had to disable commenting on our videos and
ads after one of the young people in the videos started to get a
lot of nasty trolling. We didn’t use actors. We knew it was a risk,
but we’ve never experienced it in the last few years.
• On certain types of ads you are unable to turn off comments –
so we had to pull these ads altogether. So we put a lot of work
into creating ads which couldn’t run as ads.

• We spent about £8k on advertising. It bought us a reach of over 4m
people, with more than double the number of impressions.
• It led to a decent growth in following – but if we think about how
many followers we got for £15, we didn’t see nearly as many
followers £ for £
• Even though the reach was phenomenal, the responses to the CTA
were disappointing. Money helps, but it is simply not a substitute for
good content.
BUT…

Before we pulled our ads we were advised to do general targeting of
young people aged 14-24 in the UK. We stuck to this advice until we
got concerned that our ads usually do a lot better.
Were we just not reaching young people who struggled with anger?
Before we pulled the ads we had a small window where we tweaked
the ad targeting to stuff that we thought angry teens might be into
(cage fighting, MMA, death metal, slipknot, Grand Theft Auto) and the
engagement suddenly SPIKED.

Influencers
• We have really good links with about 15 influencers including
Daniel Howell (Ambassador), Jada Sezer (Ambassador), Mikey
Pearce, Jamie Shawyer, and Joshua Pieters to name a few. Nearly
all of them approached us.

The Daniel Howell effect
• Dan’s following is DEDICATED.
• Once Dan tweeted a link to our
website and our website crashed from
the traffic.
• When Dan gets involved in a campaign
we gain 2-4k new followers in a day.
• We ran a competition to win tickets to
his stage show but it didn’t have the
same effect on growth because the
content didn’t come from him directly.

Approaching influencers – tips
• Look out for accounts with blue ticks that engage with your posts
across social media. They might not be known to you but could have
a big influence! Keep a spreadsheet if you can, so you know if
someone is repeatedly engaging with your social media content.
• If they follow you DM them and thank them for their like, comment
or share!
• Build a genuine connection. Research why they might be interested
in what you do. Have they spoken publicly about your cause – if so
let them know you know about that.
• If you don’t know why they’ve interacted with you – ask! The worst
thing that can happen is that they don’t reply.

Influencers are only human
• We saw that in influencer who liked a couple of posts in the past
reached a milestone number of followers.
• We sent a DM to say congrats! She was really pleased, said she
loved out work and to let her know if we needed help.
• The conversation continued and we’re soon going to announce
her as our latest Ambassador!

• We had an influencer pull out of filming for this campaign the
day before filming because they were offered paid work
elsewhere.
• These IGTV videos were not strictly about the influencer’s
experiences, and they were shared to our audience, who didn’t
necessarily follow or care about these particular influencers.
• We put the influencers in the position of TV host/interviewer
which didn’t necessarily come naturally to them, and in parts
might have felt a bit staged.

World Record Egg – case study
• In January @world_record_egg, who broke the record the most liked photo
on Instagram (an egg), said they’re donating 10% of their t-shirt profits to
us. They tagged us in their story and sent a lot of traffic to our page.
• Our interactions (the amount of actions people take when they engage
with our account) increased from 167 on Monday, to 118,000 on Tuesday.
And we gained 10K followers overnight.
• This is because we capitalised on incoming traffic to our page with this
post:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BsqlU_AgaXP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_lin
k and we reacted quickly in our story. People visiting our profile were could
see a direct link between where they came from and where they landed
and they liked the rest of our posts.
• The Egg did the same for a number of other charities who did not see the
same sudden growth in following. This is probably in part due to the fact
that we reacted quickly (and also that our content is designed for younger
audiences)

Viral campaign: #5YearOldSelfie
• Ever social media campaign dreams of going viral! Influencers
are a really helpful way to get there. Find out more about how
we did it in this CharityComms article:
https://www.charitycomms.org.uk/a-message-to-your-
5yearoldselfie
Overnight we gained:
• 4k new Instagram followers
• 2K new Twitter followers
• Nearly 2k new Facebook followers
• Trended at #2 in the UK and USA on Twitter

Lessons we’ve learnt
• Influencer content works best when they create it for their
channels
• They know their audience and what will perform well, and their
audience knows what feels authentic and what doesn’t
• We always send influencers new content when we create it
without any expectation that they’ll share it – they’ll share it if it
feels right.
• Sometimes you have to chase… a lot. It can feel like you’re being
pushy, but if they really believe in your charity, they wont mind.

• Just because an influencer shares your content or tags you in
something doesn’t automatically translate to new followers or
engagement with your channel.
• Direct contact is often easier than going through people’s
management team – if you can, do.
• Let influencers know what you’re planning, then follow up two
weeks in advance, then a few days before or on the day.
Influencers tend to have hectic schedules and get hundreds of
messages and requests every day – advance warning often isn’t
enough. They often prefer getting content and instructions on
the day as well as in advance.

• The key thing to focus on with any influencer is how engaged
their audience is… not how big their following is!
• An influencer with 10k SUPERFANS will bring you much more
value that an influencer with 1m followers who just aren’t that
invested.
• 10 ‘micro’ influencers’ might be just as helpful as one big name!

• We never pay influencers. Most of our influencers reached out
to support us after seeing something they liked about us on
social media.
• If we are commissioning content … this is how influencers make
a living. You should expect to pay if you’re asking them to make
you something specific for their channel.

• Do your due diligence – often PR teams reach out to charities
after the influencer/celeb in question has done something
they’ve had bad PR for, or they’re trying to rebrand their image.
• Make sure influencers know how to refer to your relationship.
What can they say, what should they never say – and be upfront.

Challenges
• Getting analytics from influencers about their reach an
engagement
• The more influencers you work with the more resource intensive
it becomes to manage all the relationships, keep them up to
date and make them feel special!

My top takeaways
1. There’s no substitute for good content. Be brutally honest – who
wants to watch a video of you interviewing your CEO?
2. Decide what you want your audience to feel and make them feel it
consistently, with every post.
3. Target your audience – a small highly engaged audience is likely to
be more beneficial than large and disengaged.
4. Influencers and money help! But be reactive. If either of these is
driving traffic to you, meet that audience with something relevant!!
5. Test, test, test! Even tiny ad budgets can make a big impact.
6. Believe that you can do it. We had lots of good luck, it happens!
7. Influencers are only people. You can make genuine connections if
they have experience with the issue your charity is working
towards.

Thank you!
And remember to follow us
@youngmindsuk

The charity digital
conference
20 November 2019
London
#charitydigital
Sponsored by

Visit the CharityComms website to view
slides from past events, see what events
we have coming up and to check out
what else we do:
www.charitycomms.org.uk

Growing your channels and engagement on a budget

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