How to Get Real Instagram Followers With Facebook Ads

In this article

1. The Benefits of a Real, Active Audience
2. Why You Shouldn't Buy Fake Followers
3. How to Grow Instagram Followers With Meta Ads
4. Improve Results With A/B Testing
5. Conclusion

Growing an Instagram following takes time, and it's tempting to look for shortcuts. The shortcut that works is not buying followers from a follower service; it's using Meta's ad platform (Facebook Ads) to put your profile in front of real people who are likely to enjoy your content. Combined with great content, engaging captions and good use of hashtags, ads can speed up your growth considerably.

The Benefits of a Real, Active Audience

An engaged audience opens up many opportunities. You can keep followers up to date on your latest offerings and drive traffic to your website. You can increase sales and build your reputation by sharing ideas your audience appreciates. You can earn money through partnerships and influencer marketing. And people who already want to hear from you make powerful remarketing audiences.

Why You Shouldn't Buy Fake Followers

There are plenty of ways to inflate your follower count artificially, but they damage your brand in the long run. Growing a real audience takes more time and money, but it's worth it.

• Fake followers ruin your data. Your insights will no longer tell you who your real audience is or what they enjoy, because the numbers are full of accounts that don't care about your content.
• They lower your engagement rate. Fake accounts don't like, comment or share. Your engagement as a percentage of followers drops, which can hurt how your content performs.
• Instagram looks for them. Fake accounts behave in predictable ways, and Instagram regularly removes inauthentic accounts and activity.
• People can tell. Visitors to your profile often notice when a big follower count comes with very little genuine engagement, which undermines trust.

A hundred genuine fans are worth far more than a hundred thousand fake ones. With that in mind, here's how to use ads to grow real followers.

How to Grow Instagram Followers With Meta Ads

The process is straightforward: build audiences of people likely to be interested in your content, run ads that send them to your Instagram profile, and measure how many followers you gain for your spend. Keep your profile well maintained with fresh content and engaging captions, so the people who visit have a reason to follow.

Step 1: Create a custom audience from your Instagram account

In Ads Manager, go to Audiences, choose Create audience > Custom audience, and select your Instagram account as the source. You can include people who:

• Engaged with your professional account
• Visited your profile
• Engaged with a post or ad
• Sent your account a message
• Saved a post or ad

If your following is still small, choose the broadest option, such as everyone who engaged with your account, and use the longest time window available to give yourself as much data as possible.

Step 2: Create a lookalike audience

Next, choose Create audience > Lookalike audience and select your Instagram custom audience as the source. Then choose a location: the countries or regions where you want your new followers to come from.

• Choose locations that matter to your business.
• If you simply want more followers at lower cost, advertising costs vary by country, so some locations will be cheaper than others.

Start with a 1% lookalike (the closest match to your source audience) if your chosen country has a large population. For smaller countries, a larger percentage may work better, because a tiny audience can limit delivery.

As you test, try lookalikes of different sizes. As new data comes in, you can create fresh custom audiences, for example from people who engaged in the last 30 days, and build new lookalikes from them.

What if you're starting with very few followers?

If you don't have much Instagram engagement data yet, start by targeting people based on interests and demographics, or use your Meta Pixel to build custom audiences of people who've visited your website. Once you've gathered enough engagement, create Instagram-based custom audiences for future campaigns. You can also build your early following organically, for example by encouraging website visitors to follow you, before investing heavily in ads.

Step 3: Set up your campaign

Meta doesn't offer a campaign objective specifically for Instagram follows, the way it once offered "Page likes" for Facebook. The most practical approach is a Traffic campaign that sends people to your Instagram profile, where they can follow you.

1. In Ads Manager, click Create and choose the Traffic objective.
2. Name your campaign and start with a daily budget you're comfortable with. You can keep campaign budget optimisation (Advantage campaign budget) on.
3. At the ad set level, choose Instagram profile as the traffic destination, where available.
4. Select the lookalike audience you created under Custom audiences.
5. Set the location to match your lookalike audience. Avoid adding lots of extra age, gender or interest restrictions: your lookalike and Meta's delivery system will find people likely to engage, and narrowing the audience further can hurt results. Do restrict languages if your content is in one language only.
6. Set placements to Instagram (feed, Stories, Reels or Explore), since you want people already using Instagram.
7. Create your ad using content that shows off what your account offers, with a clear reason to follow.

Step 4: Track performance

Ads Manager shows clicks and cost per click (CPC), along with reach and impressions. Because Meta can't report follows directly from a traffic campaign, track your follower count before and after each campaign, and calculate your cost per follower: ad spend divided by followers gained. Use the result from your first campaign as a benchmark for future tests.

Keep an eye on how many profile visits it takes to gain one follower, and remember that clicks aren't the goal: a campaign with cheap clicks isn't necessarily cheap per follower. When you test new creative, set up a new ad set so the data stays clean.

Improve Results With A/B Testing

The more people visit your profile, the more data you have to build accurate lookalike audiences. To test ads properly, run one ad at a time, because you can't tell which of several simultaneous ads drove new follows. Remember that you'll also gain some organic followers during campaigns, which can slightly skew your numbers.

A simple approach:

1. Run one ad for five days, then pause it.
2. Run a different version for another five days.
3. Compare the cost per follower and keep the winner.

To compare placements, such as Stories versus feed, use separate ad sets for each.

Run at least three tests before increasing your budget on the best-performing ads. Your goal is to find a cost per follower you're happy with. As your following grows, refresh your custom audiences and lookalikes, but A/B test new audiences against old ones: newer isn't guaranteed to be better.

Conclusion

Using Meta ads to reach the right people is an effective way to grow your Instagram account with real followers who are interested in your content. Pair your ads with engaging, informative content and organic tactics such as sharing posts, using hashtags and Stories and collaborating with others. Avoid follower-selling services entirely: real growth takes a little longer, but it builds an audience that actually engages and buys.

Good luck!