I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: while I love Instagram, I’m finding it almost impossible to grow on there. I gain 10 followers, lose 12, and the cycle continues with a never ending loop of spam bots and follow-unfollowers.
This year, I’m determined to hit a new milestone of 2000. It’s probably tiny for many but it’s still about 700 away, which would mean consistently gaining two followers a day with no drop outs. Sounds simple, right? Ha.
I’ve tried all sorts. I have a theme (sort of), I post good quality photos with as many hashtags as I can fit and while the likes come rolling in, the followers don’t follow suit, which has led me to believe that it’s one particular thing about my Instagram: my handle.
Back at the beginning of 2016, I implemented a huge blog overhaul. I bought a new domain, my snazzy layout and header, and I rebranded. By rebrand, I removed one thing from my blog’s title. You see, LottieDoesDisney was how I began, and if you’ve been following me long enough to remember the days of the blue cloudy blog posts, then I salute you! Instagram was the first form of blog related social media I got into, and being @lottiedoesdisney made me, well, me. Back in those days my blog was entirely Disney, and it’s only been in the last 2 years that I’ve branched into proper lifestyle blogging, and the rebrand made sense for the benefit of my blog, but I’ve clung to my Instagram as the only remaining form of my blog as it was when it was born.
What I fear now is what I feared back then: what if having Disney in my name is putting off new followers? I will always post a lot of Disney, both on my blog and Instagram, but that’s not all I want to be known for, and I’d hate to think that it’s the reason people aren’t hitting that follow button?
What do you think – does having a fandom/obsession in a username put you off following?
Lottie Does 
Great content and in my opinion, yes the name could be holding some people from following. I’ve been blogging for a while, until this year I got more serious and have found some great resources to help me out with social media. I can totally relate about instagram, and same goes for Facebook page / twitter. I’ve noticed a pattern of following – unfollowing and i cant help but assume is an automatic twitter option, because who really follows and unfollows someone the next day or even same day?(also, when we are scrolling through social platforms, we are more focused on the content and not actually following the account, if the content is interesting to them enough, then only then they will go to your account and possibly follow, once they stalk the rest of your content). I’ve also read that hashtags do you no good anymore, I still use hashtags, it does help but it does not drive traffic to your photo like it used to. I’d love to share a free great app I fell in love with and has helped me be ontop of my social platforms. The app is called Buffer & you can add all your social accounts and schedule posts in advance for all your social platforms.You can make the same content for all the platforms and schedule it to publish all at the same time, I find myself scheduling twitter posts more often and individually mainly due to the character limit and the hashtags on Twitter do help, meanwhile for Facebook and Instagram I schedule posts that are the same and do not have to worry about remembering to post – which usually leads to forgetting. Since it’s gotten so much more competitive in the blogging industry, consistenty and unique content is what will make you stand out and rise to the top. I hope this helped and good luck! Btw, I love disney.