The most simple, effective, reliable, and often overlooked growth tactic on Instagram is maximizing your daily interactions. It doesn’t require any special software, content format, or much skill to execute really, all it requires is that you understand how it works and that you do it every day.

What Are Instagram Interactions

Instagram interactions are simply the ways you can interact with another user on the platform. It’s whenever you like, comment, and/or tag another Instagram user and they receive the notification of that interaction on their Activity Feed.

Why Interactions Can Grow Your Account

Interacting with other users on Instagram is a way you can grow your account. The great majority of people with under 5K followers constantly check who interacts with their content through the Activity Feed, and they intimately know which accounts commonly interact with them and which don’t. More often than not, whenever someone they don’t know interacts with one of their posts, people will see it on the Activity Feed, tap on their username and discover the account that interacted with them. They evaluate it, and if they find enough value in it, they will follow it (you can read about this particular process in my article about how to create an optimized Instagram account).

It’s the same process that happens when people discover your account on the Explorer Page or Hashtag Feed (you can read more about this in my article about how to generate traffic on Instagram). They come across your username, tap it, discover your account, and if they like it enough, they follow you.

The only difference between being discovered in that way and being discovered through interaction in the activity feed is that you can actually control the number of times you are discovered through interacting every day. In contrast, all other ways of being discovered on Instagram are out of your control. You can’t control how and when the Instagram algorithm surfaces your account, how many people share your content, and/or how many people tag your account so you can be discovered by their followers.

This makes executing interactions the only controllable and reliable growth tactic on Instagram that is permitted by the platform (Instagram bots simply automate this process, but they aren’t permitted by them), and more importantly, is free!

So, if every time you interact with an Instagram account that doesn’t know you, you’ll create an opportunity for them to discover your account and follow you, what do you need to do in order to grow as fast as possible? Interact as much as possible with users who don’t know you and are likely to find your content valuable every day, a.k.a. “maximize your daily interactions”!

How To Maximize Your Daily Interactions

In order to be able to maximize your daily interactions you need to do four things:

Get clear on who your target audience is

They are the people on Instagram that are most interested in the content that you offer. They are the people you’ll want to interact with because, since they are already interested in the content that you offer, they are the most likely to find your account valuable and follow you once they discover you. Without first knowing who your target audience is, you’ll do random interactions with random users — and that will be a waste of your time because all the people that discover you through your interactions simply won’t find your account valuable — and they won’t follow you.

How to get clear on who your target audience is: Since there is no way to identify an Instagram user’s preferences apart from the accounts they follow and the Instagram hashtags they search for, the most effective way to reach your audience is to identify what Instagram niche you’re creating content about. The people who are interested in your niche are your target audience. For example, for my account @pinlord, my niche is #enamelpins, so on Instagram, the people who are interested in consuming enamel pin content are my target audience.

Identify Your Hashtag & Account Interaction Targets

Once you know who your target audience is, the next step is to find them on Instagram so you can interact with them. Like I mentioned previously, the only way to identify an Instagram user’s preferences is through the accounts they follow and the Instagram hashtags they search for. So, in order to find your target audience, you need to identify which hashtags and accounts they most densely follow. Through them, you’ll be able to interact with your target audience by liking and commenting on posts that use hashtags your audience checks as well as liking and commenting on the posts of people who follow the accounts your target audience follows.

How to find your hashtag interaction targets: Spend some time doing research on Instagram and write down all of the hashtags with over 1,000 posts that have a high concentration of posts from your target audience.

For example, if my target audience for @pinlord is people interested in enamel pins, I want to find the hashtags that people interested in enamel pins search for on Instagram. You can use the process detailed in the “How do you find the hashtags that create the most value for your account?” of my article on Instagram hashtags. It’ll give you the best results.

From that list, select the 5–10 hashtags that you’ve identified as having the highest concentration of posts from your target audience, starting with the most concentrated. These will be the hashtags interaction targets you’ll use to find users to do your daily interactions with.

How to find your account interaction targets: Once you have your hashtag targets, go through the TOP POST section of them and write down all of the accounts you can find with over 3,000 followers that you consider to have a high concentration of followers from your target audience.

From that list, select the 10–30 accounts that you’ve identified as having the highest concentration of followers from your target audience, starting with the most concentrated. For example, once I know which hashtags people interested in enamel pins search for, I’ll just go through the TOP POSTS of those hashtags and identify the accounts that I consider are most densely followed by that audience. In this case, they are @patchgame, @pinoftheday, @pintrill, and a few others.

From the examples I gave, the hashtag interaction targets for people interested in enamel pins on Instagram are #enamelpins, #pingame, #pinlord, and the account interaction targets are @patchgame, @pinoftheday, @strikegently.co, and @pintrill.

This process is half art and half science so the better research you do, and the better you know your target audience, the better targets you’ll likely find.

Find What Your Interaction Threshold Is

In an effort to limit Instagram bot interactions on the platform, Instagram has put in place an interaction limit on all accounts, regardless of whether or not you use a bot. In other words, every Instagram account has a limit to how many interactions they can do every day, and the limit is different for all accounts, depending on their history (you can read a bit more about that in the “How Instagram Combats Bots in 2021” section of my article on Instagram bots in 2022).

This limit is the interactions threshold, and it’s important to not go over it often because, if you do, you run the risk of having the ability to interact blocked by Instagram. So, in order to be able to maximize the interactions you do every day and not go over your threshold, you first need to find out what that threshold is. Because it’s a different number for each account, the only way to find it is by testing it directly.

How to find what your interaction threshold is: Now that you’ve found your hashtag and accounts interaction targets, to find your threshold you need to go to the Recent Posts section of one of the hashtag targets (whichever of them will do), begin liking the posts on that feed, and count how many you do until Instagram blocks you from being able to continue interacting. Whenever Instagram blocks you, make sure you write down how many total interactions you could do before being blocked. Repeat that process for three days. Whatever is the lowest number of interactions you could do before being blocked in any of those three days is your interaction threshold (how many interactions you can do before having your interactions momentarily blocked by Instagram).

Maximize Your Interactions Every Day

Now that you know what your interaction threshold is and the hashtags and accounts your audience follows, all you have to do is like all of the posts you can in the Recent Posts section of your hashtag targets before reaching your interaction threshold, every day.

You can also like as many posts as you can of people who comment on the posts of your target accounts before you reach your threshold, every day. By doing this every day, without going over your threshold, you’ll be creating as many discovery opportunities as possible for people who are likely to be interested in your content (your target audience) to discover your account, follow you, and consider purchasing your products.

For example, on my @couplescacao account, my target audience is partners interested in cacao ceremonies. My hashtag interaction targets are #cacaoceremony, #mindfulnesspractice, #relationshipcoach, and #reikimaster. My account interaction targets are @cacaoceremony, @keithscacao, & @healhaus. My interaction threshold is 150 likes per day.

So, what I do every day to maximize my daily interactions is that I go through the recent posts of my hashtag targets and like up to 150 posts. Sometimes, I do more interactions in some hashtags than others, depending on how they’ve been converting. Sometimes, I check the posts of my account interaction targets and I like all of the comments, so my username shows up on those people’s Activity Feeds. Over time, I improve on where and how I interact and the number of people who discover and follow my accounts because of this activity growth.

That is maximizing your daily interactions, and it’s the most effective way to directly increase the traffic your account received every day, for free and without having to rely on the Instagram algorithm.

Hope it helps!