But I found this company recently called Shoutcart that promises to get you mentions with these Instagram influencers for very little money, like 15 bucks, five bucks for thousands of followers on the account. So I tested it out, and here are the results. First, let's start with some baseline numbers. Here's my Instagram account. We started this experiment on March 15th.
Our Instagram followers were at 3,062, and our Twitter followers were at 3,096. Originally, I thought I'll pick a couple channels on Shoutcart, and we'll send the same picture. So I chose this image, which, on our Instagram account got over 100 likes when we posted it a couple months ago, and I figured let's have three or four accounts post it at the same time, same sort of caption, and see how it does.
Here are those posts on Shoutcart. What's interesting here is Shoutcart will let you rank by rating, and I figured ones with higher ratings would have more results. So I sorted the list only by that rating and spent about $50.00 on this campaign. So results from round one, measured on March 22nd, we ended up with the following: 3,116 Instagram followers, 3107 Twitter followers, so we gained 54 Instagram followers, and 11 Twitter followers. Not impressive at all.
No leads were generated in batch one for any of our companies. Because of the way Shoutcart works, we had a few dollars left. They refunded the amounts for the two or three accounts that didn't shout us out, and so we had about $30.00 to play with, so I wanted to go in for round two.
This time, instead of posting the same image to all the accounts, we decided to go into each of these influencer accounts and create an image, similar to what they post, with a shout out to the Alex Berman Instagram channel. So for round two, we bought three shout outs. The first one was with a profile called Deep Ambitions. Here are their most engaged-with posts from the last month. Both have about 29,000 likes. And you can see the first one is two emojis, and the other one is a quick quote.
We found a post on Google that was similar to what Deep Ambitions posts with two emojis and calling out Alex Berman 1 with the phrase "caption this." The second one is an Instagram account called Luxurious Man. Here are their two most popular posts in the last month. One's about a black R8 in the snow and asking people to name the actor. That one has over 3,000 likes. And the other picture is of a first-class cabin, also with over 3,000 likes.
So here's mine, a red Ferarri, and it's a picture of Michael Fassbender, asking the same thing, can you tell who the actor is? And the last one was for a page called Success Diaries. Here are their two posts, one with 2,400 likes, and one with 2,516 likes, and it's a quote with a quick message. Of those three channels, Luxurious Man didn't post, so we're gonna get a refund on that. The other two did post, and here are our final results. On March 26th, we ended up with 3,148 Instagram followers, and 3,111 Twitter followers.
And zero leads. All in, is Shoutcart worth it? I would say no. I am interested in experimenting more with Instagram influencers.
We'll most likely do another test like this based on emailing them, doing real collabs, and growing like that. Right now, I wouldn't recommend Shoutcart, at least not for what we do.
Total growth over the experiment, in two weeks, we gained 86 Instagram followers, and 15 Twitter followers. So not worth it, well below the average.
What do you think, what has been the most effective way you've found to reach out to influencers? I'd actually love to take a look at any scripts you're sending out, if you want to post them down in the comments below. It could set us up for another good experiment.
If you found this valuable, I would love if you would share it with a friend who also might get value from it.