📝 The Weekly Scroll: Notes on growing on Instagram

I crossed 2,000 followers and raided my coworker's playbook to figure out what's next

Apr 03, 2026

🎤 tap tap, is this thing on?

Hey folks,

Three months, one plan, and 93,000 subscribers later, The Weekly Scroll has officially moved into our new home on Substack. 🎉

If you’re an OG subscriber, you remember when I first introduced a bunch of new formats and then when we changed up the look of the newsletter. And now, we’re in a whole new home. Our new subscribers aren’t left out either — welcome! So glad you’re here.

So what’s different? Well, for one, you can leave comments now (please do — I’d love to hear from you). Also, we have more room to flex with our content. Some weeks will be deep dives and personal essays. Other weeks might be shorter and more laidback. And we have some new formats coming that I’m really excited about — more on that soon.

But the thing I’m personally looking forward to most is being able to share more of what I’m actually working on and pulling back the curtain on the experiments I’m running in real time. Starting with this one.

Something I’ve been doing lately that I haven’t gotten the chance to talk about in the newsletter: I’ve been trying to grow my personal Instagram. Like, actually trying.

For the longest time, I resisted pursuing Instagram as a platform to grow on since it was a very personal space for me. But I recently crossed 23,000 followers on LinkedIn and was craving a new challenge. Instagram naturally came up as a space with untapped potential for me, so I laid out a few video ideas and filmed them back-to-back.

One of them went semi-viral, currently sitting at nearly 90,000 views. That lit a fire under me and pushed me to post more, helping me break my 1,200-follower plateau and pushing me past 2,000 followers. And look, I know that’s not a massive number. But if you’ve ever tried to build an account from zero, you know the euphoria of seeing any kind of growth.

I know one semi-viral video doesn’t become a strategy on its own. I needed an actual plan. Luckily, all I had to do was check the Buffer blog.

Sabreen, our Sr. Brand and Community Manager (and someone you’ll be seeing more of in future issues), recently published her tips for growing on Instagram. She’s grown her own audience to over 15,000 people, and she’s the person behind Buffer’s Instagram crossing 100K. So when she says “here’s what I’d do,” she’s speaking from experience.

I’ve been working with her advice over the past few weeks, and here’s what’s stood out for me so far.

The first thing that hit me was the note about consistency. Our data shows that accounts posting 3 to 5 times a week grow followers 2x faster than accounts posting 1 to 2 times. As someone who was in the once-every-other-week category for a long time, you can imagine the bump this gave me. I’ve published 2 to 5 posts each week for the past few weeks and have seen visible and significant improvement in my reach. Sometimes, it really is that simple.

NOTE: Don’t take this as a sign to develop a breakneck pace of publishing — even bumping up from 2 to 3 posts can give you amazing results.

Then there’s the format mix. Reels for reach, carousels for engagement — that’s Sabreen’s framework, and Buffer data supports it. Reels get about 2.25x more reach than a single image post on Instagram. But carousels are the ones people save and share. I’d been leaning almost entirely on reels because that’s what everyone tells you to do, but the carousel posts I started mixing in are the ones that actually sparked conversations in my DMs. Different formats do different jobs, and you need both.
I’ve also been experimenting with trending audio. One of Sabreen’s tips is about pairing original content with trending sounds, and the timing is everything. Catch a sound while it’s still climbing, and you get a real boost. Wait two weeks, and the algorithm has already moved on. And if you’re the type of person who’s really picky about their music taste, so am I! My “viral” post used a song I’ve been enjoying that thankfully had the upward arrow next to it at the time.
The part of Sabreen’s advice that hit the hardest was to build a system. She talks about working smarter — batching content, scheduling ahead, letting things autopublish so growth happens even when you’re offline. I’m a content creator by day and by night. And yet my personal content (outside of LinkedIn) was completely unstructured. This is debt that I’m still paying off, but even a basic system already makes me feel super clear-headed and energized. I can share the system I’m working on in a future post — comment if you’re interested!

I’m still figuring a lot of this out. I definitely don’t have it all dialed in and find myself falling back into old habits. But hearing from someone who’s so experienced in the process has helped a lot, and I hope it helps you too!

Read the full piece: 13 Ways to Get More Followers on Instagram in 2026 — Exactly What I Would Do

BUILD YOUR SYSTEM WITH BUFFER

Speaking of building a system, one of the things that helps me actually stick to a posting schedule is using Buffer to queue up my posts ahead of time. I batch a few pieces of content on the weekend, set them to notify me at the best posting times for the week, and I can post easily, whether I’m at my desk or not.

If you’re trying to be more consistent on Instagram (or anywhere else), give Buffer a try — scheduling is free for up to three channels.

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

Glad you asked. In addition to her blog post, Sabreen shared a video on our YouTube channel with her top tips for growing on Instagram. Check it out:

I wrote about how to improve your engagement, backed up by our new State of Social Media Engagement in 2026 report. Plus, we shared a list of essential collaboration tools for social media teams.

In social news, Meta made some updates to Edits, which has been my go-to editing tool for Instagram, and shared some tips for monetizing on Facebook (curious if anyone’s doing this). Plus, you can now like your YouTube comments in bulk, and TikTok is testing in-app DM games.

P.S. How does this format feel?? We have comments now, so let me know!

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