I tried to make my dog an Instagram celebrity. I failed.
Last spring, I started an Instagram account that featured my dog, Max, trying to eat my home-cooked meals. I was confident it would be an overnight sensation.
Foodies and corgi lovers, after all, are two of the biggest audiences on the photo-sharing site. Combining the two, I jokingly told my colleagues, would be my ticket to early retirement (or, at the very least, some free kibble).
I did all the homework. I heeded advice posted on the web from internet-famous dog owners and social media mavens: Find a shtick, publish your posts at strategic times, craft funny captions and engage with your audience. I even invited a professional photographer over for a consultation.
Yet about four months and 70 Instagram posts later, @cookingwithfatmax is far from stardom. Despite how cute Max looked or how plump my steamed pork buns appeared, the account stagnated at roughly 300 followers. Max’s “likes” plateaued at an average of about 60. No sponsorship offers appeared in my inbox.
So I turned to some obscure marketing blogs that suggested a simpler path: Buy some bots, otherwise known as fake followers, to make the account look more attractive to real people and to help expand an audience. I bought 2,500 bot followers and waited for the likes to pour in and the audience to swell.
To my surprise, Max became even less popular. His number of followers hemorrhaged, presumably because Instagram purged many of the phony accounts. The average number of likes on the posts dipped to about 45.
This week, I asked Ahalogy, a marketing technology company in Cincinnati, for a reality check.
“You just can’t be an overnight success,” said Bob Gilbreath, the chief executive of the marketing firm. “This is a real job that takes a lot of effort. Stay at it with several posts a day, several ideas, and build relationships.”
Above all, he said, “no shortcuts.”
In the end, the experiment bore less fruit than my past exploits, like renting out an Airbnb or buying cryptocurrency. Becoming an influencer on Instagram was more challenging than I had ever imagined. Here’s what I learned.
Instagram is brutally competitive.
One tip echoed by many Instagram marketing blogs was to become noticed by influencers, or accounts that were already popular, in the hope that they would spread the word about my food-obsessed dog.
So whenever I had the opportunity, I called out influencers. When my partner and I made dishes from recipes by wellknown foodies, like Maangchi, the eccentric YouTube star who is famous for her Korean cooking show, we credited her and others for their recipes in the captions.
Maangchi eventually posted a comment on a photo of Max with a paw rested next to a bowl of kimchi: “Good looking dog! Looks very smart!” But that didn’t do much for making Max more popular.
Could it be that the photos were not good enough? I invited a professional photographer, RC Rivera, over for an assessment. His advice: Try photographing the pup and food with creative angles and more postproduction. Also, use visual aids like props and dog clothing. As a last resort, consider buying a fancy camera like a DSLR or hiring a social media agent who specializes in doggy influencers, he said.
Still, Max’s following did not grow.
Bots can backfire.
Another tip that came up frequently was to buy fake followers. The premise: The only good time to buy followers is when you are small and just getting started, because accounts with medium-size followings look more attractive and thus could persuade people to follow you.
This made sense to me, so I sent $19 via PayPal to Social10X, a site that offers services to improve your social media presence, and bought a package of 2,500 followers. The followers on Max’s account quickly grew, an experience that was as eerie as it was satisfying. I visited some of the followers’ profiles. Many of them looked like real people.
Max’s followers ultimately jumped to about 3,000 from 300. But his average number of likes fell. The bots themselves did not give my posts more likes — it turned out if you wanted artificial likes, you had to pay extra for a separate package.
Gilbreath of Ahalogy, which helps brands ferret out influencers with fake followers, said that generally bots worked in two different ways: Some are phony accounts that have copied all the content from real people’s profiles, and others are actual people who are part of a so-called follower exchange program, in which they agree to follow people in exchange for being followed back.
You can’t make people love you.
One legitimate way to lure followers is to get exposure to a wide audience. A primary method is to embed photos with hashtags, or keywords after the pound symbol, such as #cutedog. If people look up the hashtag #cutedog, they might stumble upon a slow-motion video of Max gobbling up a piece of Thanksgiving turkey.
Another way to reach new audiences is to pay for an ad on Instagram. On an Instagram post, you can click the Promote button and then select the demographic you are targeting and the number of days you want the ad to run.
I tried both approaches. But this didn’t do much.
Max, of course, is still a big winner from all of this — he gets to taste our food. Next up on the menu: steamed fish.