This is about a Chinese tea account we launched about two months ago. The goal was to grow sales across Russia gradually with minimal spend—relevant for this business size and the current climate.
We started by picking competitors (what else?). For the first run we used a broad set: local competitors in the client's area plus well-known sellers across Russia.
We decided to use only competitors for now—no hashtags or geo. That was enough to start.
We used fairly soft filters. We didn't limit follower count or last post date. We did set max 300 following to reduce bot accounts that follow everyone. Min 3 posts so accounts weren't empty and to reduce bots; language set to Russian.
We didn't exclude private accounts; we did exclude business accounts. Private accounts tend to be more active and can convert well. We skipped business accounts as an experiment. Stop-words we left empty—the system has sensible defaults.
The first week after launch was lost to temporary limits from Instagram—something our support often gets asked about. Yes, it happens; no service avoids it. The limits are temporary and nothing to worry about.
Results:
- Total spend on the plan over this period was about $8.
- 254 new followers (why so few? The account started from zero—followers weren't the main goal here).
- Revenue in the same period was around $90–100 from 6–7 sales.
Solid result for the spend, especially since our service was an extra sales channel on top of everything else.