Grow Your Instagram Profile Fast

When you’re in the market for a product, how do you decide which of the many brands making that product to go with? Do you pay attention to the TV commercials or ads in your browser? Do you go reading reviews on Amazon or Google’s shopping center?

No, most people skip the easily modified and “corruptible” methods and instead choose to ask their friends and family. They turn to social media and post a question, ask for recommendations, or just look to see what the people they follow are using.

This, of course, led to the development of influencer marketing. Brands want to be the one recommended by your friends and family. Of course, your mom probably doesn’t have more than a few dozen or a few hundred Facebook friends – depending on the size of your family, probably – so brands are pretty unlikely to target her for marketing.

What brands do is find the people with millions of followers and try to get THOSE people to promote their product. If Kim Kardashian or Chris Pratt or your favorite Instagram model happens to post about some product they like using, well, maybe you’re more likely to go buy that product.

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Who cares if the brand paid for that mention?

That mention is called a shoutout, a social mention, a tag; it goes by many names. Many brands want them, and for every desire, there are facilitators. Companies have sprung up with the sole purpose of connecting the people willing to accept payment for shoutouts with the people willing to pay for them. You might not get Kim Kardashian – you’d need to talk to her agent, probably – but you’ll be able to find people with anywhere from 10,000 followers to 10 million. Whether or not you have the budget for it, well, that’s another story.

Enter: Shoutcart

That middleman relationship is where Shoutcart comes into play. Shoutcart is one of the larger and more visible companies working in the influencer marketing niche. They purport to hook you up with influencers who, combined, reach over 400 million active followers.

Is Shoutcart worth the money? Well, I’ll get to that. First, though, let’s take a look at what they claim to offer, and a few looks into what they actually provide.

Shoutcart, like any good web business, puts a bunch of selling points right on their homepage. They call themselves the number one platform for influencer marketing, and who am I to dispute it? I don’t have access to the inner workings of every such platform.

They promote themselves as having “top influencers”, though they don’t quite specify what that means. They analyze influencers in their network for niche, activity, and authenticity, and give them a proprietary score. They also claim a 100% satisfaction guarantee; they don’t pay the influencer until your shoutout is actually published, meaning the influencers can’t just take your money and run.

No marketing platform would be complete without some form of analytics, and Shoutcart is no different. They track the messages you pay for and the statistics achieved from it, so you can see exactly what you’re paying for and determine if it’s worth continuing.

Mechanically, it’s quite a simple platform. You register an account for access to their library of influencers. Then you browse that library and find influencers in your niche or who you think will be relevant. You can filter their list by audience size, category, follower demographics when available, and even just keywords. The demographics available are basic; language, country, age, gender, and not a lot else.

Once you find an influencer whose audience seems to fit yours, you add them to your cart and start creating an order. An order is essentially just the social media post you want the influencer to upload. You can make an image or video, you can write the copy with your username and link, and you choose a schedule for it to be posted, within reason. Influencers are given a 72-hour window in which to post your order to earn their fee.

You can organize your orders into campaigns with multiple influencers if you choose, or take them one purchase at a time.

If you take a look into the “for influencers” side of the site, you can see a little more detail about the inner workings of the platform. Shoutcart appears to take a minimum of 10% of the fee for an influencer’s post. They work on an escrow model, so you pay Shoutcart, and Shoutcart holds the money until either the order is fulfilled or cancelled. That way you can’t get a shoutout and revoke payment to scam the influencer, and likewise they can’t scam you.

Notably, influencers are allowed to cancel orders if they think the shoutout doesn’t fit with their brand image. If it’s outside their niche, if it’s too spammy or represents a company the influencer simply refuses to support, well, they can refuse the option.

Shoutscore ranges from 0 to 30. The lowest I’ve seen in a cursory search is .17, while the highest is 29.72. In fact, as of writing this, there are only three accounts with scores above 25.

Let’s look at some of the accounts they offer, actually. Here are those top three:

9.carat on Instagram. This account has 15,700 followers and has the highest score at 29.72. Their account on Instagram has the same metrics, and posts humorous videos of all kinds. It appears like they used to post a lot of #aesthetic photos, but pivoted into video around April of this year. Their price is $10, which is very reasonable.

Viakavish on Instagram. This account has 228,000 followers, and their shoutout price is $250. They appear to be a cartoonist posting largely doodles and simple animations, and I don’t actually see any recent shoutouts on their page.

Marcy on Instagram. This account appears to be a musician and Youtuber from Venezuela. They post their own content for the most part, and I don’t see any recent shoutouts here either. They have almost 50,000 followers and their price is a mere $20.

On the other end of the spectrum, here are some lower scoring choices.

Is Shoutcart Worth The Price?

There’s no denying that influencer marketing can be quite powerful. The problems I see with Shoutcart are that most accounts aren’t all that great, and while shoutouts are cheap for them, I don’t see you getting much in the way of returns. On the other hand, the majority of the reasonable accounts have prices under $1,000, and that’s still a decent budget for a suitably large brand. If you could get a good shoutout on BestVines and get decent returns, you could come out ahead.

The real question is whether or not you can actually get those returns. I haven’t actually paid for any shoutouts, but I imagine the rate of returns is dependant on all of the usual metrics: how close they are to your niche, how well you can craft a post, and how compelling your call to action ends up being. I recommend running a few experiments with the mid-level accounts before going all-in on a big one, but it’s entirely reasonable to spend $50 on testing to see if the platform works for you.

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