Instagram Carousel Strategy to Gain 70,000 Followers in 2025

I've gained nearly 70,000 followers on Instagram in 2025 using only this carousel strategy. And it's very simple.

So, I wanted to walk you through it. And I'm even going to build out one of my carousels for you in this video, too.

So, if you want to follow along and learn how I make my carousels and start growing for yourself, then watch this

video. So, first off, I want to talk through a little bit what the strategy is. If you're looking here, this is my

Photoshop document. And this document here uh accounts for over five million views. And it's all pretty simple stuff.

Overall, the designing is is practically just image and a tiny little bit of text. It's nothing crazy. It's nothing

wild. Um you're not going to see this in really great detail here because it is uh very zoomed in, I guess, um from a

screenshot. But overall, there's very minimal text in what I do. So, it's not about having a ton of information on

your carousels in order to get a lot of views. It's more about how you present that information in a way that is easily

digestible, easily consumable, and easily sharable. So, let's go through it. My secret growth strategy, and I

kind of stumbled upon this, but I had a good feeling that it would work. First off, why carousels? On Instagram,

carousels reach your actual followers. When you post a reel on Instagram, it honestly doesn't go out to very many of

your followers. It kind of does this little test out on a few of your followers to see if they'll engage

before Instagram decides to send it to more of your followers, which I think is just stupid. If somebody's following me,

send them my posts. Why are you doing this stupid test to try to see if you want to send it to more of my followers?

And the benefit of carousels as well is if they perform well, they'll actually push it to the reals page. You've

probably seen this yourself when you're scrolling on Instagram and all of a sudden there's a gallery that you can

swipe through. This is what Instagram does. It can post your your carousel to the reals page. So now you're getting

the benefit of reels without even posting a reel. Um, another reason carousels seem to get a lot more shares

and saves than um reals do. Mostly because I think they're a low impact form of content. And I say low impact

meaning anyone can really watch it. You don't need the audio. You don't need a listen. It's all about reading. So, you

can consume it kind of at your own pace and it's not really forced on you. And so, with that, it makes it very very

easy to consume and very easy to share. And then lastly, I find that carousels and and photo posts get shared to the

explore page a lot more than reals do, which allows your post to even get seen by people who might not be following

you. Also, this is why I think carousels are great. And all of it starts off obviously with having good design. And

if your carousel looks boring, no one's going to click on it. No one's going to swipe through it. So, I'm going to go

through my strategy of kind of making carousels that look good. Now, I want to give a little bit of the sauce. Uh, if

you haven't watched my last video, you can go watch that. There's some information again on all this topic as

well. Um, but I think there's really two types of carousels that people are generally going to make whether they

know it or not. I call these informative and revelational carousels. Can you can swap out revelational with inspirational

as well. I'm not even going to try to write that out. It's just annoying. Um, but the two types of carousels that I

see most people making are informative and revelational. Informative just meaning it's teaching something. It's

building authority in some sort of subject. And this lets you build kind of like a I mean, you can think of it as

like five things you should do if if you want to lose weight, right? Um, I would say though, I'll talk about this in a

different video, but I'm just going to bring it up now. If you're using a hook, try to make the hook more personal and

less preachy. So, everyone's used to hearing how to, how to, how to. Instead, if you flip the switch, flip the script

and say how I, how I lost 10 pounds, how I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. Now, it's it's a lot more I can relate to you

because I think you're a person that I can trust. And if you're talking about your story, it's easier for me to kind

of picture what it looks like. Now for me, instead of saying how to, I'm being told how to do stuff all the time. It

doesn't make me do it right. You remind people all the time and they still don't do things. But if you show them the way

that you've done it now, it makes me a little bit more interested because there's this there's this almost hero

story beginning in that that oh, I can relate to the hero and maybe I want to, you know, try it try along what they

did. Anyway, that was a little tangential. Informative posts, pretty self-explanatory. It gives you

information on a subject. Revelational posts, though, these are kind of where each slide is a standalone thought. It

can be shared on its own. You don't even need to know the prompt in order to get the message of what this this slide

means. The reason this doesn't happen on inform informational um carousels is because if it's like five things you

should do and you're like tip number four do this, no one's really going to share just tip number four. It doesn't

really make sense for them. But with this revelational slide, if it's a standalone thought, it's not really

connected to the prompt, although it is. If you know the prompt, it makes it easier to understand the the slide. Now

somebody can share that without there being this this thing tied to it that they must understand that to know what's

going on. So each sli each slide can be a standalone thought. It can be shared by

others as a series or as individual posts. And the way that I like to think about this is that it gives you many

times to engage your audience. When you make a reel and you spend four hours on it or however much time you spend making

this reel, you got one chance to gain attention. You get one chance to capture and hopefully have somebody share this

post. With carousels, if I have 10 slides, I I essentially have 10 chances to capture that audience and have them

share it out. Now, this isn't necessarily completely true. Somebody might get three slides in and get bored

with the information that you're sharing or the design is crappy so they don't want to continue scrolling. Which is why

it's important that we um make these slides look good. We make the information digestible so that they

continue to swipe through and as they're swiping through they can share out kind of you know somebody might relate to

slide three or somebody might relate to slide four and so they might share different slides.

whole thing here is that it gives us more chances to really capture the attention of our audience. Second thing

too, Instagram does this interesting thing where if you post a carousel, if it comes across your followers

profile like on their feed and they don't look at it, like let's say your first slide pops up and they don't

really look at it, they don't swipe through and they kind of just keep scrolling, right? Maybe they they didn't

see it so they scrolled past. Instagram is going to give them a second chance to see your post and show the next slide.

So now it's going to pop up on their feed twice. Your reel does not do that. Anytime you post a real, if it if it

shows up on their post or on their feed, if they don't watch it, they don't watch it. And you get no more chances. That

sucks. Honestly, that just sucks for the creator because now you get no extra chance to try to capture the attention

of your audience. So, this is why I think carousels do so well. And this is why it's done so well for me. If you

look at this, these are the results. January 2025, I had 180K followers. And then here in July 2025, I have sitting

at, and this is honestly, this is like from two weeks ago, not even. I think a week ago, I'm at like 247K

now or something like that. So, I've gained nearly 60,000 followers. And um you can look at the the analytics here.

These are just screenshots from uh my dashboard and one of my posts that got a million views. You can see here what I'm

talking about as it gets pushed to the reals page. That other 881,000 views, that other is the reals page because you

can see from the explore page, it's got 8,000. From profile, it's got another 6,000. From the homepage, this is my

followers. Um well, some of my followers and some not. But that other is coming from reals. Um and stories are blended

in there too. I get a lot of views from stories, from people sharing stuff. And then um you can see that just from

February to March alone, I had over 11 million views. And I was posting only carousels, only uh graphic posts, no

reals. And I gained over 50,000 followers in that month. 54,000 new followers, which is insane. In just one

month, I gained 54,000 new followers. So, this is a strategy that works and I want to show you how you can start

making your carousels. Now, I'm going to walk through it with you. If you want to find the file, by the way, I linked a

file down in the description if you want to follow along with me and create your own carousels. Cool. It is a Photoshop

file. Just saying if you don't have Photoshop, you can use I think there's a a Photoshop alternative online called

Photop. It's not exactly the same as the Photoshop that I use, but you can still follow along if you want the free

version. Otherwise, highly recommend. Invest the $10 into Photoshop and just use Photoshop. It's so so useful. I It's

pretty much the only Adobe product that I use. So, um, use it if you want to, but you can follow along with me. Now,

really quick here. If you're a creator who's been posting for a while and just isn't seeing the results that you want,

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sustainable, DM me the word DACA on Instagram. So, this is the Photoshop file that I will be using to create my

graphics. Um, I keep the file size at 2160 by 2700, which is just a 1080 by350 or 4x5 aspect ratio, uh, but at a higher

quality so that I'll get the best quality photo that I can for my graphics. I don't know if this is

scientifically true or proven on Instagram, but I just like it gives me more comfort knowing that it's a higher

quality photo. Um, and I've noticed that with the designs that I make, it's usually better to have more pixels than

less. So, um, I recommend that if you're going to create this in Photoshop, use a 2160 by 2700 aspect ratio. If you're not

using my file, then do it yourself. And then I also create artboards. So, there's a little check box when you

create a new file. So, if I go to create a new file, there's a little uh check box here that says artboards. So, you

would check that and that's what gives you these little artboards. Originally, it'll just have one artboard, and if you

want to make more, you have to click on the top of it, and it'll have these little boxes that you can click to make

new artboards, but I'm going to delete that one because I don't want that. So, right away, I already have an image

placed in here that I work on. Um, I recommend if you're going to use something like a personal hook like

realizations I made following Jesus in my 20s, which is one of my best hooks that these seem to get a lot of views,

um, probably put a picture of yourself in it. And honestly, for most carousels, I would probably put a picture of a

person or some sort of human, if it's not you, on the first carousel. Why? Because people relate to people. And

it's proven that when people see people and people see faces, they engage more. So, you probably want to put your face

out there, a picture of you out there. Um, or if you're just having a picture of a random person through Pinterest or

something, um, take a picture of a person. So, I already have put this in here.

Your file probably won't have a picture of me, so sorry. Um, and it really wouldn't make sense for you to edit

pictures of me anyway. So, um, that's fine. But what I do to my photos, I I take a photo on my Fujifilm X100 6. Uh,

I love this camera. It's very good. It's got like a film style already built in as a digital camera, but you can use an

iPhone, whatever. I like to give it more of a film look, though. And right away, just out of camera, it doesn't have

enough of a film look for me. So, what I do is I add a little bit of a box blur. And as it pops up for my first slide for

my selfie, I don't want it to be super blurry. So I usually go with like a radius of two on my blur. And then

afterwards, I add a noise um effect as well or a noise filter. And I use the amount of 15% because I find that it's

not too much, but it's not too little. And it just gives me a nice bit of noise for my image. And then if you notice

within the file that I've given you, if you're in the Photoshop file, I kind of separate my um

elements out into these four kind of folders. You can be as customized with this as you want. This is just what I

do. So I have my images in the bottom. I have my adjustments, which you'll see um what kind of effects they have here. I

bring down the exposure about 1.2 2 just to let my text really pop out because the image isn't the focal point. It's

really the text. That's what's going to hook people in. Then I also go through and I bring the brightness down a little

bit too, which brightness only affects the brighter areas of a image. So if you have a lot of brightness in the

background, this is where the sun comes into my apartment, so sometimes it's brighter. Um, that's where I would apply

that brightness uh adjustment. Um, and then here in the text is where I just have my text. Uh, which is helpful.

Now, something that you're going to use all of the time, or at least that I use all of the time for my Photoshop editing

is the command, well, I'm on Mac, so it's command, u, not comma, command, apostrophe. Uh,

that's going to bring up this grid, which is really where I'm able to align things to very um consistent spots

within my carousels. So, I always go five boxes down from the top and three boxes in from the side or

five boxes up from the bottom, three boxes in from the side. The only time I get flexible on this is honestly the

first um post because sometimes things are arranged in the photo that it just wouldn't make sense for my text to be

there. Right now I'm putting it there. Why? Because there's a big open space here. It gets really hard to read this

text when there's lots of things in the background of it. Right away, I'm going to just lock my photo so that I can drag

over my text to make it a lot easier. If this wasn't locked and I try to drag, it's just going to drag the photo, which

is not helpful. I'm gonna hit command- Z so I undo that. Lock this and drag over this. Now, if I bring my graph back up

here and I drag this around, let's say I bring it down here, right? And there's just a bunch of stuff in the background.

Not that it's hard to read. You can definitely still make it out, but it's still very like it makes it way more

difficult than up here in this blank space. And I might even move this down a little bit more just so that it's out of

the way of this um where I have this light in my apartment. So now it's in this open space. I like that. I'm

probably just going to break my rule of where I place it inside my boxes. I'm still going to keep it three in from the

side just cuz I like it that way. It's less cluttered when it's in in a little bit and it makes it just look a little

bit more designed. So that's why I'm going to put my first text in my first um slide. But just showing you kind of

how I think about what I do here. And now you can see from my other two, these are kind of my typical layouts for my

posts. So I'll either have text at the top left and bottom left or I'll have text kind of centered up um on the left.

And practically these are the only two formats that I use. You can kind of get creative and make your own formats. I

just like the way that these look. I'm a very minimal, modern type of designer. Um, I wouldn't call myself a designer,

but that's the way that I like my text to be laid out. So, that's what I'm going to use here. And then

as I design this, I'm going to show you a few tricks that I do um to help make my designs kind of pop, to give it that

like texture, that graphic design feel that is not like something I designed in Canva, that sauce, if you will, um that

makes my things different than everybody else's. Right away, I've got all my work over here on the side. So, I'm just

going to copy and paste these as we work. So, um I'm bringing in one of my uh

sayings here. I act surprised by suffering, though I follow a crucified king. And

I'm going to capitalize my eyes. I like to keep everything else uh lowercase just because that's kind of trendy right

now. But this is what I do here. And then I'm going to center this up. Um, inside the Photoshop file, if you're

really trying to get customized with your fonts, you can notice here on the right side in the paragraph by your

characters. This is where you really change things around. So, here is the um line spacing, which I keep at 18. I feel

like that's a good line spacing. Some people think it's cramped. If that's you, you can make it longer, right?

Like, oh, I don't want the letters to hit each other. I don't really care that much. I care more about the vibe and I

like the vibe that this brings. And then you can also play around with the kerning um which is what this is called

or the letter spacing. It's really really called kerning. Um I like to put it at about negative

anywhere between negative 80 and 100 is a good amount for me. This is really where you can get customized. It makes

the font different than when anybody else is using because if you're normally using this font, it's going to be set to

zero. And for me, that just doesn't it doesn't hit. That doesn't hit for me. I'm like, uh, no, I don't like that.

It's not good enough. So, I like negative 80. I think it's a good modern minimal type of font. Um, or even

negative 100 is pretty good for me, too. So, that's probably what I would keep it there. And I like this here. I like the

spacing of it. Um, on the left hand side here, some of my other thoughts that I have written down here, I'm going to do

more in this format, which I don't do this this format all the time cuz it's a little bit harder to digest, but it's

still creative and I like it. So, something that you can do with your designs if you want is you can kind of

design out all of the fonts and all of your thoughts. So if I took my next one and I can put it into this text and

design it out without having an image in the background. You can do it that way or you can kind of go one by one and

find an image that applies to it. Right? So for this I could write out my thought and then what I do is I go to Pinterest

to find all of my images. People ask all the time where do you get your images? Where do you get your images? It's just

Pinterest. Um, and the cool thought the cool part about Photoshop is if I copy an image, I can just copy this image on

Pinterest and I can come back to Photoshop and I can just paste. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down

to my images and I'm going to hit paste here. And so now I don't have to save the image and put it on my desktop and

find the image and drag it into my Photoshop. I can just copy and paste the image and that makes things so much

easier. So much easier. I can't even tell you how much time this saves, which is why I really love Photoshop. I think

Canva does this, too. So, if you're using Canva, go ahead. You can do it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to

do the box blur, and I'm going to do Actually, I need to change this box blur because it's still at that two from

before. I want it to be four here. And add my noise. And there. Now, I have kind of the image that I might want this

image. just might it's kind of it's got this little angsty feel. You know, it's a dude that's maybe suffering. You can

kind of see it. Um, another thing too, I'm going to check my black and white. Even though this image is already in

black and white, I just want for any future images, I want them also to be black and white. So, I'm going to check

that off. And then the last thing I'm going to do here, you can see inside my um my template here, I have textures and

I say apply at the end. The reason I say apply at the end is because when we want to

potentially copy text effects, right? Like if I want to copy this, I'm going to hit option or

alt and drag over that. So now I have a new uh text layer and it's the same options as my other text layer and I can

type something out. Cool. But if I put this paper effect over and I try to now move around my text effect, I can't

really do that. Even if this is locked and I try to if I if I have this selected and I'm like, "Oh, I want to

copy this." Now, it's going to copy that paper effect and I don't want it to do that. So, I'm going to add the paper

effect at the end to really just kind of sell or give myself that texture that really, really helps my image stand out.

So, I'd say that's pretty decent. I might honestly, this is kind of a little bit too noisy in the background. So, I

might choose a different photo. Or what I can do here, um, actually, I'll just show this off for you. This is another

reason why Photoshop is is really, really great. if I like this image, but I think it's too too much for, you know,

what I'm doing right now, and maybe it's kind of minimal, but I just don't want there to be a ton of noise in the

background. What I can do here is select this, and I need to make sure that my image is selected here, and I can hit

content aware fill. And what this is going to do is it's going to try to read the pixels around it and see, oh, what's

the most natural framing or filling that I can do here? And so if I do this again, content aware fill,

and if you don't know what tool I'm using to select things, I just hit M on my keyboard and it brings up this uh

rectangular marquee tool. And so that'll allow me now to fill out an image that potentially wasn't like that before. So

now I turned that massive image that was fully on into this smaller image that is easier to read. And I might even bring

this up more and just have it up there. Break my own rule again of where I place things. Why? Because I can. I make the

rules of how I design my stuff. And then I'll place my paper um effect on top of it. And I would say that that's good.

That's a good image there. And I will use that. Let's go now to my second one. Let's

see. I'll use this one. Okay. So, I have spiritual ch spir oh my gosh, spiritual maturity looks less like

having answers and more like being comfortable with questions that have no earthly resolution.

So, what I might do here is um I might do answers

and I'm going to cut this. And I'm gonna put this in this text layer.

I'm gonna take away the answers and bring it here. And I might go like this instead. I like

to I like to put like one word on the side here, which allows me to kind of slide in this accent font. So now when

you're reading this, spiritual maturity looks less like having answers and more like being comfortable with questions

that have no earthly resolution. That's pretty good. I like that. And I'm going to look at my framing here and see where

this is at. So I got one, two, three, four, five boxes down. Good. One, two, three, four, five, four boxes up. So I

need to drag this one up. Boom. Cool. And that's pretty good for me. I like that design. That looks good.

Now I need to find an image that goes along with it. And you can see here on Pinterest, I just have a ton of these

kind of opened when I'm scrolling. This is my this is my Pinterest homepage. It just has like a bunch of different

things that are kind of like my moods, I guess, from pictures that I've clicked on. So, it it kind of knows it got it

has the vibe of the images that I like. And as I click on these, it's going to show me more with those similar vibes

like this one. This is a pretty good vibe. This is a pretty good vibe. This is a pretty good vibe. I like all of

these. Um, and as I click on these more and more and more, it just shows me more images that are like it. So now I can

find a bunch of images that have a very similar vibe instead of trying to find all these images on some sort of stock

photo website. I'm not selling any of these images, so it doesn't matter. Um, and I can just copy and paste these and

make my designs. So let's see, what was this again? Spiritual purity looks less like having answers.

H, sure. Let's just take this one for the heck of it. Copy and paste this over. And I'm going

to drag this back down into my images folder so that it's under my adjustments. You see there when it was

dragged above my adjustments, it doesn't have the one, it's not underneath the text, so you can't see the text, and

two, it's not darker so that you can read the text a little bit better. And then I'm going to box blur this again in

my filter and add noise again. Cool. And then I need to add my paper texture over top of it again. And there we go. That's

my second design made in less than a couple seconds. And what it's going to save you a ton of

time here as well is that while you are making these designs now, if I want to make another, I don't have to just like

go here and make another artboard and then copy and paste everything. Instead, I can click here. When this button comes

up, if I just hit option, if you're on Mac or alt and click here, now it's going to copy everything over. All of my

layers, everything is exactly the same, and I can just edit the information again. So, I can just type in here and

change my fonts or change my words, change the image, and just do that eight more times. and

everything will be finished. Then that's how I make these. So simple, right? So simple. And once it's made, you know,

you just hit save, come on to the next one, right? So, okay. Now I want to make my next

my next graphic. Cool. All right. Well, now I have my intro. I have my first slide. Let's come down here. Let's make

my second slide. Let's come down here. Let's make my third slide. And now I don't have to waste my time kind of

creating a whole new file when they're all just right here and I can just go into this warning, fair warning here, I

would probably not make once you get up and this file gets pretty big. It'll take a lot of RAM from your computer to

to function because there's a lot of different layers being processed at once. So, what I would do is I'd

probably save a file as a template and um you know, I might even save this with just these seven slides here. And as it

gets larger, I might close it every once in a while and open up that template just so that my computer can kind of

rest from how much RAM is being used and how much memory is being used by it. Just a fair warning, I've ran into that

problem a couple times and I don't want you to run into that either. But this is it. This is how you make graphics that

get viral millions of views. Um, get 30,000 followers in a month. Um, try it. Do it yourself. Again, if you want this

Photoshop file, it's in the description. You can find the template that you can use yourself. I would recommend

customizing some stuff to your own liking, using fonts of your own choosing, just so that it doesn't look

exactly the same as mine. Um, kind of choose your own branding. And other than that, play around with

this. Have a good time. Create some graphics that look great and get a lot of views. Until next video, I'll see

you.