I am an entrepreneur and influencer who personally understands the power of having an active audience on Instagram. After all, the larger your audience, the wider your reach and impact. However, organic, genuine, active followers are a difficult climb to gain.
That’s why I was keen to give Path Social a try. Path Social is an Instagram growth service that promises to boost your followers through ethical practices like influencer collaborations, email outreach, and AI-based content targeting. They explicitly avoid fake accounts or bots.
In this article, I’ll provide a step-by-step walkthrough of my experience onboarding with Path Social and launching my first Instagram growth campaign with them, including the results I achieved—something I hope will be helpful to anyone exploring Path Social reviews before committing.
Choosing the Right Plan
Path Social offers two core plans depending on your goals:
Instagram Core ($29/month billed yearly). Best for individuals and small businesses seeking 1,000-2,000 new followers per month.
Instagram Elite ($41/month billed yearly). Aimed at larger brands and influencers wanting 2,500-3,500 followers monthly. Has added targeting and support.
As a relatively small but quickly growing lifestyle influencer, I opted for the Core plan to start. You can always upgrade later as your needs evolve.
Setting Up Your Account
Getting set up with Path Social was a breeze. I simply headed to their website, clicked “Get Started,” and entered my Instagram username and email address.
After submitting payment for my chosen plan, I received a welcome email within minutes, walking me through the quick onboarding process:
Step 1: Connect Your Instagram Account
I safely linked my Instagram account, via OAuth, from Path Social’s dashboard, allowing a small access to engage followers on my behalf.
Step 2: Set Your Growth Goals
I then set my target monthly follower growth (I picked 1,500) and chose demographics to assist Path Social’s AI in its targeting.
Step 3: Complete Your Profile Analysis
To do this, my Instagram profile and posts were reviewed by Path Social’s AI and growth specialists so that you could craft a personalized growth strategy based on my niche, my brand aesthetics, and for my audience.
Step 4: Track Your Growth
I finally had access to Path Social’s analytics dashboard, which allows you to know how fast you are growing as you build followers, engagement metrics, top posts, and much more.
My account was ready to start gaining followers, and that was it.
Seeing Initial Growth
Once I was onboarded, Path Social estimated it would take 2 days to start follower growth efforts such as shoutouts and hashtags.
So 48 hours later, I could start to see small bursts of 10-20 new followers a day. The bios and posts from my niche were relevant, and these incoming followers seemed to match my target demographics well.
Being that it is my first week around, I was able to gain 152 new followers (mostly from influencer collaborations, email newsletter promotions, and whatnot). It was also trending upwards with engagement on my posts.
Fine-Tuning Your Campaign
One great feature is Path Social’s ability to fine-tune your growth campaign as you go…
During week two, midway through, I started to notice the growth starting to plateau, so I contacted Path Social customer support (24/7 for their Elite plans). They promptly reviewed my account and found that my hashtags weren’t completely optimized.
When I changed my hashtags to reflect my content focus and theme, Path Social was able to refocus my growth efforts. Engagement was nice too, and the gains accelerated for followers. This is so valuable at the personal level!
Continued Growth and Engagement
I’m now about 8 weeks into my time at Path Social and can still see a very strong and consistent increase in followers per week, averaging around 1,800 new followers a month.
But these new followers are all doing that just as importantly. I am reaching more people, getting more saved, and generating more comments.
This is exactly the sort of legitimate engagement that I was hoping for from Path Social. I’m blissfully pleased with the organic growth and community enthusiasm that it has allowed me to build so far, while not every user has the same results.
Key Takeaways
After several months actively using Path Social to expand my Instagram following, here are my key learnings:
- The onboarding is quick and easy – you can be up and running in less than an hour.
- Initial growth takes about 2 days to kickstart, but then builds momentum week over week.
- The followers I’ve gained seem authentic and relevant to my niche.
- Engagement rates have risen significantly (now 8-10% average).
- Their level of personalization and responsiveness is impressive.
Of course, Path Social has its downsides too. The growth can be slower than less ethical services promising 10K spam followers overnight. But for legitimate, organic growth, I’ve found it to be reasonably effective.