S4S or Shout for Shout is a crucial marketing strategy for those who are just starting in the Instagram business. This is, by far, the most popular strategy that people use in order to grow their accounts, as it is effective and it costs nothing.

The first thing that you have to do in order to engage in S4S with another Instagram account, is to look for accounts that are in the same niche, and the same number of followers as yours. DM (direct message) them, and ask if they want to do a shout for shout with you. S4S can either be as a story, or as a post—it all depends on what you and the other account have agreed to do, and how long the shoutout will last (it could be 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, and so on).

Once they have agreed to do an S4S with you, send them the template of your S4S, and they will send theirs to you as well. You can also send them a copy of your post, complete with captions, and how you want them to tag you. This is the easiest way to deal with S4S, since everything is prepared for, and both parties have their respective contents, ready to be posted.

Do some A/B testing with your S4S templates and posts, and do not stick with one S4S partner. Make sure that you have 5 to 10 S4S partners, so that there’s variety in their following as well. Whichever template or post performs the best, use that for all your S4S strategies.

Another strategy is to do a collaboration with another Instagram account. Instead of actually disrupting your page’s design and theme, you can do a post on “the Top 10 XXX” and divide the post to two. You can post the first five, and the other Instagram account you’re doing S4S with will post the other five. In the captions part, you can mention that they need to go to @username’s page to see the rest of the list. It’s creative and effective.