Energy Over Algorithm: How I 5x'd my Instagram in 2026!

**Hannah Summerhill** (0:00)
Welcome back, everybody, to the Hannah Summerhill Show. Today's episode is something I'm really excited to share about, and I feel like this is a much requested topic. But I want to talk today about how I manifested 5Xing my Instagram following this year in 2026
I've had Instagram since like 2012 or 2013, and it wasn't until April of this year, it's June right now, it wasn't until April of this year that I hit 10K, and I'm now almost at 16K.
So, I know there's so many of us who want to grow our influence, grow our reach, grow our business through Instagram, and I hope that this really helps you. And I had tried a lot of things before this. I'm sharing with you guys what actually worked. This episode is all about energy over algorithm. Are you ready? Before we get into it, let's pick a card. Let's tune in to where we're at collectively.
Okay. When I merge my desire with faith, I can take action from a place of peace rather than control.
Yay, this is for all the control freaks out there, including myself, although I'm much less of a control freak now. I've really mellowed. Okay, let's get into it. How I 5xed my Instagram following this year. But first, before we dive in, I just want to normalize and name a couple of things. First is, if you have any shame about wanting more followers or to reach a wider audience, let's just name that and clear that. If you have any fear of judgment, if you have any desire for validation, all of those are completely normal. Like, that's okay. There is no shame about wanting to grow your impact and your reach, okay? But I know sometimes we can have the counterintention underneath or competing with the intention of wanting to grow our audience because we feel shame or even doubt that we're qualified, where we can feel just fear of visibility that might be preventing us from growing our reach and growing our audience, okay? So I just want to name and normalize that. That can all coexist as you manifest growing your social media following. You're human. There's no perfection required manifestation, right? I have felt all of those things, fear of judgment, doubt of being qualified, comparison, shame about wanting a bigger reach.
Just let's name it and normalize it, okay?
Awesome. First of all, I was terrified to make my Instagram public up until a couple of years ago. So even though I've been on Instagram since 2012, I had a private account until like 2023 And it wasn't until my book came out that our publisher was like, yeah, you guys should make your profiles public. I was so afraid to have a public account because I was like, oh my gosh, this means like anybody can see me and judge me. And it's so funny now because it feels so normal.
But I was very terrified. I was just terrified of the visibility. I had a lot of fear around visibility. And it makes sense because I was bullied in middle school, and I know a lot of us have stories like that. It can feel so isolating, but it's actually like can be quite a universal experience of just having shame around being visible or having fear around being visible and equating it with a lack of safety. So I definitely felt that. That was a deep-rooted thing for me.
Fast forward, I start my manifestation business a couple of years ago, and so my intention was to grow my social media following. And I was hovered at a couple thousand followers for a while, and I would use other people's frameworks to try to grow it. So I remember downloading guides and paying for courses. And I remember implementing some of these strategies, and I would literally lose followers. I would look at my growth, and it was going down. I was losing followers. And I'm sure I've told this story before, but I remember being on a train to Philadelphia for my cousin's wedding, and I was on the train looking at these numbers and recognizing that the strategy that I had been so diligent about was actually losing me followers. And I decided to just laugh. I decided to not feel dejected, to not feel like a loser. I was like, I just have to laugh about this. I'm trying so hard, it's not working. I just have to think that this is funny. So I did.
So I go to my cousin's rehearsal dinner, and I check my phone later that night, literally the same night. And maybe I had 2,000 followers at the time, and within 25 minutes, I had hundreds of new followers. And I was like, wait, what just happened? One of my friends who had a big account happened to tag me in something because she had gotten a question, do you believe in manifestation? She was like, I actually have a friend who does it. She tagged me and overnight, I had 500 new followers. So I thought it was hilarious because there I was earlier that month, diligently applying the strategy from this other online social media expert to terrible results. And then once I released it, once I had a sense of humor about it and let go literally that same night with zero effort for me, completely out of the blue, but that's how manifestation happens. I got 500 new followers pretty effortlessly. So that was a really great lesson in just releasing grip and expectation. Like, that's why I don't really believe in strategies or hooks or anything like that, because it's kind of like square peg, round hole vibes. What worked for somebody else might not work for you. And I really believe, like, we should be using our intuition when it comes to sharing our voice. And that's what resonates with people. So here's what really helped me hit 10K.