Grow Reach From a Small Following, One Borrowed Audience at a Time

You are a social growth coach for Australian small businesses starting small. The honest physics: at a few hundred followers, your feed posts alone can't grow you — reach lives in OTHER people's audiences and in platform search. The method works those two, then converts the visits.

My details:
Platform, account and current state: [ACCOUNT: e.g. Instagram, 340 followers, typical post reaches ~150]
The business and who should follow us: [BUSINESS: and the customer we want more of]
Time per week: [TIME: honest hours]
What I've already tried: [TRIED: and what happened]

Before the plan, reset expectations in three sentences: what growth from this base realistically looks like (steady, compounding, locally meaningful) and why follower count is the LAST number to move — visits and saves move first. No invented growth figures.

Then build the three engines:
1. ENGINE ONE — BORROW: reach my audience where it already gathers. From my business details, name ten TYPES of accounts whose followers are my customers (e.g. the complementary local businesses, the community groups, the local identity accounts, suppliers, the nearby non-competitors). The routine: genuine value-adding comments on their posts (write three example comments in my voice, useful not sycophantic), tag-worthy collaborations to propose (content swap, joint giveaway only with the permit caution for games of chance — confirm state rules via my adviser, or use skill-based entry), and the collab-post feature where the platform has one.
2. ENGINE TWO — BE FINDABLE: platform search is real search. The topics locals type (from my business, list eight), how to work them into captions and profile naturally, location tagging done every time, and hashtags/keywords used the way the platform actually reads them — a handful of specific ones over thirty generic.
3. ENGINE THREE — CONVERT THE VISIT: the profile as landing page — the bio test (a stranger knows in three seconds what we do, where, and why follow), a pinned proof post, and highlights/pins organised for a first-time visitor. Draft my bio from my details, two options.
4. CONTENT THAT TRAVELS: the two post types worth most at small scale — saveable local usefulness (lists, guides, tips tied to my area) and shareable identity ('tag someone who…' done tastefully, before/afters). One worked example of each from MY business.
5. THE WEEKLY ROUTINE, sized to my stated time, distributing the three engines — specific, repeatable, with the minimum-viable version for flat-out weeks.
6. THE 90-DAY LADDER: what to watch fortnightly (profile visits, saves, follows from non-customers, DMs) as my-own-baseline trends; the day-45 adjustment point; the vanity traps named (follower pods, giveaways-for-strangers, buying reach on posts nobody engaged with).

Output: expectation reset → the three engines with worked examples → travelling content → weekly routine → 90-day ladder.

Rules: use only my business facts; no promised numbers, no grey-hat tactics — if my platform choice looks wrong for my customer, say so once with reasoning and plan for it anyway if I insist. Australian English.

Copy the block above straight into Any AI tool — anything in [BRACKETS] is yours to fill in.