Team Gullan — from 2,500 to 50,000+ Instagram followers in 18 months.

The situation

Team Gullan is a real estate agency in Cape Town. When we started working together their Instagram sat at around 2,500 followers — a modest presence for an agency with real ambition in a competitive market. The brief was to build a genuine audience on the platform: not vanity reach, but a following that would actually put the agency in front of buyers and sellers.

What we did

We ran their Instagram as a close, hands-on partnership — not a set-and-forget content drop. The approach was simple to describe and disciplined to execute: make a lot of content, watch how the audience responded, and keep steering toward what worked.

• Reels-led. We put most of the effort into reels — the format doing the heavy lifting for reach and discovery on Instagram.
• Study what performs. We tracked which posts landed — the hooks, the formats, the subjects — and read the audience's response closely instead of guessing.
• Adapt continuously. Every round fed the next: what resonated got doubled down on, what didn't got dropped. The content sharpened as the audience told us what it wanted.

Why reels were the engine

On Instagram, reels are how a smaller account reaches people who don't already follow it. A strong reel travels well beyond the existing audience, and a steady stream of them is what compounds a following over time. By concentrating on reels — and on the specific styles their audience kept rewarding — the account grew far past where listing posts alone could have taken it.

The result

Over roughly eighteen months, Team Gullan's Instagram grew from about 2,500 followers to more than 50,000 — around twenty times the audience they started with.

More importantly, that audience did real work for the business:

• It brought in buyers and sellers. The following wasn't just a number on a screen — it translated into real enquiries and business for the agency.
• It built a recognisable brand. Consistent, high-performing content made Team Gullan a name people in their market actually knew.

The takeaway

An audience on Instagram isn't won with the occasional listing post — it's won with a high volume of reels, a close read of what the audience responds to, and the discipline to keep adapting. Done consistently, it compounds into both reach and real business.