how i got 1.1M followers on ig in 9 months

hiiii friend,

before we get into today’s newsletter, quick question so i can make sure i’m writing about things that are relevant to you…….

ok so today is actually a part 2, following on from last week’s newsletter about how i think about viewership.

—> if you missed it, go read last week’s newsletter here first

now that you understand why you might want your goal for your socials to be viewership and how to work toward that, today we are talking about followership.

as we said last week, there are reasons to go for each one and only you can decide what your goal should be.

if you decide to focus on followership, your goal is to build a community around your brand that you are nurturing rather than just casting a wide net.

the advantage of growing your followers is you're creating an audience you can sell to. an audience that trusts you, likes you, wants to see more of you.

before we go any further, something you should know -

if you do go for followers, you want to be tracking follower growth, not net followers. a large followership can be gained over 10 years, five months, one month.

so you want to be asking:

—> how many followers did I get over a week?
—> is the rate of growth dropping?
—> does that mean the content i'm making is less relatable?
—> is it not engaging my audience?
—> are people are sick of something i’m doing?

i believe there’s something that consistently sits in that sweet spot of absurdity and relatability we talked about last week. 

and that thing is your personality.

there are very human traits, feelings, dynamics you will live out which are highly relatable but the part that is ‘absurd’ or as i talked about in the last newsletter, how unlikely this is to occur to everyone, is your unique personality. 

when i look at my best viewed vs. the best followed content, the most followed content shows 10x more personality compared to my content that got the most views.

and that leads me to believe that people follow to see you be you. 

going viral. posts that go mega viral have a very high chance of converting followership. they go viral because obviously they resonate with a lot of people. they go viral because there is really good storytelling. then people go, ‘i would like to see more of this.’ so they follow.

series. when you create a content series, you’re actually letting people know if they want to see the next part, they have to follow along. even if you don’t say ‘follow for more’, people just understand that’s how it works.

but the actual best way to grow your followers is what i’m going to call the snowball effect. and that really comes down to….