- That was less than two years ago,
and this is my account today.
Growing followers was really hard at first,
but I did a ton of experimenting
and I did figure out some patterns
that could bring me
thousands of followers, pretty consistently.
I'm gonna share with you how I did it
and I'm posting everything for free,
thanks to Adobe, who is sponsoring this series.
I made five episodes
and I'm sharing them on my Instagram, one a week.
But if you're watching this,
that means that you're watching on Adobe Discover,
which means you can watch
the whole thing for free right now.
So, let's go.
If you're trying to grow,
the most important thing to do
is to stop thinking about Instagram as a photo app
and start thinking about it as a video app.
Instagram is in a battle with TikTok right now,
which means video, and specifically Reels,
is a huge priority for them.
And if you wanna grow,
you wanna work with the algorithm, not against it.
Reels was specifically designed
to give your video a chance to go viral.
This was my first viral Reel.
You can see from my follower growth
the day that my Reel went viral.
And I know a lot of people
who have grown thousands of followers
from a single viral Reel.
But, it's hard to make a viral Reel.
Most of my Reels don't go viral
and it can feel so powerless
to be at the mercy of the Reels algorithm all the time.
I actually found something that worked even better for me,
and with this technique,
I grew over a hundred thousand followers in a single day.
That's next week's episode, but if you don't wanna wait,
you could watch it right now.
I've experimented with so many different ways
to grow my account.
And there was one thing
that just worked better than everything else.
It was this.
Get large pages to repost your content
and even better, if you get them to repost your Reels.
Out of everything I tried,
that was the single most effective thing,
and more than half of my million followers are from that.
Here's how you do it.
Find large community pages on Instagram,
pages that have a theme.
Maybe it's filmmaking, art, humor, education, or travel.
You're looking for pages that post content
from lots of different creators,
and then you need to reach out to them.
But here's the tough part.
These pages get hundreds of DMs,
so, how do you stand out and get their attention?
That's a whole strategy that took me,
honestly, months to figure out.
And I wrote out exactly how I did it here,
in my article for Adobe,
which you can read for free right now.
In next week's episode,
I'm gonna talk about how you can go from just getting views
to actually getting people to follow you.
In part two, I showed you the main strategy I used to grow.
I did this by getting large pages to repost my Reels.
Here's one of them.
I got this video re-posted on 9GAG,
and that day I grew by 12,000 followers
in a single day, not bad.
Two months later,
another one of my videos got re-posted on 9GAG
and it got around the same number of views,
but this time I grew by 127,000 followers, in one day.
If the videos got roughly the same number of views,
why was there such a big difference
in the number of followers?
Here's why, the second time,
I asked 9GAG to tag me in the first line of the caption.
Why does this matter so much?
Because Reels only shows the first line of the caption.
If you get tagged any lower than that,
people just won't see it.
So how do you get pages to tag you in the first line?
You can just ask nicely and say this,
but none of this matters
if people don't actually wanna watch what you're making,
so next week's topic is storytelling.
I'm gonna tell you about one pretty simple change
I made to my content and then my videos started taking off.
Here's what I did.
I started showing the behind the scenes of my shots.
Why is showing the behind the scenes so powerful?
It's because it changes the intent of the video.
When I didn't do behind the scenes,
I was just kind of showing off,
like, look at this cool shot I got.
It was about me.
But when I started showing the behind the scenes,
it's no longer about me, it's about you,
giving you a chance to be entertained or to learn something.
But the point I'm trying to make
is not just about the behind the scenes,
it's about being useful.
That's the number one change that I made,
was going from, how can I show off on social media
to how can I be useful to my audience?
The creators that are growing the fastest right now
are the ones who know how to be useful to their audience.
And being useful can take many forms.
Next week, I'm gonna talk about creativity
and how I get my ideas.
There's this myth of the creative genius
who gets ideas out of thin air,
but I don't think of creativity
as some sort of mysterious talent.
Creativity is a muscle
and it's a muscle you could train like any other.
Growing up, I never even thought of myself as creative.
I prided myself in being analytical, not creative,
maybe because of my culture.
And it wasn't even until much later in life
that I even started trying to be creative,
and it was pretty uncomfortable and awkward at first.
But the more I practiced, the stronger that muscle got.
The number one way that I get my ideas is
I see something that I like,
and then I just try to change one thing.
And that's it, I rarely start from zero.
I'm just constantly observing what's around me
and trying to put an original spin on it.
Next week, I'm gonna talk about something
that's really important to me.
Topic is loosing followers.
If you let social media, give you validation,
then you're also giving it the power
to take away that validation.
You don't get to experience the rush,
the high of getting so many likes
without experiencing the downside when it doesn't happen.
At some point, you're gonna make something that flops.
It doesn't get as many views or likes
as you think it should.
And that's enough to send anyone
into a bit of a downward spiral.
But many creators chase followers for a living.
I'm one of them.
And in order to stay sane,
you've got to find something
besides the views and the followers to hang onto,
ideally something you can control.
Here's what I measure myself on
besides views and followers.
One, did I learn something?
And two, am I excited about what I'm making?
And I'm in full control of both of those things.
The kinda work that I wanna do more of,
is work that I am so excited about it
that I'm willing to loose followers for it.
Because if you are just posting
out of your fear of losing followers,
then you may just end up losing yourself.