Everyone needs Followers
We live in a world where the average person spends most of his time on his phone. More than a sizeable chunk of this time is spent on either Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc - social media of some sort.
You don’t have to be a genius to understand how important Social Media Marketing is for anyone looking forward to make money online.
There are entire agencies, companies, and influencers raking in millions of dollars (some of them for a single post).
However, you are probably not one of those people. No Justin Biebers are subscribed here. You are more likely to be a guy with zero, a few hundred or thousand followers looking forward to grow.
This post will be about the general trends & patterns I have noticed while growing my social media close to a million followers.
Note that this is not a “Twitter 101” or “Instagram 101” post, we will discuss individual platforms and their strategies in other posts.
Entertain or Educate
You have to understand why anyone uses social media. It is mostly for 2 reasons: To either educate or entertain themselves.
If you are not growing on social media, it is most likely because you are not doing either. Entertainment is the biggest driver of engagement. The faster you can get the dopamine going, the more you’ll grow (look at TikTok)
Think about it: Which accounts are the biggest? Elon Musk (meme master), celebrities & athletes (entertainer), spicy media channels (entertainment/gossip in the name of “news”). Even in crypto/money twitter the biggest accounts also happen to be good trollers/meme makers.
Value provision is another way to grow. Your audience will albeit a bit less (more people want entertainment than info), it can still bring huge value as education (in any form) is a highly priced commodity.
Nobody is paying for a clickbait article, a lot of people are paying for fitness guides/investment advice/books/SaaS, etc. (product sales > ad revenue any day of the week)
If you’re choosing the educational path (i.e. you provide some tangible advice to your audience - fitness, finances, business, study, self-help, etc) you must try to find a way to entertain your audience while doing it.
Remember, “content is king”. If your content is good, you WILL grow. That is one of the few areas you can’t take shortcuts on.
Dry content = slow death.
Engagement is Everything
What is common amongst the most famous people on earth? They all have an ability to court attention (aka, get more engagement).
Is Elon Musk actually the weirdo he seems to be on the internet? Is he building a rocket company purely out of passion? Does he support doge coin just for the sake of it? Was his Twitter bid a mere business decision?
Why does Donald Trump always land in trouble, some way or the other? Are his statements a reflection of his personality, or are they an attempt to build a carefully crafted, engaging image?
Is Taylor Swift a drama queen by nature? Or are her breakups, fanbase, songs a carefully orchestrated effort to drive attention?
Artificial or in born, there is something going on if you dig deep: THEY ALL KNOW HOW TO ENGAGE.
As the great Robert Greene states as a Law of Power:
Court Attention at All Costs
This should be your goal as well.
State the controversial. Have a beef with the biggest guy who will give you attention. Disappear for a month without notice. Spread rumours. Create a public bond that seems absurd to everyone (aka: they gossip)
Get the point? STOP BEING A SHY PUSSY AND DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO GET MORE ENGAGEMENT. Of course, don’t be an idiot for it, stay within the limits of sanity and civility - but a few publicity stunts here and there don’t hurt.
Some hands-on ways to get more engagement (we will discuss this in detail in individual posts about social platforms):
Polls/ask people for opinions (everyone loves attention)
Debate/create long public comments/convos
Having genuine connections in DMs
Posts with images/videos
Memes/viral funny stuff (remember, entertainment)
Collabs with big accounts
Controversies and Beefs (be careful though!)
Diversify & Automate
You should be present on as many social networks as possible: YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.
Try to repurpose your content: Make short tiktoks/clips from your YouTube content and upload it as shorts/reels/tiktoks: you are now reaching 4x people with same content as before.
If you can take out 5 clips from a video, you now have 20 content pieces!
If you tweet, copy paste the top performing tweets onto Facebook and LinkedIn as well. Make it a quote image and post it on IG. Put a song on it and post it on TikTok/YT/IG reels.
This not only diversifies you against risks of being on just one platform (bans, censorship, platform death) - it also makes your likelihood of vitality higher.
Sometimes, your content can be great, but it might simply do better elsewhere due to algorithmic or random issues (a popular LinkedIn creator shares your shitty repurposed-from-twitter LinkedIn post, making the post viral).
This way, you are getting a lot more value from the same content.
Also, keep posting content that works regularly after a few months. Nobody will remember your tweet after 5 months, repost the banger 1k like tweet and enjoy (it will do well again simply cause of human nature: it did well at first due to a reason. The level of virility might vary due to randomness, but overall you’ll do well).
You are creating a content machine here. If you manage to post all your content on 5 platforms, repurposed once a year - you are literally 10x-ing your probability of one of them going viral and having to create 10 times less content.
Content is king, but only when the content velocity is high too. Making content that grows is hard enough, make sure you repurpose it to lessen the burden.
You can automate and simplify a huge part of this process, I am soon launching a software to do this at a reasonable price, DM me if you want a private beta (only serious customers please).
Summary & Conclusions
This is enough info to digest for today, you need to get these things in your head and content strategy ASAP, so that you are ready for the upcoming posts on individual platforms. We discussed:
You must at least do one of entertainment or education to grow
You must drive engagement else you will die
Repurpose to increase your content velocity and chances of virility
Hope you enjoyed it, do leave your queries as comments - I will address them all. Like this post and share it with a friend. I’ll be very grateful if you do that:
Till next time!
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