Last week’s post was a hit, so I thought I would make a similar post but instead focus on growing a social media following. The appeal might not be as broad (everyone wants to know how to make millions of dollars, not everyone wants a lot of followers), but hopefully there’s enough overlap and interest that this is still a valuable Letter.
There are many reasons to want a lot of followers (and to be fair, many reasons to not want a lot as well). I’d say the main ones all lead back to the same thing at the end of the day though: money. But there are plenty of non-monetary benefits as well.
-
You’ll get more frequent and significant airdrops from things like InfoFi and other random meta things that pop up in the crypto sphere
-
You’ll get more offers and access to investment rounds, presales, whitelists, advisory positions, and content sponsorship deals
-
You’ll be invited into more alpha groups, be given early sneek peaks into protocols and upcoming releases, and be more of an “insider”
-
You’ll just get random free stuff: honorary NFTs, free valuable NFTs or meme coins sent to you, merch, etc
-
Invites to live events to be a speaker, be on panels, etc. Also for podcasts, twitter spaces, and other similar things where you can then promote your own products and services
-
You’ll attract haters and trolls, and there will be people who are vicious and toxic towards you — and it will weigh you down one way or another (gets easier over time though)
-
You will attract more of the wrong kind of attention — you become a target for online and IRL attacks, hacks, and will need to be mindful of your security (being undoxxed helps the IRL part a lot)
-
Unless you’re a sociopath, you will need to be increasingly mindful of what you put out to the world — there’ll be things you “can’t” talk about, or at least can’t talk about without significantly impacting the market
-
Algorithms can be punishing to the absent, so you might feel an obligation to continue posting even when the drive and desire dwindles
-
There’s just straight up a lot of hate for “influencers” or “KOLs” out there, so that’s some sort of bias or prejudice against you that you’ll almost certainly have if you reach a certain point
Before we get into the meat of the post, I also want to share this excellent article by Tim Ferris: 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous, and specifically one quote that has always stayed in my mind since first reading it:
During my college years, one of my dorm mate’s dads was a famous Hollywood producer. He once said to me, “You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face.”
Everyone wants to be rich and famous, but the reality is, rich and not famous is almost always better. Think long and hard before you dox yourself.
We’re going to break this post down into five stages:
-
Stage 1: 0 to 100 followers
-
Stage 2: 100 to 1,000 followers
-
Stage 3: 1,000 to 10,000 followers
-
Stage 4: 10,000 to 100,000 followers
-
Stage 5: 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers (and beyond)
I’ll primarily be talking about Twitter (X) because that’s where I grew the majority of my following, but a lot of the concepts will also apply to YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Pick your poison — though I do recommend picking one platform to focus all your efforts on rather than taking a wider approach and trying to grow everywhere at once. There’ll be time for expansion later.
One thing to say before beginning is that you don’t need a lot of followers to receive a lot of the benefits mentioned at the top of this post. Quality over quantity is almost always the best approach. 1000 true fans will reward you infinitely more than 100,000 low quality accounts full of bots and people who don’t care about you or your content.
I’ll also say that the below approach is for those who want to intentionally build a following and put time and effort into this endeavor. I like to think of it as a video game: there are ways to play optimally to win, and ways to play which are still fun and fruitful, but far from optimal in a “winning” sense. There’s nothing wrong with having fun and not caring about growing a following — somewhat ironically, many of the largest and most respected accounts operate this way. But they’re the exception, usually because they’re exceptional people who have had exceptional results or have an exceptionally valuable perspective on the world and exceptional experiences to share.
You might be exceptional. If you’re not, and you still want a lot of followers, then you’re just gonna have to work hard at it like the rest of us.
This is often seen as the toughest stage, but it really isn’t and doesn’t have to be. Stage 1 (and 2) are really about putting in the work for each and every single follow.
In the early stages, your own content matters less than your responses to other people’s content, and how people perceive you. In this stage you want to make sure you set up the basics well: have a clean profile picture, banner, bio, etc. Make it so that people can quickly understand who you are, what kind of stuff you’re interested in / are likely to post about, and why they might want to follow you.
Something that is important at all stages but that I like to emphasize from the beginning is the concept of injecting humanity into everything you do. Starting with your profile, do what you can to appear as a real human and not another bot. That doesn’t mean you need your face as a PFP, but avoid a clearly AI generated image, and try and show your personality a bit with it (NFTs are great for this!)
One little “hack” is that getting an NFT from an active community is a great way to meet like-minded people in the space and getting a lot of followers relatively quickly. Be mindful of hopping from PFP to PFP and community to community, but if you happen to find a community that has an NFT within your budget, and that you vibe with, I can’t recommend enough how beneficial it is to engage with them
Take that concept of injecting humanity into everything else too. As I said, your content matters less than your responses to other people’s content — or in other words, be a “reply guy” (or reply gal).
The idea behind this is simple. If you have 50 followers and post something, chances are you’ll get like 7 views. If someone has 100,000 followers and they post something and you comment on their post, chances are you’ll get anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand views. Every view is a chance for someone to find you, discover your profile, find your words interesting, and give you a follow.
When replying, it’s easy to get caught up in a numbers game and take a quantity over quality approach, which I really think is a giant trap. Instead of generic “great post!” or “gm” or formulaic style responses, try to add something of interest or value to every reply.
A good way to think about it is simply thinking that you’re having a conversation with the person you’re replying to. You can imagine being in a coffee shop chatting to them, or on the phone, or whatever — but imagine a real conversation with a real human and just talk to them.
Don’t overthink it, you don’t have to be a genius with every response. You just have to be a human.
What you should do
Inject humanity into everything you do
Have a clean and easily digestible profile, bio, etc
Consider an NFT PFP from a community you vibe with
Reply guy like crazy — like a human
Work for every follower
What you should be wary of
This is definitely going to be a bit of a grind and most likely going to take you at least a few weeks, but there are some things you can do to speed up the process. The main one though is basically just more of the same from Stage 1: reply guy like crazy.
There’s a direct correlation between how much time you put in and how much growth you see. Spending a few hours a day will give you rapid growth, whereas 20 minutes a day will be a longer grind.
Something I recommend doing is to set up lists of people in the industry that have a lot of followers and that you enjoy the content of, and regularly go through and engage with them. If you like their content, and aspire to post similar content or at least stuff that’s in the same vertical/area, then chances are that their followers would also be your ideal potential followers, and thus by replying to them you’re getting exposure to their follower base.
You don’t have to pick a “niche” or anything here, though it’s not the worst idea if you do (i’ll talk more about niches in Stage 3). I find this is a good Stage to figure out what you like to think and talk about, and also to get a sense for what types of posts other people like to see from you.
Experiment, go wide, talk to humans as a human, build relationships, put in the time, and you’ll get to 1,000 followers in no time. Trust me.
What you should do
Put in the time, continue to reply guy and work for every follower
Focus on quality over quantity
Create lists of people to engage with
Start thinking about what value you might be able to add to the timeline
What you should be wary of
10k is a big milestone — there are a lot of people stuck in this range, and I know many who basically give up trying to grow or become someone with a lot of followers when they’re here. The reality is that for most people, it’s going to take you longer than the previous steps. You could get lucky and randomly go extra viral or stumble into a content pipeline that is all the rage.. but more likely than not, it’ll take a while.
The previous strategies still work and should 100% be employed to continue to grow (aka be a human + reply to a lot of people like a human), but you probably want to start thinking seriously here about why people might actually want to follow you, and what value you might be able to provide them.
Because at the end of the day, people follow others largely because of an expectation of future value. They expect that you’ll post insightful things, funny things, or, in crypto, post things that will result in them making money.
If you’re not funny, clever, good at making money, or interesting, then sorry, you’re out of luck. Good news though! Not everyone can be funny, or clever, or be good at making money… but everyone can be interesting. By virtue of being a unique human being with unique life experiences, you will almost always be able to provide value by sharing your experiences. Even if those experiences are how you just lose money over and over and over again — people will find it relatable if nothing else.
That is the question.
I’m a big fan of an approach that follows a broad-narrow-broad scope in terms of the type of content you post. When you’re starting out (sub 1000 followers), be broad, explore your interest, see what works and resonates, and have fun.
After you hit 1k and if you are intentionally about growing, you generally do what to start being more narrow in your posting. You want to be known as the person that…
What do I mean by that? Well, I built most of my following by posting daily spreadsheets of NFT floor prices and market commentary. I became known as the person that posts spreadsheets, or simply the spreadsheet guy.