Scaling Up Unhinged Lady Friend
Advice to myself on growing my platform to the 100 subscriber bench mark.
In 2016, I was a measly girl starting high school with an overwhelming obsession for a foreign girl band. I wasn’t particular fond of sharing my admiration to all of my friends but I desperately needed an outlet. I was constantly online hoarding content related to the band for a single person I knew in real life who enjoyed them; particularly of edits, pictures and memes.
At some point I came to the decision that I would make my own Instagram page, if at the least, to be a means of storing my personal amalgamation of band-related content outside of my camera roll.
Even though I started my fan-page for fun, I was familiar with the customs of all the most popular and successful ones. Naturally, I carried on the conventions that I wanted to emulate and with time, my fan-page saw similar success.
In less than a year, I had reached 1,000 followers. And in three years- 20,000.
Running this page was part secret passion project and part business. On one hand I had a lot of fun and on the other it was a lot of work.
Eventually I moved on from devoting hours each day to growing my page as I transitioned to new phases of my young life. But now five years later, as I attempt to brand a new online identity, I find myself rehashing much of what I did back then.
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For starters, I was very familiar with Instagram as a platform and I understood how to adapt to its changes as needed. Of course, Instagram followers (then and now) carry a much lower weight than blog subscribers and even YouTube subscribers.
But the principal methodology for acquiring those early fans remains largely the same. After marking up several readings about marketing Substacks, and in combination with my own experience, I’ll outline some of my biggest takeaways.
1. Start Hot and Stay Steady
Rapid publication normalized by the internet has seemingly degraded the value of ‘quality over quantity’. But I’m here to tell you that quality still matters. Considering the overload of stimuli that people are berated with, it’s quality content that stands out. And to me, quality means hot and steady.
When people visit an Instagram profile, they want every post to click on to matter. People are very quick to be disengaged from content they recognize as inauthentic or sponsored. This applies on every app or website.
The stream of content depends on current norms on that particular site as well as the type of content. But whatever it is, keeping up with a steady stream of HOT content will keep you motivated and relevant in the long run.
2. Joining the Cross-Platform Community
Even though my Instagram has been the focal point to my fandom efforts, I still utilized other social media platforms to funnel people to my Instagram. Engaging with people on Twitter and Tumblr (two sites that shared a lot of the people I sought after) helped me spent time collecting content as well as connecting to users. Friends I made online via commenting, messaging and following all were a part of the first 500 followers i gained. It was important that I didn’t use other social medias solely as plugs to my Instagram, but rather an extension of it in a small way. I didn’t shy away from participating in “follow-for-follower” accommodations as a means to expose my page just a tiny bit.
3. Congregating and Engaging the Right Audience
Understanding who you’re speaking to and who you may unintentionally be attracting is majorly helpful when it comes to growth. For example, I anticipated my band-blog to be for fellow adolescent fans with a shared sense of female appreciation and humor. Amassing the perfect subset of people for anything is hard, but the closer one gets to devoutness, the closer one cusps true glory. Finding that audience can be hard, but the numbers work out in the end. I followed tons of pages that specialized in content similar to mine and put special effort into develop as many as those relationships I could snuggle between. And being exposed to the audiences of already established (but similar) pages helped breach credibility and reason of access that would’ve been impossible on my own.
