100K Followers Will Require Smart Work
The short answer is yes, it is possible. The battle begins when people choose to try to do things "their" way, instead of the way that works. In growing an audience fast, there are rules to follow.
These rules make it easier for people to find you, relate with you, and thus choose to follow you. Some of these rules you might know, and some you might just choose to ignore.
When you ignore them, you are choosing to not grow with speed. So take a look at this list and ask yourself "Am I ignoring these items because I am stubborn in my old ways?"
If this is the case, shift your mind and be open to trying these and test the results. They will be better than your current situation.
NICHE DOWN
No one wants to hear the obvious, yet the obvious needs to be stated. When you are a creator looking to reach a certain number of followers, you need to know what that audience looks like.
Not everyone and anyone can be your follower. For example, anyone looking to make pranks will only get people as followers who like pranks. Thus, you will loose a large chunk of potential people who just do not like pranks, and that is ok.
Now, if you decided to only do pranks that resonate with millennials, then you loose out on more people. How is this beneficial?
The better you target one group, the easier it becomes for them to press the follow button. When you are a jack of all traits, no one knows how to really relate. Thus, you loose the opportunity to connect with someone once you do get their attention.
CREATE CONTENT ON THE NEWEST SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
When a new feature or platform is introduced, it does two things.
The social media platform helps creators get found because they need more users on their platform. This happened with TikTok and we saw the same when Clubhouse was introduced. Instagram then copied TikTok and introduced reels. The same way Twitter spaces is doing. What's the point? When all these new features were copied, it allowed certain people to reach hundreds of thousand new views. If you took advantage of it, you saw new followers too.
It allows the creator to be in control for once. You can make content you want to make and have it reach more people organically. Once mass adoption has set, it will be too late and you are completing with too many other people for views.
CREATE ONE TYPE OF CONTENT, OVER AND OVER AGAIN
Becoming discoverable is one thing, but once you are found, the viewer will want to see more of what they just watched. Are you into cooking? Make more cooking videos. Adding cooking, plus business, then a comedy bit one after another is confusing. The person who wants to watch more cooking videos will not follow you and will follow someone who only does that.
SHORT VIDEO CONTENT IS KEY
This one is really subjective to the times we are in. When Instagram first launched it was all about photos. Moving forward, we are seeing a big push for video content. With this being the case and attention spans being so short, you need to move with the flow.
The great news is we are in the infancy stages of video. There is little competition on this space and a lot of people are really resisting the change. Great news for you! Pump out some short video content that engages the viewer and you are on your way to a few new thousand views.
IMPROVE YOUR HOOKS
I could spend all day talking about this one. There are items that get you more views and grab the attention of your new audience. This is one of them. A hook is the initial part of a video, the first paragraph of an article and the subject line of an email.
A great hook gets people to stay and watch or read the entire thing you want them to. Most people just record or start writing and never ask themselves if anyone will watch past three seconds or read past the first sentence.
Working on your hooks will do more to getting you to 100K than everything else on this list combined.
DEVELOP COMMUNITY
Once you have 20K people following you, how do you get them to stay? How will you get them to tell others about you?
Some of the best influencers are creating communities for the followers the have and
finding creative ways to create Superfans as well. This can be by charging a small fee to be a VIP fan, or just giveaways for those who follow.
Either way, you should look at making everyone feel like they are not just another number but that they actually matter. Make them feel validated for giving you their time.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO REACH 100K TODAY?
Yes, we are in a really great time where everyone is competition for influencers and content creators to use their platforms. This puts you in a position of power. However, just because you have power, does not mean anyone will just give you their time.
You need to be smart with your content, you need to make the community feel special and they will return the love. 100K followers(or more) can be yours, just use your time wisely and stop wasting it on things you want to do.
This is the biggest issues we see. Avoid them at all cost and you will see consistent results starting today.
What questions do you have about reaching a bigger audience? Leave your questions in the comment section below.