I grew over 2 million followers on social media in 10 months, and I know the first thing you're thinking is, who the hell is this guy with like a few hundred subs on YouTube telling me that he grew 2 million followers in 10 months? I would be skeptical as well. But just let me give you a little bit of background so I can then get into the main value of how we did this. So my name is Simon Shaw, and for the past four years I've been the behind-the-scenes content marketing advisor for top personal brands in the coaching space, consulting space.
I've worked with finders of software companies, e-commerce businesses. crypto companies and anything else you name it I've worked in that space and I've been the main strategist behind all of their content marketing and in some cases I own parts of these businesses as well and in that same time frame in four years across all of the different clients and partners I have I have driven over a billion views multiple millions of followers and the two million followers in 10 months that I'm referring to in this video is with one of the personal brands that I am a co-owner of Okay, but I'm not the face of that brand. I'm the behind-the-scenes strategist behind everything.
So we started in August 2023. Within 90 days, we hit 1 million combined followers on all social media platforms. And within 10 months, we'd hit 2 million followers combined. So it was 1.2 on Instagram, just over 880k on TikTok, and tens of thousands across YouTube Shorts and also on Facebook as well.
But obviously, that's not as much as the other two platforms. So I led the entire strategy. And if you stick around, I'm going to be sharing seven of the main lessons and takeaways that I learned in order to reach that 2 million followers from zero in 10 months.
And you'll be able to implement all of these takes into your personal brand. I have my notes here on my laptop. I do not like to do crazily edited videos, so I'm just going to be giving this to you raw, live, with no cuts. So I'm going to be looking at my laptop just to keep me up to speed with notes. But we're going to get right into it.
So the first thing is in order to grow your personal brand. with a quality audience but also in a relatively short time frame you have to be focusing on short form content and specifically the platform that you should care about growth on the most is on Instagram right and the reason for that is twofold the first reason is it has some of the fastest growth you can possibly get one of the best algorithms for going viral just it's basically on par with TikTok in that sense but the good thing about Instagram and the advantage it has over TikTok is that the followers are actually much higher quality. And the reason for that is people treat Instagram more like a personal profile, more like a business card, where if you go out socializing with people and you want to grab their contact information, you'll probably just grab their Instagram rather than grabbing their phone number, right?
And that's because Instagram, people basically treat it more like a social app where they can keep up to date with people, track the things they're interested in. And the biggest thing of all is that... Since you have higher quality followers on that platform, you also have the DM feature as well, which allows you to monetize your followers significantly easier.
So you should care most about growth on Instagram with short form content, but you should also post that short form content across all other short form platforms because why not? You're growing, you know. multiple audiences with the effort of one video, with the same effort of making one video, right?
So you want to focus all of your effort on short form content. The other platforms, like they have a time and place like Twitter and YouTube. I'm doing YouTube now. But in terms of actually getting fast growth with quality followers, X and YouTube are super slow. They have very high quality followers, but the growth there is very slow.
So it's much more of a long-term play. Okay. The second thing you need to know is And this is something we discovered very quickly is that in short form content, value, strict value is dead. It used to be where you could just hop on camera and start talking for two minutes or whatever and everybody would watch it and you would get millions of views. But those days are long gone.
Those are the days of Alex Ramosi blowing up very easily just by talking to the camera. Nowadays, people are swiping past it because everybody is just doing it where they're sitting in front of the camera and they're talking into the camera, not giving much entertaining. entertainment value in that video. So value in short form content is dead and you have to incorporate entertaining aspects into your video. And I'm not saying to do like dances or skits or do funny content.
I'm saying it needs to be more entertaining in nature because that's why people come on social media. So whether that is people getting a dopamine kick from seeing your lifestyle, from seeing a much more engaging, visually impressive video. whether that be you are much more active in the video, moving around and being creative with your shots.
This is the content that performs so much better. And we noticed that when we were posting content for this client to get up to 2 million followers, is that when we were posting our strict value content, our reach was essentially limited. And once we started implementing more dynamic elements inside the content, much more visually appealing, that's when we started to go create.
viral and grow much more fastly. The third thing is consistency is still the king over all other metrics. I know it's the most cliche piece of advice, be consistent, but it literally is the most important metric.
If you can't stay consistent posting two to three times per day, you're just not going to see that fast growth. You will see growth, but if we're talking about in the context of 2 million followers in 10 months, you can't just rely on posting one time per month. You have to be posting two and even three times per month or per day, sorry.
And so you have to have a good mix between low effort content and high effort content because three videos a day is very daunting for a lot of people. And so you have to come at it very strategically in the way you film your content and you present it. So an example of high effort content is something where, for example, you'll be talking to the camera or you have to go out and you have to film a bunch of complex shots.
But... You can only do so many of those before you get tired, before you get fatigue, and that's not going to be a very sustainable way to run the brand. So you have to keep thinking in terms of how can I have high effort content and low effort content.
And low effort content is stuff like maybe you'll have clips already pre-filmed where you can essentially just pass those off to an editor and then make a piece of content with maybe text on the screen and just a B-roll clip, and you'll be able to essentially create content using those assets without having to do any... effort yourself, right? And that's why it's a low effort style of content that you can mix into your content strategy, okay?
The fourth thing is the most important metric or the most important, sorry, factor that we noticed across all of our content was the difference between the viral videos and the less viewed videos. Even if they were well viewed, they weren't touching the same views as our more viral videos. The reason or the difference between the two was the viral videos had much more movement on screen and they were a lot more visually stimulating or they had a visual demonstration.
And that was the defining factor that I performed every other kind of content regardless of what was being said in the video. There's a lot of instances where we split tested between saying a certain type of value in one video where we just stood and talked straight to the camera and it performed okay and then we did it a month later with the exact same content in the value but we were actually doing a a visual demonstration of what was being explained in the video. So not only explaining what is happening, what you need to do, but also demonstrating it live. Okay. Um, and so the next thing that we noticed also increased our, our views and our growth a lot was we incentivized engagement.
Okay. So you might've seen on social media, a lot of people saying comment, the word, whatever, and I'll send you like a link to a free thing. Uh, these kinds of videos. When you catch fire and actually get a lot of traction, a lot of comments coming in, these are the kind of videos that really push your content out to more people.
And we noticed that anytime we would push a video with a CTA directly to purchase the product or apply to work with the client, then we noticed our sales on the graph, it would literally just spike. As soon as we had a viral video and we had all those comments, it would spike overnight and we'd make significantly more sales. And so...
The videos that had a really high comment rate, because we incentivized that engagement, directly translated to more growth, more followers, more views, and also into sales for the info product as well. So you can do that in two ways, using a ManyChat tool, by the way. You can Google up how to use it. This won't be a ManyChat video, but use ManyChat to set up the automation to send the free link or the free whatever it is that you're going to be giving the person. But you can do it in different ways where you're either giving away something for free in the video Maybe you mentioned something in the video and you're saying, hey, get this free guide, free resource, or it's a direct pitch.
It's like, hey, if you want to buy my course, if you want to apply to work with me, just comment the word, whatever, and I'll DM you. And then you can trigger a flow based on that. But basically what you need to do is incentivize those comments to actually get them coming in. The sixth thing that we did, and this was one of the biggest bumps in follower gain that we noticed across the entire year.
the entire span of the project so far and we gained the most followers whenever we had a video that went viral but it also got picked up by mainstream media so we had several instances where our videos went viral and they were posted on places like sports center the washington post lad bible and a bunch of other mainstream media outlets on social media and this is when we saw the biggest bump because these legacy media outlets they are essentially the mass market right And if you are in that market, which we are, it's really beneficial to be posted there. So when we had a viral video and we got posted on those, they would link back to our original video. They would tag us in the video and we would just get so much traffic coming over from those people.
pages that it would just blow up the following overnight, quite literally hundreds of thousands of followers within days. And that was the biggest, the single biggest spike that we saw for our following in such a short period of time. And so obviously that's not something you can necessarily control, but you can in the sense where if you are willing to pay to play, paying bigger pages to post your content and kind of imply that it is a viral video that they're watching.
linking back to your original account. If you're willing to pay to play for that, that could be the way that you can artificially make that happen, get that traction to come across. But I would be careful on the types of pages that you are advertising on, essentially, because it is advertising.
I wouldn't be picking any theme pages because the followers from there are super low quality. I would be focusing on much more traditional legacy social media pages, legacy brands that have large followings in first world countries. They might be more expensive if you have to pay to get on them.
They might be more expensive, but if you can find some way of getting on some of these accounts, you will see a significant bump in followers and they will be pretty high quality as well. Just make sure if you're also going to do that to time a CTA at the same time as the post goes live. So when you have people come into the funnel or come into your account and follow you, they're immediately seeing a CTA that can try to convert them on booking a call or selling a course.
Okay. And the seventh thing that we noticed that is basically the most important factor, one of the most important factors is your on-screen aura matters significantly. You could have the same video and give it to two different people and this guy will get crazy results and this guy will get nothing.
They could be saying the exact same thing, they could be doing the exact same thing, but one guy will have a significantly better on-camera presence than the other guy. Okay, and that's something that if you aren't used to being on camera, you're not used to speaking in front of groups and crowds and everything, you're not going to have that, that comfortability on camera, you're going to seem tense, you're going to seem, you know, your words aren't going to flow, you're not going to be very charismatic. And that is going to cause people to swipe past your video, and you're basically not going to get any growth.
So we're lucky in the sense that the, you know, the person that I have as a partner on this, this personal brand, who is the onscreen talent. you know has been teaching people for years in person in large groups and so he's very used to speaking in public very used to speaking to groups and very used to being on camera so he's a very charismatic person and people really love him when you read the comments he has hundreds of positive comments so if that's you and you are charismatic and you're very used to speaking on camera in front of people fantastic great but if you aren't then i encourage you to get a lot of practice try to book yourself on some podcasts even if it's with small podcasts that don't really have any viewers The practice is fine. Speaking on camera is fine. You need to get that reps in. So find some podcasts that you can get on.
Practice recording content without a camera. Some people, when they're recording with the camera, they get all tense. They stare into the lens. They forget what they need to say, and they just act all awkward, right?
And so if you can film content without a camera just to practice, then it's going to get a lot easier by the time you actually do get on camera, and then you need to actually perform essentially in the content. So if you don't have aura, essentially, people are not going to really be drawn to you in a sense in your content. You have to kind of have an aura about you. And so those are the seven things that I learned that basically matter for growing an audience on social media and how to grow to 2 million followers in 10 months. And if you like the video, you know, just leave a comment, subscribe if you want.
If you want my help with this kind of thing, you can check out the description or you can just DM me on Instagram, Shawpreneur. It's the same as my YouTube handle. So if you want to talk, you can just shoot me a DM there.
And if you have any questions at all, just leave a comment. I do not get many comments. And so if you leave a comment, I will respond to it in detail if your question is solid. So like the video, subscribe, comment, share, all that stuff. And I'll see you on the next one.