October 2nd, 2020
Social media followers are the result of putting your best work into the world.
How to grow your social media:
- Step 1: Put your best work into the world
- Step 2: Receive followers on social media
Most people skip over Step 1. Why? Because they value followers more than they value creating their best work.
They optimize for “hacks” to grow their following, like:
- posting woke-isms / jumping on trends (virtue signaling-type tweets)
- sparking controversy (e.g. cancel culture)
- Posting sexual images (Instagram influencers)
Where it goes wrong is when they start to focus more on these “hacks” than on the original work they wanted to share on social media in the first place.
It’s easy to find these people. Just log onto social media! They post every day, if not multiple times per day.
Examine their posts. Are they sharing their own work in a humble manner? Or talking about others’s work? Criticizing? Ridiculing? Trying to sell you something?
For these people, social media is their work.
These people might have followers today, but they will be forgotten tomorrow. Because people aren’t following them for them.
If you create your own work, people will find you and follow you for it.
Create your own music. Write your own jokes. Build your own business.
That’s the real long-term growth strategy. Kendrick Lamar has only tweeted once in 2020 and has 12M followers. He has this following because he created amazing music, not because he kept everyone updated on how he feels on Twitter.