1,000,000 Followers On Social Media: How I Am Doing It & How You Can Too

[Alferez]

INC magazine called me a "Social Media Rockstar" for a reason. I know social media as good as the palm of my hand.

In one of my business ventures, I own Facebook and Instagram pages with a total following in the millions and have access to a network of tens of millions of followers across various niches and industries.

One of those pages, to give you an example, is @deep_lit on Instagram. These pages are themed accounts focusing on a particular topic. In the case of @deep_lit, the topic is meaningful illustrations with insights about life.​

Deep_lit is growing at a rate of 8850 followers a month, according to Social Blade, all organically. It's now at 131,000 followers.​

EDIT: This account was mysteriously stolen and I wasn't able to recover it. Lost forever. Ouch. That hurt. I should've been more perspicacious. (How do I strikethrough the red text above?)



All the effort I now put into an account at that level is minimal to non-existent. It takes less than 5 minutes a day to manage it.

How?

With automated systems and processes and a team I've been building in the last couple months.

Now, I know that I don't post a lot here, despite having been a member of the Fastlane Forum for about 2 years.

But when I post something, you will know it's god damn good!

Like this Notable thread I wrote back in early 2016: How I Made $11032 In 2 Months With Less Than 1.30 Hour Of Daily Work

That venture by the way. has scaled to 7 figures, yearly, with almost ZERO daily work at the MOMENT (stressing that because it had a hell of a lot of work to get it there).

Other than a bi-weekly (often short) meeting with my general managers, it's so well systematized that my time is detached from it, in true Fastlane fashion.

Having that freedom, allows me to divert my focus on other endeavors. One of my recent endeavors is Personal Branding.

Although the followers of my themed pages are in the millions, growing a personal brand is a whole different game.

EDIT: Aside from the deeplit account and a couple others, the themes of the other pages I own aren't directly related to my personal brand. Using them to grow wouldn't be an option, plus how would that help you?

Many principles and strategies are transferable. Generally though, building a Personal Brand is harder than building a Themed Page. That's primarily because a Themed Page can curate content from others, whereas your Personal Brand most likely won't. It's not because you can't, but then would it be personal?

I want to share all my discoveries with you, give you regular progress upgrades, as often as my schedule allows.

If you want to build you personal brand, THIS is the thread to follow.

I will outline everything I am doing here on my way to building a personal brand with a total following of 1,000,000 people on my personal profiles, across various networks like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube & Facebook.

One regret I have from the above mentioned post I had published back in 2016 is that I didn't make it a progress thread.

I did not gave regular updates on how that venture evolved to a systematized, 7 figures a year, Fastlane machine.

I can't help but think about how many lives that could have impacted, had I shared all the successes, the failures, the experiments and everything that happened along the way.

So, for this social media and personal branding venture, I will be sharing everything I learn on my way to 1,000,000 followers on social media and the establishment of a world-renown personal brand.

I am currently at 7839 followers on Twitter, 29,200 on Instagram, about 16,000 on Facebook and have nothing going on at YouTube right now. I am not sure if I will disclose e-mail list numbers, but it's currently in the thousands.

When I got started in early September, I had about 1500 Twitter followers and 2500 on Instagram. Those were mostly obtained by a practice known as follow/unfollow, which by the way is a horrible strategy to follow.

The growth since then, has not been bad, for a matter of just 3.5 months though. It wasn't even my full-time focus, as I've been building my 2nd business, which is a network of e-commerce brands selling physical products worldwide.

So, that growth from September to December, happened with roughly 1/10 of my time being devoted to this venture. That's solid, I think.

I am at 1/20th of the way to 1,000,000 followers, but I know for fact that exponential growth can occur within a matter of a couple weeks, when you consistently build up your momentum.

That's what I expect to happen here as well. At one point within the coming months, there will likely be a sudden spike in the range of hundreds of thousands of followers, within a very short timeframe.

I have ideas and strategies on how I will pull that off that I will share with you.

However, I can't help but say that this whole undertaking is something I am doing for the first time.

It's SCARY.

And like everyone in the beginning of a venture, I have no freaking idea of what's going to happen.

So, you will not just see the Event here, but you will also be an INSIDERS in the Process, to speak in plain Fastlane language.

Who is excited for what's coming?
What do you want to learn?
Let me know below!​

I'm always open to new possibilities, which was why I read Unscripted in the first place.

In your 5th post of this thread, there were 811 words, and it can all be summarized to just 4 words: "Get a blue tick". Then, there's this part:



So, what's this "damn more powerful", legendary forbidden secret technique of the ancients that you speak of? Why is it so powerful that it cannot be executed at this time? Will it crash Instagram's servers or the whole WWW?

How many times are you going to emphasize your achievements, as shown below across all your posts:






(scarcity?)

And from the signature are things which makes me feel even more cynical than ever:



(ok, if you can turn me into a millionaire, I'll take back everything I said and call you dad!)

And even more stuff to establish "credibility and authority":



And below is the final straw which makes me smell a rat and totally reminds me of @SinisterLex 's guru thread:



Private FB community is part of the funnel which will then lead to some private messages, then free skype calls, free coaching and free seminars?

Have the stars finally aligned, with Virgo paying a visit to the Water Halls of Aquarius and the Big Dipper is in full formation? Is this now finally the time to reveal that legendary secret technique for growing Instagram which cannot be mentioned previously? Looking at the other replies in this thread, many people are very curious.

Till date, there's 6 methods I know of to grow IG, which is:

1) Follow/Unfollow
2) Automation bots to mass like people's posts for them to notice and follow your account (e.g. Everliker)
3) Buy followers / join social discovery network channels to get your IG account blasted somehow to an audience and they follow you
4) Create really viral content that's so good it sucks everything to follow you
5) Shoutouts
6) Leveraging influencers with giant followings (this was mentioned in that IG thread by Zaid)
7) Your method?

Of course, I could be wrong about you. Maybe I'm too cynical.
Maybe you're not another Tai Lopez (he hangs with multi-millionaires and billionaires at parties and even took pics with Mark Cuban) or that recent Alex Mailtag guy (he even had a photo with Kevin O' Leary!)

.....or you could speed things up, post a link to your website/seminar so I can join and sign up as a paying customer and grow my IG by 8K followers per day/month like you, and maybe even become a millionaire in the process.

I think you are 100% right @Xeon , this man is selling smoke.

For me, this guy sells what you could learn reading 4 or 5 books of marketing.

 

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[woken]

Why is this notable?

this is 30 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Why is this notable?

this is 30 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

I have no idea… I haven’t read it. I’m guessing it has zero actionable advice? If so, I can downgrade…

 

[ZF Lee]

I have no idea… I haven’t read it. I’m guessing it has zero actionable advice? If so, I can downgrade…

Not so...I found Fox's nuggets to be very representative of what I experienced when I started helping my mum do her Instagram page (she sells mutual funds now )

See below:

For anyone coming across this thread in the future, I've compiled all of the most valuable Instagram posts into one PDF (ft. @Fox and @InformationH ) and I've done the same for @rpeck90 's posts in this thread (great read for anyone interested in personal branding, luxury positioning, and more).

Hope this helps!

Meh. I've grown an account to a touch under 80K through the amazingly secret hack of:
1 - produce unique and interesting content
2 - post it
3 - genuinely interact with others
4 - rinse and repeat.

You can "hack" and automate stuff but you get out exactly what you put in, you put in fake and automated comments, you're going to get fake and automated comments back. You follow / unfollow, you'll get people who only follow you because you follow them. All of this is pointless, you are not growing or developing a real and engaged community.

This is exactly what I did to grow the page followers by 20% in one month (I started around early November)...follower numbers climbing towards 1000 as I have not made stuff like reels and live sessions.

This is not very viral growth...but I get highly curated folks who are suited for the mutual funds page. Mutual fund agents...personal finance devotees (some of them are gurus, some of them just want to post on Insta like a diary). I even had one ask me to review an investing book they were writing...and another agent who is open to meeting up in KL.

I ease the interaction process by finding out what hashtags existing influencers use, follow them and hop in onto the most recent posts made.

I like hashtags with 10,000 posts or so...they are less saturated and less bots.

There, I can find newcomer creators who I can talk with...and are more likely to be good followers (since they also want my support).

So for each hashtag, I earmark maybe 2 'central pages' (where they do shoutouts or reposts) and 2 individual pages already posting good money content that isn't copycat. For the latter, I make sure they already have folks commenting decent comments...can be as little as 2-3 comments on average a post.

Then I go comment on 2-3 of their posts.

Not just say 'its a great post!'...but I give ACTUAL ADVICE.

Example:
-If they posted a post on why Apple is a great stock to invest in...I comment to chime in on why Apple can last for the next 10 years.

-If they posted something on mutual funds vs ETFs, I go in and highlight the different expectations investors should have for each...and point them to a post I wrote on before




This can seem like hard work...but it isn't.
This is SOCIAL media...the name of the game already hints how to do well in it.

My only problem now is not gaining followers...but SELLING the product.
For my mum, that typically would be mutual funds consultation sessions...but I think it is possible to write some ebooks and sell them as the initial front-end product.

But sadly...don't think my mum has the vision for it. It is too bad that her line of mutual fund agents only give the Internet lip-service in general (i.e. just ask you to post on social media....and that's that).

I just help her out though...but I might end up doing all the work for that expansion.


On a side note, posting regular original content on Instagram seems to net a lot better engagement than Facebook (FB is like a dead snail now although I do cross-posts). And thinking constantly about post ideas can be very healthy for business idea gen.

 

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