As your audience grows your techniques will change.

What big boys do for growth isn’t relevant for you early days.

And what techniques are great for you early on will be inefficient later.

We need to modify our approach as we go from stage to stage. I’ll survey how to do this in this Part.

The path to 100,000+ followers will be different for everyone.

For some it’ll be years of carefully piecing together an audience. For others it might be one viral post.

It depends on your niche, your platform, your content and, let’s face it, luck.

Regardless of how long it takes to get there it’s worth it. With our audience we are building an asset - a group of people who are potential customers further down the line.

I’m not going to talk timelines. Me saying that you should hit 1000 followers in a month is counterproductive. We’re all different and will move at our own paces.

Instead let’s use audience count as rough benchmarks here. Again, this isn’t perfect - for instance 100 LinkedIn contacts could indeed be worth more than 1000 Tiktok followers (depending on your business) but it’s sufficient.

I‘ll also focus more on early stages because that’s more relevant to most people reading this guide!

0-100 audience

We all start in the same place. At 0.

It’s an awkward place to be I won’t lie. Who wants to follow an account with zero followers? No-one!

But everyone started here initially and had to deal with the first step. Well, maybe not Taylor Swift.

The great thing (!) about have hardly any followers is that you can experiment.

You can sing like nobody is watching because…they aren’t!

Treat a fresh social account as a blank palette and play around with the tools on offer. Test the functionality, see what’s what. If there are multiple formats (lnstagram has Reels, Posts and Stories for example) learn what they are and test them out. Find what appeals to you most.

And then start posting using the techniques we’ve covered. Initially don’t worry about quality too much. We literally just need our profile to look “lived in” at first.

I get of comments and DMs from people saying “please follow me!”. Every once in a while I’ll actually go and look and their profile. And I’ll find it has one video. More likely than not a blurry photo of their cat.

Why would I follow them? Same question goes for you.

If your profile is absolutely empty no-one will follow. So…start to consistently publish. Even if no-one is watching. Because when someone does come to your profile we need them to see it’s inhabited.

Feels weird yup. But it’s required!

OK then how are we getting people to come to our account then? Certainly not by DMing people and saying “follow me”!

Instead we’re going to start as we mean to go on. By offering value.

You’re going to engage with other accounts on the platform. And genuinely join conversations and be useful.

By doing so other people will see your profile and think “huh, who’s this?” and come to visit your profile.

You will also be building relationships (good ones) with people in your niche. Human relationships. Don’t just spam their feeds! Value first, always.

Sometimes you’ll even get a shoutout from a big account.

Here’s a recent example:

The bottom of the image is a tweet from George Ten. He has about 200,000 followers on Twitter.

I responded to his tweet saying that I’d used his advice and it worked. This was true. I did use the advice. And it did work!

George then screen-shotted my response and put out another tweet about the interaction.

I got a bump of followers (100+) from this interaction. Not bad for 30 second tweet.

Notice that I didn’t beg for followers. I didn’t spam George’s timeline. I didn’t do anything icky.

Instead we had a human interaction, just publicly on social media. Which led to some more followers on my account.

That’s the name of the game initially. Social media is…well, social!

100-1000 audience

Getting to your first 1000 followers is the real slog.

You’re in a weird space where you aren’t brand new. But your count is still too small to be taken seriously (sorry!).

This is where persistence comes into play. You just need to keep showing up. Keep posting. Keep engaging. And you will grow.

The key is to be sustainable. This means finding how to enjoy the process. It’s going to take time so it’s critical you find a way to take joy from the process.

Find the formats, content types and engagement that you enjoy as this will be sustainable. Then keep pushing.

This is the time when you’ll be tempted to take shortcuts. Don’t.

I’m talking about buying followers, paid bots, engagement groups etc.

These can be used to (immediately) plump follower counts. Hell, you can buy 100,000 followers right now if you want to. Don’t!

The reason not to take this shortcut is engagement. Nearly all the social media platforms use the % of your audience engaged as a metric for whether to share your content more.

If you have 100,000 bot followers then your engagement % will be low. And as a result your content will be seen as junk and not shown to anyone. You basically kneecap yourself. The account will strangle itself.

Instead use this time to lock in the type of content you’ll be doing. Watch for what your audience (at any size!) reacts to and do more of that. This feedback loop will cascade bit by bit and you’ll find the rate of growth starts to increase.

1000-10,000 audience

OK it’s go time.

Around 1,000+ things start to happen. There’s something about the 4 digit number that makes an account look “legit”. It’s stupid but it is what it is.

Continue to do the same activities (content creation and engagement) but also add in networking. Start to directly talk to others in your niche and build relationships.

Now that you have over 1000+ you will start to be seen as another creator rather than a consumer.

You will very likely also see an acceleration in audience acquisition at this point. Suddenly you’ll be adding more followers in a single day than you used to in a week.

It might take 6 months to hit 1,000 and then a single month to get to 2,000. It’s not linear but accelerates. My Tiktok, for example, took a month to add my first 1000 and now I add 1000-2000 every day.

The big get bigger, which feels entirely unfair when you are a smaller creator!

But…you’ll get the same treatment once you get here.

At this stage in your audience growth I also recommend layering in email capture. You’re now pulling enough traffic for it to be worthwhile to start lead generation. My suggestion is a newsletter, especially using beehiiv as your platform because you can get paid for each sign up.

10,000 to 100,000+

Now it’s about ROI.

I suggest looking into advertising as a way to grow your audience at this point.

You’ve cracked the code and have content that your niche wants. You can now scale that organic content using advertising.

As we’re running a business we need ROI. So make sure you have your offer in place to monetise your audience via your sales funnel.

As a nice bonus (depending on your platform) you may be able to directly generate revenue if your platform of choice has a rev-sharing programme. Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter all pay their creators for putting out content. Treat this as bonus revenue - you are a business owner not an influencer!

Next steps

Hopefully having this outline of growth stages helps.

I won’t lie. It takes time. And the first stages are the slowest!

But being forewarned is forearmed.

You know the challenge. And the work required to get there.

And know that the end result is well worth it.

Now it’s a matter of getting started and (most importantly!) sticking to it until you get what you want.