The Idea

It's very easy to differentiate yourself from an Instagram 'influencer'. I personally enjoyed just looking at posts and liking/commenting on the ones that were especially interesting. When I saw a 'celebrity', I looked at their large followings and I just accepted that they must have been special to have earned that audience. It wasn't until I learned that an acquaintance of mine had amassed a huge online internet following that I began to wonder what truly separated the people who were followed and people who followed. This girl lives a life probably very comparable to mine, but if she chooses to, she could have a powerful effect on a multitude of people with a single post. I found that really interesting. As time passed, I became slightly obsessed with the idea of 'celebrity' and fame. Where did this obsession come from? Perhaps jealousy or perhaps my need to understand why I stood on one side of the barrier and she stood on the other. I would like to believe that others also have this innate desire, or I might just look like a huge narcissist in this post haha. Regardless, I needed to know difficult it was to amass such a large following. I concluded that the only way to truly know the difficulty was to try it. So I did.

The Experiment

I knew that gaining a following on any social media would be difficult, but I wanted to target the easiest social media so I could get a large following in the shortest amount of time. I did my research on the top 3.

Facebook: Relatively easy to get followers due to how easy it is to share posts with friends. However, the engagement for most pages that I checked were very inconsistent. Some of their posts would literally get half a million views, while other posts would only get 15 likes. I decided that I didn’t want to spend time growing a following only to get basically zero attention if a post wasn’t particularly funny.

Twitter: Also relatively easy to get followers, retweeting is basically having someone advertise your account on their page. I also really liked that all you needed to be was funny. I’d rather be on a social media where I could convey humor through text than having to go out and take pictures and videos all the time. 

Instagram: Gaining followers is complex, the only way to share posts is to manually type a friend’s username in comments or DM them the Instagram post. Instagram is also a photo sharing website, and my photography skills are shit. 

After my shoddy research, it seemed to me that the best place to grow a following was Twitter. However, whether it was my immature yearning to beat the girl at my school on her own platform, or my narcissistic need to have the power to show my face to my followers whenever; against better judgement I started an account on Instagram instead of Twitter. 

Instagram

I knew I had to make an account that favored my strengths. I couldn’t just pose and take selfies to get famous. I don’t imagine a selfie of mine garnering thousands of likes. So I knew that I had to make a more niche Instagram account. 

What I can do: Mediocre music production skills, basic video editing skills, and lots of free time.

All signs pointed to me making some sort of content-based Instagram account, but I didn’t have the infrastructure or technical knowledge to film anything substantive. I didn’t even know what type of shit was popular on Instagram, the only pages I followed were Meme pages. And when I checked the meme pages, it seemed I wasn’t alone in my affinity for memes. Many of them…had hundreds of thousands of followers. Damn. Alright then.

Memes

On February 20th 2017, I made @Kanye_Breast, not sure why I chose that name I just thought it was kind of funny. I stockpiled around 20 memes that I thought were pretty funny and I posted a few. I paid a friend of mine 5 dollars to shout me out on his Instagram page with 100,000 followers to get me on my feet. The result? A surprisingly easy ride. 

X-Axis days, Y-Axis # of Followers

As you can see my follower count increased extremely fast. There would be periods where I would gain nearly a thousand followers in a few days. I began to notice at day 70 that my rate of growth increased over time and that my goal of 10,000 followers in 100 days was very feasible. 

Interestingly, despite my increase in followers, the engagement with my content did not increase at the same rate. My pictures got more likes when I had 200 followers than when I had 2000 followers. I’m not sure why, but my pictures when I first started out would randomly get 1000–4000 likes. I was only sure of one thing, that feeling of watching your phone constantly light up was intoxicating. Every second, I got a new like, a new follower, or a new comment. Honestly, when you experience something like that, you can’t really go back.  

Day 100

I think that when I first started, my relationship with my Instagram account could be categorized as unhealthy. I would get frustrated when my posts don’t do too well, and I would find myself obsessively scouring the web for content I can either steal or work with. I found myself checking my Instagram app every 5 minutes. I sometimes would have to consciously tell myself to wait an hour before checking because I couldn’t get work done due to my constant need to refresh my follower count. This has all changed after I hit 10k followerrs, and yes, I did manage to get my 10,000th follower on exactly the 100th day. I think that the fact I was able to hit my goal really allowed me to relax more and be on my phone less. Nowadays I post maybe 3 times a day and only read through the comments when I have nothing better to do.

Conclusions

It's been about 330 days since I started my account. As you would expect, over time you become numb to all of the notifications and followers. Currently I have 33,600 followers, but I am thinking of either shutting down my account or giving it to a friend. I am not passionate about just having an audience. After a while the numbers just don't mean anything and you question what the point of posting is anymore. Yes, I know very cliche. This is not to say I don't appreciate all of my followers, I just prefer a lifestyle focused on becoming someone who should be followed rather than becoming someone with a lot of followers. There is a clear difference.

Steemit

One of the main reasons I decided to forego doing my experiment on Facebook was because I didn't want to put work into an account just to have my followers not see my content. Unfortunately, this has started to happen on Instagram as well. Many posts don't even show up on my followers' feeds unless it performs well to the first few hundred people who see it. This makes sense from the company stand-point because they want to retain users and give them a positive experience; so companies try to curate content that they think users will enjoy because others have enjoyed them. This is great for customer retention and revenue for these companies, but it really fucks over the people who produce content as well as the people who consume content. Even if my cousin doesn't get a lot of likes in the first five minutes he posts a photo, I still would like to see what my cousin is up to! I fear that many social networks are going down this path. 

This is one of the reasons I am a big believer in Steem. Yes, there are a lot of advantages of having a centralized social media but we have no idea when we can be censored or what is going to happen to the platform if the platform starts to generate less money. We're not perfect but I believe the safest hands are still our own.

Parting Words

If there's anything I learned from this whole journey it's that getting a following is not difficult, doing things that are deserving of a following is a much more arduous and noble venture. :)

Thank you for reading! I hope that you were able to learn something or gain insight from my article! I'm new to Steem so I'd love to read your comments and hear what you think!