How to Grow Your Social Media Following From Zero

You may have noticed that some people spend years writing and publishing content and only build a handful of followers whereas others quickly grow a six figure audience after just a few months or years.

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Simply publishing content isn’t enough to grow a large social media following quickly.

While you do have to publish content to achieve any social media growth, there are a handful of subtle mistakes many people make that stunt follower growth.

We’ll address all of these mistakes and provide a simple plan for growing your social media following.

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Posting content isn’t enough to build a large (and quality) social media following. Here are five of the most common social media growth mistakes that hinder audience growth.

Mistake #1: Publishing Content Sporadically

Social media platforms are designed to show users the latest content from their friends. This means the content you published last week won’t help you earn additional followers, as algorithms won’t show that content to new people.

Instead, you have to publish new content to earn new followers.

Additionally, it’s difficult to build a deeper relationship with your followers if you don’t publish content consistently, which can lead to less engagement (e.g., comments/likes/shares) and even cause them to unfollow you.

Mistake #2: Content Topic Inconsistency

There’s one major difference between ordinary people (e.g., non celebrities, models, movie stars) with large followings and regular social media users; regular social media users post about any updates in their life, while most influencers post about a specific topic.

Think about it – you probably won’t follow a person you don’t know who posts about random life updates, like buying a car, learning to swim, and starting a business.

However, if 80% of that person’s posts are relevant to your interests, you’ll probably start following them. After following their journey, you’ll likely soon want some of their personal content.

For example, you probably wouldn’t follow this person if you didn’t personally know them:

However, if you’re interested in social media growth tactics, you probably would follow them. And after following them for some time, you’d probably also be interested in content related to their personal life.

You can (and should) still post content about your personal interests and life, as that can help deepen your relationship with your followers. However, keep the ratio of niche-related to personal-interest content about 4:1 so that you continue to attract new followers who aren’t yet familiar with your content.

Additionally, you can weave your personal experiences into your educational content to make your content more engaging and deepen the relationship with your followers. For example, a post on how social media impacted your life is a great way to weave personal experiences in with social media tips.

Mistake #3: Failing to Engage With Followers

Social media platforms are unique from blogs because they’re designed to facilitate two-way communication.

Instead of just posting content, it’s important to respond to followers so that they feel heard and are therefore inspired to engage with your future content.

If you don’t respond to their comments and questions, they’ll feel ignored and unimportant, which will ultimately cause them to quit following you.

For example, this person asked the poster a question and never received a response, which can hurt follower relationships:

Engaging with your followers also allows you to build genuine relationships outside of social media platforms, which can lead to other opportunities, experiences, and events.

Here’s a great example of how you can build real relationships online:

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You can also talk to your followers directly to understand their problems, which can help you generate content topics and even product and service ideas.

A key reason someone like Brett Adcock built so many followers in such a short time is that he has real, interesting life experiences to share.

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Few other people can share what it’s like to take a company public and build a cutting-edge robotics company.

This content makes his thoughts, ideas, and experiences much more credible and interesting because they come from a perspective very few people have. For example, this post is interesting because of the context – very few people have hired as much as someone like Brett, so it immediately makes his insights more interesting and credible:

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Even if Brett’s copywriting skills aren’t perfect, he could probably still build a strong audience simply because his experiences are so unique and interesting.

Instead of focusing exclusively on building a social media following, think about how you can build experiences that people will find inspiring and interesting.

Then, simply share your mistakes, what you’ve learned, and how you plan to proceed.

Mistake #5: Not Collaborating With Others

Social media growth comes from your followers engaging with your content and sharing it with their friends. The more engagement and shares your content receives, the more people will discover you.

This is why it’s easier to grow faster as you earn more followers. However, growth is often relatively stagnant in the early days, as you’ll have very few followers, limiting the number of people who will discover your content.

Collaborating with other micro-influencers is essentially a cheat code for social media growth. When a micro influencer shares your content with their established audience, it multiplies the number of people who can discover your content.

For example, Dane has about 5,000 followers.

He interviewed Andy Crestodina about his content marketing philosophies.

As Andy has over 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, Dane was able to 20x the reach of this LinkedIn post when Andy shared it with his followers.

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Therefore, collaborating with influencers is an excellent way to earn more followers.

Here is a step by step process to grow your social media following, even if you currently have zero followers.

Step 1: Define Your Niche and Target Audience

What do you want to be known for?

If you’re known as “the YouTube thumbnail person” or “the Instagram graphic design person,” it’s easier to earn followers who have that specific pain point and eventually convert them into customers.

For example, someone interested in building faceless YouTube channels might follow Adam and potentially buy his course or book a consulting call. However, Adam had defined himself as a general “YouTube expert,” people specifically interested in faceless YouTube channels probably wouldn’t have singled him out and decided to follow him.

Niching down will help you stand out because there’s less competition and people with that specific problem will follow you.

For example, instead of branding yourself as “the YouTube strategist,” brand yourself as “the YouTube strategist for (SaaS, ecommerce, etc.),” or “the YouTube title guy.”

You can also always branch out and become a generalist after you’ve earned some followers, but you’ll find it easier to gain some initial traction if you start by branding yourself as a niche expert.

Once you know exactly what your niche is, think about who your target audience is and create an audience avatar. An audience avatar will help you craft content that resonates with these people’s specific pain points.

Similar to a live, one-on-one conversation, you’ll know exactly who you’re talking to as you write your social media posts.

Without a detailed understanding of who you’re talking to, your content may sound generic, and it will be difficult to earn followers.

Your audience avatar should include:

Age
Title
Goals
Information sources
Location
Interests
Pain point related to your niche

Here’s a sample audience avatar template you can use to get started:

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It’s tempting to post content on every social media platform to maximize reach.

The problem is that you have limited time and resources, and learning each platform’s content style and audience takes time. Instead, you’ll grow faster if you invest all your resources into growing on one platform.

After gaining traction on a single platform, you can repurpose your content on other platforms.

You’ll find it’s pretty easy to direct your audience to those other platforms and grow quickly once you’ve built a following on one platform. Additionally, once you see an ROI from your initial platform, you’ll have more resources to hire experts to help you repurpose your content and grow on the other platforms faster.

It’s also important to choose one content medium, ideally either written content or long-form videos.

You can do short-form videos, though it’s often much more difficult to build a loyal audience as short form content doesn’t allow you to provide detailed explanations that build trust with your audience.

Here are a few reasons why it’s best to stick with just one content medium when you’re getting started:

It makes your workflow simpler. If you only create written content or only video content, you can block off time once per week to write or record content. However, if you create video and written content, you’ll double the amount of time it takes to create content. By overwhelming yourself, you’ll ultimately give up, which is the only way you can truly fail at growing your social media following.
Mastering a single content medium takes time: The skills for each content medium are different and take time to learn. Learning how to craft a great hook for a video is different from crafting a great hook for written content.

If you’re not sure which content medium to choose, start with whatever is most fun and easiest.

If video is too hard, or takes too much time, start with writing. If you hate writing, but don’t mind recording quick videos on your phone, start with video.

Once you’ve grown enough to see an ROI from your social media efforts, then you can hire experts in the other content mediums (videographers, editors, graphic designers, etc.) to help you repurpose your content into different mediums and across additional platforms.

However, if you try to do everything at once when you’re first getting started, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed.

Step 3: Create a Content Idea Bank

Most social media creators don’t generate content ideas on the spot. They have a bank of content ideas and frameworks that help them essentially generate content.

Here’s a simple process you can use to generate endless content ideas relevant to your niche.

First, create a blueprint of your main process.

Then, you can repackage that information in a few different ways:

Case studies
Mistakes you often see
Failures you’ve experienced/what you wish you knew earlier
What you’ve recently learned
Tools you use at each step of the process

For example, let’s say you’re a YouTube thumbnail strategist. Here are a few different ways you could use these content frameworks to create dozens of social media posts:

Blueprint: My step by step YouTube thumbnail creation process

How we doubled clicks to MrBeast’s most recent video
Here are the top 10 most common thumbnail mistakes
Here are 10 thumbnail cheat codes that took me 10 years to learn
I paid $5,000 to learn from MrBeast’s chief thumbnail designer. Here are 10 lessons
Here are 10 tools I use to create thumbnails

You can also segment each of these into specific steps of the process. For example, choosing the best colors for a thumbnail is a hotly debated topic.

Here’s how you can apply the same frameworks to the subtopic of thumbnail colors:

How we adjusted the color of this thumbnail to double clicks
Here are the top 10 most common color mistakes ruining your thumbnail’s CTR
Here are 10 things I wish I knew earlier about optimizing thumbnail colors
I studied 10,000 thumbnail color variations, and here’s what I learned
Here are 10 tools to nail your thumbnail’s aesthetics

These are great frameworks to help you get started, but you can also create a note in your phone and write down random thoughts and ideas as they come to you.

For example, if you think of a thumbnail hack or a customer asks you a question that you find particularly common, write it down and then add it to your list of ideas.

Step 4: Create Your Content And Automate Your Publishing Schedule

Consistency is arguably the most challenging aspect of building a social media following, because social media platforms typically only show your posts for about 24-ish hours.

So if you want to deepen relationships with your existing followers and ultimately grow your follower count, you need to be publishing consistently and frequently.

To ensure you remain consistent, create a content calendar with each topic for the month and then schedule your posts in advance.

You can make your content calendar in a simple spreadsheet like this:

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Then, schedule time in your calendar each week to actually create the content. If you don’t put it in your calendar, you probably won’t do it, so schedule content creation time the same way you would schedule a meeting.

After creating your content, schedule it in advance. Today, most social media platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, have built-in features that allow you to schedule content in advance.

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Alternatively, you can use a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your content in advance.

If you find that you’re still not motivated to actually schedule your content, another option is to create all of your content in a Google Doc (or upload videos to a Google Drive) and then hire someone on Upwork to actually optimize it and schedule it on a social media platform.

Step 5: Engage With Your Followers (In-Person and Online) Set Up Automated DMs

There are several key benefits to engaging with your followers:

Increase future content engagement: If you respond to someone’s comment, they’re more likely to comment on your future posts. This is a key advantage you have over other influencers with large followings, as they often can’t respond to each and every comment.
Generate new content and product ideas: This is an opportunity to learn about their pain points so that you know what kinds of content and products/services to offer.
Deepen follower relationships: Deeper relationships with your customers can help you drive more sales to both your own products/services as well as affiliate products/services.
Build genuine relationships with interesting people: You can make new friends, build valuable business relationships, and open the door to new opportunities, like content collaborations, speaking engagements, and more.

Block out time in your calendar to respond to comments to ensure you take action and engage with your followers.

Another pro tip is to message new followers. Specifically, ask them what they’re hoping to learn from you and what they’re currently struggling with.

One on one conversations are key to building genuine relationships, which amplifies the four benefits of engaging with your followers.

Depending on the platform you use, you can even set up automated DMs to automatically send to people who comment on your posts. However, make sure that you aren’t auto DMing people who have already followed you for a while.

Also, when someone responds to the auto-DM, be sure to personally respond and engage in the conversation.

To help you get started, here are a few resources on setting up auto DMs:

Twitter/X auto DM setup guide
Instagram auto DM setup guide
Facebook auto DM setup guide

Step 6: Collaborate With Others

Collaborating with others is one of the best growth hacks because it instantly puts your content in front of a larger target audience—it’s the equivalent of borrowing someone else’s audience for a day.

Most collaborations are essentially cross promotions, where two content creators with similar-sized audiences promote one another’s content or create a joint piece of content and distribute it to their audience.

Collaborations can be challenging when you have no followers, as most influencers (micro and macro) won’t receive equal value through cross-promotion.

The good news is that there are other ways to deliver value and make a collaboration equally beneficial, even if you don’t have any followers.

Here are a few different ideas:

Write a case study of their products/services
Target their team members
Attend an event they’re attending

Here’s how you can execute each of these steps.

Write a case study of their products/services

If they offer a product or service, writing a case study about their work is great free marketing for them.

For example, Danny Miranda completed Andy Frisella’s 75 Hard Challenge and documented every step of the process. As a result, Andy Frisella eventually invited Danny onto his podcast to talk about the process. When Danny first spoke to Andy, Danny had a podcast, but it was far smaller than Andy’s. However, it made sense for Andy to have Danny on the podcast because Danny essentially was a case study for him.

If I was trying to get Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit, to collaborate with me, a great way to do so would be to collect a variety of case studies from different ConvertKit users and then post them all in a Twitter thread. Assuming the case study is truly outstanding, it would likely get picked up by the ConvertKit team and potentially capture the attention of Nathan Barry.

Target their team members

Rather than targeting the influencer directly, asking to interview their team members can be equally effective as it provides a “behind the scenes” look at their operations.

Here’s a great example of how one creator targeted YouTuber Ali Abdaal’s general manager:

Attend an event they’re attending

One of the best ways to collaborate with an influencer is to attend an event they’re attending and ask them a few questions in the lobby or somewhere off stage.

For example, this person went around a YouTube conference and asked different YouTubers how much money they make. He even got YouTuber Ryan Trahan to respond.

The trick is making it a single simple question that you can quickly ask them in just a few seconds.

This step-by-step process will help you grow your social media following, but one of the best growth hacks is learning from other people’s mistakes and receiving feedback on your work.

As an entrepreneur, it can be lonely and challenging when you’re first getting started, especially if you don’t have a strong social media network. That’s why we created the Copyblogger Academy.

It’s a community of entrepreneurs and side hustlers building their personal brands on social media, and it also contains nine courses on various skills you need to master, like copywriting.

Best of all, the community is led by people who have real experience building personal brands, Charles Miller and Tim Stoddart.

Charles alone has over 170,000 followers on X and 120,000 followers on LinkedIn and has helped many other top performing entrepreneurs grow their personal brands.

You can try the Copyblogger Academy risk-free to see if it’s the right fit for you.