How to Get Your First 10,000 Followers [Guide]

As we close out the year and gear up for 2024, many people (including myself) are setting big social media goals.

But one of the questions I most often get is “What would you do if you had to start from zero?”

So here’s exactly what I would do.

While mapping this out, I was mostly thinking about how I’d grow from 0 to 10k on X or LinkedIn, but the principles can apply to other social platforms as well.

Note: I’d focus on growing on just one social platform. Once you’ve built up a following and gotten consistent engagement, then you can think about a second platform.

0 → 100 followers

Your first 100 followers should be the easiest to get. The goal of this phase is to bootstrap your early following and engagement via people who already know you and who are willing to help you on your journey. As you’re reaching out to people during this phase, be sure to let them know why you’re trying to build a following, why it’s important to you/your business, and what you ultimately want to achieve. This will make them much more willing to support and share with others in their network.

1) Friends & Family

• Attending a family gathering? Ask everyone at the dinner table to follow your account

• Send a text to all of the last 50 people who you’ve recently messaged with and ask them to support

• Reach out to your friends, cousins, teachers, colleagues, and anyone who you have a good relationship — ask them to give you a follow even if they don’t regularly use their account

2) Bootstrap engagement via tex and DM

• Now that you have a bit of following, you can experiment content creation. Write about your top interests and send your best posts to a handful of people who you are very close to and ask them for a repost, like, and/or comment

• This will seem odd at first but it’s really tough to build a following from the start if you aren’t getting engagement on your content. Literally text people and DM your posts to others

• Another way to do this without seeming desperate is to ask people for input on your content. A simple “Hey, I just wrote this and thought you might find it interesting. Would love to see your thoughts in the replies.”

3) Leverage other social accounts

• Have a Facebook account that you rarely use? Share a post with your network asking them to follow you on this other account if they want to support your journey and see more regular updates from you

• Share your content or a link to your account on your Instagram stories

• Add the link to your account as the the link in bio on all your social accounts, websites, and landing pages

100 → 1,000 followers

This phase is where you begin to get a taste of scale. By now you will have a few hundred followers and sparse engagement across your content but you’re probably itching to hit that 1,000 follower mark and consistent engagement on your content. These 3 tactics below should help you get there.

1) Tap into existing communities

• Part of a small online community of others in your profession? Share your content with these people and ask them to support. Since you’ll already have a small following and a bit of engagement by now, this group of people will be more likely to support (sorta acts as social proof since they aren’t landing on a blank account with zero followers and no engagement)

2) Attend events and join groups

• Attend in-person or virtual events where there will be people in your niche. Ask everyone who you meet if they’d like to exchange socials (if attending a virtual event, find people who are posting about the event on X or LinkedIn by using the search bar and filtering by most recent")

• Join online groups or private communities where you can provide something of value (perspective, knowledge, or feedback) to others. Drive people back to your social account if they want to learn more from you 

3) Leverage email

• Even if you only have a few hundred emails, send out a blast to everyone asking them if they’d be willing to support your journey. Since you have some following and engagement, they’ll be more likely to support

1,000 →10,000 followers

This is the toughest part. By now you will have a few thousand followers and some engagement but you probably don’t have a consistent theme of content since you have people from all walks of life with different interests who follow you. Now you have to niche down, improve your content output, and spend a lot more time doing daily outreach to remain top of mind.

1) Refine your niche

• It is very tough to grow an audience by talking about 10 different things on a weekly basis. I’d suggest selecting 2-3 broad topics that can be broken out into niche subtopics. One of these should be your main niche that you want to be known for (ideally, this is tied back to your business or long-term goals as a creator). For example, one of my topics is “Social Media” which also includes “Content Creation for Social”, “Social Media Community Management”, “Social. Media Analytics”, “Social Media for Startups”, “Growing an audience on social”, and the list goes on

• Your main topic should be something that you can always write about and find energy when you create content about this topic (don’t do it if you don’t have an interest in the topic because you’ll burn out)

2) Double down on your content strategy

• Once you’ve got your main niche, start mapping out content themes, templates, weekly goals, and get to work creating content

• Aim for consistency. This could be a post a day for a month until you have enough data to reflect on what worked and what flopped. This phase will also help you grow the muscle of creating content

• This post should help you with your content strategy

3) Focus on daily outreach via replies, comments, DMs

• Aside from your content strategy, you should also be sending 20-30 mins a day (or longer if you have time) interacting with others in your niche, community, or people who are engaging with your content

• Thank people for their support with they re-share and try to reply to every single comment

• Set up quick calls with people who you regularly interact with — this will strengthen the relationship and results in a win-win for both parties

If you’re finding value in this newsletter, I’d really appreciate a share on social or forwarding this edition to a friend!

It goes a long way for me.

Thank you so much and hope you have a Happy New Year! 🎉 

Ish

Something I really enjoyed this week:

^^ this is my 6th time listening to this episode btw — sooooooo damn good 🔥