Why You Can Increase Your Social Media Following

Do you want to increase your social media following? Do you think you have something interesting to say, an opinion that matters? Or are you one of millions who think your thoughts are not original? You don’t think anyone will pay attention to you?

Self-doubt is not a new phenomenon. An early caveman probably looked at drawings on the walls in France and thought: “Oh, Ogg made good drawing. Nobody like mine. I erase.” Same with every culture since then. How many essays, letters and books were never written, how much music was never made, how many artistic pieces were never created because someone thought “Oh, Da Vinci or Plato or Homer or Fitzgerald or Dickenson did it better?”

Many people look at social media and the internet and think that, even though they have something interesting and profound to say, they’ll never get a lot of followers. They say “Look at Mike so-and-so. He has 10,000 followers on Instagram. Look at Candice so and so. She has 500,000 followers on Facebook! Look at Grandma down the street. She has 5000 followers on YouTube! Look at all these successful people. How can I be successful?”

(Want to increase your Instagram following? Check out this FREE article: “21 Ways to Increase Your Instagram Following”.)

Your Perception is Wrong

I’m going to spin your view of getting a social media following a little differently.  I like playing with statistics and I like playing with social media programs like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube. The next time you find yourself thinking I can’t be successful because so-and-so has 10,000 and so-and-so has 50,000 and so-and-so has 5000 followers on Instagram or Pinterest or YouTube or whatever, think to yourself: “How many people are there in the United States?” The answer is somewhere around 330 million.

If one of the most successful people that you know, who is doing exactly what you want to do, has 10000 dedicated Instagram followers, (granted this is making an assumption that everybody in the United States is on social media which we know is not true but let’s just for the sake of argument say that they are,) that means that there are 329,990,000 other people that you can reach with your thoughts!

Dating and Your Social Media Following

Try relating this to dating. I recently got married, and I was, as an adult, in the dating world for nearly a decade. One of the things I learned in dating was that I was not meant for every woman. There were women who I thought were really interesting and attractive and who I really wanted to date. Many of them looked at me and for whatever reason they just did not want to give me the time of day. And I used to worry about that; it made me upset. Then I discovered that there are still a lot of fish in the sea and there were a lot of women who were interested in me. Instead of focusing on the women who DIDN’T want me, I focused on the many, many women who were interested in me!

The same thing is true with social media and your opinion and voice. There are a lot of people who will not want to hear what you have to say. But there are a lot of people who will hear what you say and think: “WOW! The way you said that, the way you presented that and your tone of voice and your choice of words and your pictures and the way you think just resonates with me!” They’ll agree with your thoughts, and so they’re going to follow you, because you are saying things the way nobody else ever has before! Why? Because you are unique!

Got it? The next time you think to yourself “Nobody is going to care about my opinion. Nobody is going to follow me,” just remember the sheer number of people out there. If you are thinking a thought, chances are really really good that at least 1% of the USA’s population is thinking the same way. If that’s true, 1% of 330 million people is still a heck of a lot of people (like, 3.3 MILLION!!) Let’s pretend you get 1% of that number to follow you on social media. That means you would still have 33000 followers. Yes, 1% of 1% of the USA’s population is still a lot of people. So say what you have to say and get busy! Stop hiding your voice. Stop inventing excuses. Build your social media following.

(By the way, if you know what you want to say but you need some help building your Instagram and other social media following(s), I recommend checking out CoachGlue. Simple to use and inexpensive, CoachGlue has a great FREE program that you can use to build your Instagram following. Get “21 Ways to Increase Your Instagram Following” here.) (And send me a link to your thoughts! I want to find out what you’re thinking!)
:-DK

(aka CyranoWriter)

Featured Image Copyright: Worawee / BigStockPhoto.com

David Kuhns

Dave has decades of writing and editing experience, including: Web content, marketing collateral, marketing, communications and business plans, curriculum development, communications collateral, book ghostwriting and editing, social media, technical writing, blogs, local search engine optimization. Clients have included: AT&T, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and assorted local businesses.