Growing on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest (feat. BowTiedGrappler)
Social media isn't optional these days
gm and Merry Christmas everyone.
2023 has been a great year. I’m pumped to have built a community of crazy mofos who are out there taking action and building businesses.
Today I have a guest post from BowTiedGrappler. He’s built up an insane following on Instagram in a short period of time and he’s here to tell you how he did it.
Without further ado, here’s Grappler:
Okay, first I want to thank Tetra again for the opportunity to write for his site for the third time! It's insane that it has almost been 20 months since the first time you all have heard about me and what I am building.
This post will be directed at giving you a better look at how I look at social media and how to brute force your way to growth. Every platform is different in terms of what the consumer’s intention is while scrolling.
Remember, the social media platforms want everyone scrolling. Your goal is to feed that by always being in front of people's faces. It’s not sexy, but volume is the name of the game.
Let's begin.
Every Platform Has Its Own Use Case
People consistently ask me: will images be a viable strategy today? On top of that, they presume their first 100 posts will ignite growth in flash.
Sorry to break it to you, not happening.
While it may work on certain platforms in certain niches, posting still images (and thinking anything less than 100 posts is always going to create the following you want) is going to underperform video content. You need to be posting reels and tiktoks if you are serious about growing an audience.
Every platform has an intended use case. All they want people to do is scroll and stay glued to their phone. They want to feed the consumer beast so you have to find what your audience wants and needs and provide it to them in a way that keeps them glued to the platform.
What you do on IG is not what you do on Pinterest. What you do on YouTube is not what you do on Twitter. Vice versa, you get the point.
Get to know your audience. Know what they want and what they are being fed by the social media gods and add to it. Sometimes this doesnt’ even have to be new and unique content it could be completely resurfaced. Many brand son the web do this and grow massive followings by doing so. Some questions that you need to answer:
What type of content is your audience consuming on the platform you are looking to grow in?
What are other large accounts doing?
How often are these people posting?
What hashtags are they using?
How are differentiating themselves?
Social media giants like Facebook and Instagram throttle reach and make people pay to get more eyeballs. To play the game, you have to steamroll this by getting creative and posting more than everyone else. Growing on IG is more of a numbers game than any other platform.
It took me 150 posts to actually have something go semi-viral and get me past 3,500 followers, after that things started to compound quickly and now I am sitting at ~47,000 followers on the platform.
Best Practices By Platform
Pinterest has been my latest testing ground and firmly believe that anyone can do well on there. Everyone reading this should be on Pinterest, it is literally free traffic to your website that sticks around. If you are not on the platform I believe you are behind the eight ball especially if you have a blog. Relying on one source of traffic (whether it is just IG or Search) is a losing game.
Mix it up. Understand the people you are trying to get in front of better than anyone in your niche and serve them exactly what they need on a silver platter.
Here are some best practices to follow for each platform that I have found to not only get results (gain followers) but also boost traffic numbers:
Instagram / TikkTokky
Instagram is the place you need to grow but it is the hardest platform to do so in my opinion because of how established it is.
Identify about 10 to 15 key hashtags that are not overpopulated in your niche and be sure to exclusively post reels with these hashtags.
Combine this with trending sounds that you see while you are consuming and you may have a direct way to growth. You have two options when it comes to content on Instagram, you can go the reposting route (how to repost content) or create original content (by doing clips or talking into the camera and creating).
When it comes to creating your own content the biggest thing that holds people back (or they give pushback) is that they don’t have any ideas. I will kill that excuse in two seconds. Here is how you can come up with 200 ideas:
Go to AnswerThePublic
Type in your niche or anything related to your niche
Boom you have 200 things to create content around
Do not post still images and leave blank spaces in the video. It looks ugly and makes you look like a boomer trying out an iPhone for the first time. The only platform where still images are acceptable to post right now is Pinterest.
I know a couple of anons in completely unrelated niches (BowtiedCyclist - OnYourLeft) who have followed this exact strategy and it worked! Check out his IG page that he is building and follow a similar path to him. If it works for us it will work for you.
The best thing about video content is that it can be repurposed EVERYWHERE. If you make one video or plan on reposting, that video should go on every platform you are on. The more platforms you are on the better because it just gives more people an opportunity to run into what you are trying to sell or what you are posting on the internet.
Pinterest
Pinterest is my new favorite platform and I will scream from the top of the mountain that you should be here probably more than anyone else on this side of Twitter.
It is free traffic. It is evergreen. And if I can get this kind of results in less than three months in a niche that is not “supposed” to do well on it, you may be sitting on a field mind of traffic.
I was (and am) so excited about this platform because people are starting to trickle in from here onto my website. If you sell anything to women, this platform is for you (or do home decor, design, male clothing). Here is what you should do on Pinterest:
Post the video content that you have on here linking to posts that are relevant to your site.
Create still Images (below) with big text giving people a reason to read more and get more outbound clicks (use this for IG stories too)
Follow and comment on other people’s accounts to show that you are a real business and someone real is behind the posting
Post everything you can as many times as you can for 2 months and you will grow
Examples:
Leveraging Hashtags, Trends, Sounds, and Other Accounts
Okay. Now, that you have followed the recipe and gained a little bit of clout on the web it is time to use it to your advantage.
You should be posting to your story regularly (with still images above) but now you could even reach out to influencers in your space and start to do a bit of influencer marketing. For me, I just released the first iteration of rash guards and BJJ shorts, so I have been using the following that I have to get in touch with other creators in my space who would be interested in wearing my stuff.
People are more likely to answer you when you have a sizeable following backing the request.
With that being said, you need to connect and show support to others in your niche pretty much from day one. When you do this and you grow to a size that “matters” you now have other powerful allies in the same niche as you who would be willing to collaborate and share the traffic they have to boost engagement. This is a win-win scenario.
When I have two other accounts sending me collab posts pretty much daily it just lowers the burden on me to have to constantly find the content and caption it, someone else is doing it for me!
Let’s look at a completely different niche for an example of powerful combinations that can occur.
Kettlebell Kings has a massive following on IG and from the looks of it, they don’t even create the content!!! Content creators do and then just send the collab post to the company and do the work for them.
Are they getting paid for this, more than likely not. They are just affiliates with the following. They both benefit in this situation, Kettlebell kings don’t have to stress about content and get their brand name out to more people and the creator gets to be associated with a big dog in the space.
Find allies early on and do collaborated posts with them as frequently as you can. It keeps your timeline fresh, feeds your audience more content, and is a win-win situation for all parties involved.
Volume is the Name of the Game (Especially for Instagram)
In the beginning, do not stress about analytics, you can worry about that when you are big enough to have something to worry about. You need to will and force your way to grow on this platform by just putting out lots of stuff.
Test things. Each post that you have gives you direct feedback if what you are trying to do is striking a cord in your audience or not.
Winning on social media to me is all about getting really clear about what your audience is specifically doing on the platform you are posting on. The more clear you are about that the easier it is for you to feed them what they are telling you they want. For the creative types, the more you post the closer you get to striking that cord. Use tools like answering the public to come up with the initial idea and spin it in a way that gets people to pay attention.
Always remember that controversy or getting people to comment and engage will always work out in your favor. So if you see a video doing numbers, use the repost strategy to create a conversation with the audience you are building.
I think I covered enough for this time around and want to again thank Tetra for everything these past 18 months. Without the Bowtied community, I would probably still be hating life and not working towards a better future. Here are the previous posts if you want to catch up on my lore:
I mentioned it briefly but I did just drop athletic apparel (rashguards and no-gi shorts) on my website that can be found at the shop in Pre-order now.
If you train Brazilian jiu-jitsu (or just want to support) consider checking us out! I think the gear looks incredible. I have many more designs that I plan on launching based on the initial success of this first iteration so the support would go directly back into the business. If you can’t, it would mean the world if you could retweet or follow me on Twitter where I am most accessible (BowtiedGrappler).
Grapplers Graveyard is morphing in 2024 and will start covering more current events that are happening in the BJJ and MMA space, so feel free to follow our business page if you want to stay up to date with that (Grapplers Graveyard Twitter).
Great post!
Great post Grappler.