How To Build One Million Followers in 30 Days, with Brendan Kane.
Yuli Azarch | May 10, 2019 | No Comments on How To Build One Million Followers in 30 Days, with Brendan Kane.
“That experience changed my life and I hope it can have an impact on yours. If being an unknown digital strategist could generate this amount of followers, you can also do it. Applying the following digital strategies can help you build a large fan base with high levels of interaction.” — Brendan Kane
Brendan Kane is a known Growth Strategist, Keynote Speaker & Author.
He is a growth hacker for Fortune 500 corporations, brands, and celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Adrianna Lima. Brendan is currently advising Strike Social, which runs over 2500 Trueview campaigns each day for brands such as NBC, Netflix, Disney, and more.
What We Discussed About?
- Building One Million Followers From Scratch.
- Start by Creating Great Content.
- A 3-Step Process to Build an Audience.
- Using Social Media the Right Way.
- The Strategy and its ROI.
- Key Takeaways.
- Where to find Brendan?
Building One Million Followers From Scratch.
For the last 15 years, Brendan has been working on improving digital strategies for celebrities. He has learned how to optimize analytics, information, and paid media to help them achieve the massive growth they seek.
“I had a lot of success generating awareness through social engagement.”
According to Brendan, when he set out to reach a million followers on his own, he knew that the people he worked with before, had the advantage of being famous. But he wanted to experiment with what he had learned before, to build an audience for someone unknown. In other words, building an audience from scratch.
Experimenting and succeding in this way, he was able to gain credibility and help anyone who wanted to achieve their dreams. So he came up with the idea to try it with himself, generating 1,000,000 followers in 100 countries in 30 days.
“In June of 2017 I put into practice all the tools I had, and by July of that same year, I already had a million followers.”
Start by Creating Great Content.
An audience wants to engage with brands that have great content. According to Brendan, the best way is to start is to create a hypothesis and test it.
“Everything comes down to great content”.
Many people want to share messages massively on social networks to gain exposure for their brand, product or service. But considering that there are more than 60 billion messages that are uploaded every day only on mobile platforms, it is easy to understand that almost all content is lost among so much noise.
Brendan advises, to create content that your audience wants to engage with. Investigate the elements that make people want to like or share content and create a hypothesis about the type of content you can create. Identify a format or theme that will connect with your audience about a specific message. Then do low-cost tests and check your hypothesis.
A 3-Step Process to Build an Audience.
Brendan uses an agile 3-step process to produce and test content:
- Create a hypothesis (theme/story) that represents your story. A great way to start is by doing a competitive analysis. Search and look at accounts that are reaching your audience in a successful way. Then, reverse engineer the formats that are successful for them and improve those that are not.
- Go out and test. Use low-cost testing to pass it quickly and see if your hypothesis is true. Brandon’s ability to learn from the tests was the key to reaching a million fans. Take the time to understand the reason why some content works better than another. Brendan recommends being very specific with your tests. He tried hundreds of variations in the content and in the segmentation, to really learn how to optimize the performance of what to do. Do tests until you find a format or theme that really works for you.
- Analyze engagement. Study the reaction of your content. Investigate if the content format that you choose, connects with your audience.
“Generating a following on a high level is all about being able to test the content and understand what your intended audience needs. Not only to engage with your content but connect and share with other people”.
Using Social Media the Right Way.
It is about understanding the growth mechanisms of each platform. Facebook is a sharing community. You can grow on Facebook, by posting high-quality content and getting people to share it. You can actually go viral through your own account. On the other hand, Instagram is not about sharing.
The real growth strategy is to distribute content out to other mechanisms and drive traffic back. The same testing mechanism works differently on both platforms.
“In Facebook, one should focus on how to create content that is super shareable, while on Instagram on content that, when distributing it in other people’s account, will allow you to get your traffic back”
One of the benefits of using Facebook’s advertising platform is the level of segmentation it gives you to find your ideal consumer. When creating your ads, segment your audience by gender, age, location, interests, lifestyle (singles, married, work, income, and products or brands they already like) and choose to have your ads reach you as well as the fans of your competition.
Each business should determine their core and general business objectives first. From there, one can set the key performance indicators. After that, is when one can start setting benchmarks that will guide the business matrix. For Brandon, it is all about getting followers, so for him is an engagement matrix.
The Strategy and its ROI.
“Anyone can build a one million followers account, but it does not mean that everyone should”
The need to build a larger community of followers depends on the objective of your business. Not all business will reach their objectives with more followers. Again, it all comes to know your business core objectives and work towards the achievement of the key indicators.
Achieving a million followers has opened the doors for him to give lectures, but that is not something that everyone should do. Gaining followers requires an investment of time and money. How quickly your fan base grows, depends on the way you invest your energy.
The success around digital and social media is learning the right mind-shift. Learning how to get out of how much the strategy costs, to get to a place where you are making something for you. The key is to start thinking about the ROI of the strategy instead of the cost. What is the ROI and how far can you scale it?
To determine how much you need to invest, analyze the benefits that you want to get with that community of fans (the ROI). Sometimes that ROI has nothing to do with money, but with validation or credibility that opens doors or takes you somewhere. Ask yourself how many followers you really need and invest what you need to reach those goals.
Reaching a million followers has opened the doors for Brandon, to write his book and give lectures.
He went to generate one million followers with a strategy in mind: to be able to close the deal, to publish his book, and talk around the world. He used the book as a foundational tool to build his business brand.”
“Just having followers is nothing, Knowing how to differentiate yourself and how to maximize the potential of having that audience to your advantage is your real ROI”.
Key Takeaways.
The best place to start is to make a list of people that are reaching your audience and study what are they doing. See what is working for them and what is not. Focus on people with 50,000 to 100,000 followers first and look at their content, themes, and strategies. Start using them as a guideline.
Then, test and learn how that content is working with your audience, so you can know what content works best for your brand. You need content to get people to engage with your business and to get people to share your content.
Using viral content can be used as a strategy but it is a costly one. Also, when you have built your audience you need to be able to maintain it. That can only be done by pushing solid content.
Show Notes
One Million Followers Workshop.
Reverse Engineering Social Media.
Thanks, Brendan Kane!
To find more about Brendan, go to his Facebook account (BrendanJamesKane), his Instagram (@brendankane), his One Million Followers book website, or learn more about him through his LinkedIn account (brendanjkane).
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