PERSONAL BRANDING: HOW I GREW MY FOLLOWERS

I previously shared some practical strategies on how to grow your followers if you're a business. In this post today, I'll speak on growing your own personal numbers. As much as we want to disregard this, the number attached to your profile is an important statistics used to measure your scope of engagement. This specifically affects many digital influencers and bloggers. A question that I get asked a lot is how I can grow my followers on my Instagram. Till today, the topic on "growing your followers" still a big discussion amongst many — potential clients, aspiring digital influencers and bloggers and brands. I'll share a few strategic pointers on how you can achieve organic increase in number of followers and continue to keep your followers engaged.

Be authentic and be different

Like all famous brands, always look at your own personality as your strongest selling point. Who are you? What defines you? What are you strongest at? What makes you different? There are plenty of digital influencers, bloggers, social media influencers these days so being unique is a plus point. Find out what you're good at and set yourself apart from another person. Would it be travelling? What about beauty? How about food? Find your own voice and don't be afraid to show it. A way to find out about this is to ask your friends what they think of you and what do they categorize you as. This way, you genuinely find out what the public thinks of you as a brand. 

Know your strongest social media channel

With a large number of platforms available like Youtube, Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and Instagram — you need to know what works for you. Different personalities suit different platforms, a strong example is how a vlogger will make Youtube their main social media channel while Instagram will be their secondary social media channel. Michelle Phan's strongest social media channel is through her Youtube in which she has 8.9 million subscribers while her Instagram only has 2.1 million followers. Knowing your strongest platform will help you to focus your efforts in helping you to streamline the time you put into producing great content. I tend to focus on producing great imageries on my Instagram and creating original, insightful content on my website.

Picture credits: Ketnipz

Establish genuine partnerships

Stay true to yourself and work together with brands that will grow with you. Establishing a long-term relationship with brands you genuinely love will help you carve out an authentic voice. When you develop such partnerships with brands, you tend to cross promote easily. My advice is to look pass the short-term monetary rewards and think about the bigger picture. I started my journey into being a digital influencer by paying for brands that I genuinely love. Brands like Shop at Velvet and Superga have helped me in growing my followers tremendously. I have been lucky enough to have carved out a genuine partnership with brands who have appreciate your creative vision. 

Work really hard

The misconception about growing your followers is that it is an easy job. To continue to grow and keep your followers highly engaged, you have to work really hard. Producing great content (not only great looking pictures), maintaining a conversation with your followers and keeping at it is not as easy as it looks. Working in a visually pleasing environment, people tend to forget that a lot of hard work in involved behind the pretty photos. My advice is, if you're serious in growing your followers — work really hard, be passionate in it and keep going at it. 

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How did you grow your followers? Are there any ways that you've tried and think that is effective? Comment below and let me know!

* Please note that the above post is solely based on my personal opinion and is solely for the purpose of discussion.