How I gained over 34K organic and engaged social media followers in less than one year for my startup and how you can do it too (Part 1)!

Hello all! I've posted to entrepreneur in the past and have always receive lots and lots of questions about what I did and how I did it, so here it goes. I apologize for the very informal formatting! These are just coming out from the top of my head.

A small bit about our Los Angeles based company and myself: I operate and own The Parks Apparel - an outdoor lifestyle brand that sells lifestyle clothing and accessories. I began The Parks with 2 other investors (aka friends who for some reason trusted me) with less than $6K in cash. I am the only full-time employee and I run virtually every aspect of the company. I launched our instagram @theparksapparel in February of 2016, and our website www.theparksapparel.com officially launched on July 21st of 2016 and has been doing much better than anticipated ever since! We now grow about 1,100 followers weekly.

Now onto why you're reading this: how we reached over 34K organic and engaged followers on Instagram in under 7 months (and how you can too!).

First question: Why Instagram? Instagram is free visual marketing. Since we are an apparel business, it's crazy important that visually we sell ourself to consumers and other businesses. Twitter isn't as much use to us as it considered a "dying" platform whereas Instagram and Snapchat are growing. Moreover, the twitter demographic isn't necessarily our market. If you've done your research and you know a large share of your market can be found on Instagram, read on! Otherwise, the rest of the following info may not be of much use to yo.

So you know that you want to build your social media following. But why does it matter how many followers you have? Conversion, reputation and retention. Many brands don't bother with their social media, but if your sole platform of selling is online, you better bet that your social media is arguably the most important aspect of your company. How else will anyone know who you are? By building a social media following, others can get a solid understanding of company reputation and credibility.

"So can I just buy a butt load of followers and call it a day?" Absolutely not. We've seen so many brands do this but more followers does not equate to more purchases or more reputation. When a brand has over 50K followers averaging 600 likes and 4 comments a photo, the math just doesn't add up. Go see for yourself: if you're following any brands on Instagram, chances are a large majority of their followers were purchased. A solid engagement ratio for brands is about 5-15% likes per photo of total follower amount (if you're a half naked female Instagram model, the numbers are significantly larger). Comments are a bit trickier, but we've found that about .5 - 1 comment per 1k followers is about right. Obviously, these numbers fluctuate depending on the content.

The point is that you can't just buy a ton of followers and expect buyers. You may be able to fool other users, but you won't be fooling other brand influencers and other large brands (more on them later). They've had enough experience and analytics to know who is fake and who isn't and it will determine whether others will want to work with your company in the future.

So what did I do to build the initial following for The Parks Apparel? I forced all my friends and family and all of their friends and families family to follow our brand. We were able to amass a small following of over 2,000 in the first 3 months! But we needed more to build a reputation.

What did we post starting out? Apparel of other brands. We didn't have any of our own apparel at the time, so we just posted photos of apparel we loved and wanted to possibly emulate down the line. If you don't have any tangible products yet, post photos that relate directly to your brand and your audience.

Important Do not post potato photos (if you're not familiar with Reddit terms, it means it looks like the photo was taken through a potato - it looks like shit). Do not do this - ever! It degrades your quality as a brand. Instagram is a direct way for others to get a visual quality of your brand. Don't have a good camera? Hire someone to take good photos of your products. Don't want to hire someone? Then don't start a business. You won't sell anything taking iPhone photos of your blade-less knives.

What did we do? We hired Instagram influencers. Now here's where a lot of brands mess-up.... "Let's hire the hottest girls with the biggest butts and the biggest followings! She has like 500K followers and we can just pay her $5000 and be on our way!" Don't do this. Don't hire someone who's entire profile is COMPLETELY different from your products (unless you're selling butt pants). Start small. About our 5th or 6th month in, we hired 2 social media influencers who had amassed a small organic following of around 15k each (remember, organic means more likely to engage which means more likely to purchase). Their images were high quality, and their engagement ratio was prime. More importantly, they took photos that directly related to our market. What you pay them is up to you, but a good payment method to go off of is $100 per per post per 10k followers. However, it entirely depends on your agreement with them.

Speaking of influencers, this is where the whole organic thing gets really important. Sally the photographer/model with over 140K followers built her reputation over the course of 5 years. She knows it takes some damn hard work. She knows what it looks like to have 30K followers and 5,000 like and 50 comments per photo. If Sally sees your brand, Blade Less Knives Co. with 30K followers and 700 likes and 4 comments per photo, she won't trust you no matter how pretty your photos look. She won't want to work with you, and she won't reply to your DM (Don't buy followers!). Same thing goes for brands - they'll know if your followers are real or not, and they'll refuse to participate on a promotion or crossover with you. Speaking of promotions....

Giveaways. Giveaways are a fantastic way to build engagement. Here is one thing that I don't recommend doing: a giveaway of an item everyone wants. We ended up doing a giveaway about our 4th or 5 month in with a GoPro Hero 4 Session. "But if everyones wants it, won't I gain a massive amount of real follower?" Yes you will - and then you will immediately lose them once the giveaway is over. Yes our market is outdoor lifestyle apparel, but everyone and their grandmas want a free GoPro. We'll lost probably 60% of our new followers from this giveaway. The value and payoff just isn't there. If you do ending up doing a giveaway, schedule them out and do 1 or 2 a month. This entices others to stay tuned to your Instagram feed so they don't miss out on any new freebies coming their way. Another way to increase engagement rate is to partner with a brand with a similar market or even a competitor. Why a competitor? They have the same exact market as you, and while you may be "giving" the competitor customers, you're also gaining their customers. It evens out.

You can also partner with influencers to do giveaways. However, the payoff isn't quite as nice as partnering with another brand. A brands market is more focused to your market than an influencer is. Those following a competing brand are ready to make a purchase.

That's all for this post! Ask me anything in the comments below. If there is enough interest I can make a Part 2 in a separate post or in the comments section. It will be about how to make an engaging post and then some.