I remember getting my book deal for Big Thrift Energy and feeling incredibly overwhelmed at the thought of having to market it once it hit stores. At the time, I had 5,000 Instagram followers, no presence on any other platforms, and essentially zero name recognition.
So, I set a goal for myself: 10,000 Instagram followers by August 2022.
That seemed like a huge amount at the time, so when I hit my goal, I was elated.
I set goals for myself constantly, in every part of my life, because that way I have something I am working toward. Once I reach them, I push back the goalposts!
Cut to October 2026, and I have more than one million followers across Instagram and Facebook alone.
It was not a straight line. There were many ebbs and flows. In fact, I sat at 100,000 for a full year, and at one point I was losing followers rather than gaining any. But more recently, I have been pretty nose-to-the-grindstone serious about honing my content and leveraging every tool available to ensure my success.
Instagram is extremely limited in how far back they let you look at your analytics, but I have charted my following sporadically over the years, so I asked Claude to create this loose chart of how my following has grown since September 2019, when I had 3,807 followers. I began really focusing on my following five years ago, but the biggest jumps for me happened in the last three years.
My growth on Instagram wasn’t because I hired a consultant or social media manager (I currently manage all my own content and brand deals), bought followers, or paid for ads. It was the result of doing lots of research and constantly analyzing my own analytics.
A big part of my growth happened in the last year, when a series of Reels netted me tens of thousands of followers each. Were those Reels viral? Not necessarily. They were valuable.
And here’s the thing I really want to nail down because I think this is the biggest misconception about social media in 2026:
Going viral won't lead to more followers.
I’m going to get into what actually moved the needle for me, along with:
the exact posts that brought in 20,000+ followers apiece
the type of content that doesn’t perform for me
what a million followers actually turned into for me, in terms of brand deals and monetization