Episode 011 of the "Rise of the Young" podcast (host Casey Adams) features social media growth strategist Zach Wenger explaining how he grew a Snapchat presence to ~1,000,000 daily views. Key points: Wenger began growing Snapchat >1 year before the interview, stalled at ~100,000 viewers for several months, then used three core growth approaches—encouraging viewers to share posts, cross-promoting on other social platforms, and maintaining high-quality, frequent content—to scale to a million views. He reports organic growth (no paid Snapchat ads), using shoutout-for-shoutout exchanges with other niche pages up to ~600k, driving traffic (example: 7,000 visitors to a quiz site in one push), and operating a niche comedy account (No Chill Snap). He emphasizes consistency, knowing your posting capacity, and owning content creation rather than outsourcing.
Questions this episode answers
Over a year before the interview.
About four to five months.
About 200,000 to 300,000 additional viewers per month.
7,000 people.
No Chill Snap (a viral comedy page).
Chapters
Legacy of Monsters an Apple Original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th.
This place.
It's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.
Oh my God.
Go.
Go, Go.
Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV. Plus.
This episode is brought to you by Michigan Economic Development Corporation. In Michigan, you can have both a rewarding career and a quality lifestyle. With plentiful career opportunities in world changing innovating industries, from electric vehicles to clean energy to biotech, with room for advancement no matter where you are in your career. Plus, Michigan offers a welcoming, beautiful, affordable and inclusive community for all. Live your best life you can in Michigan. Visit themichiganlife.org.
This is the Rise of the Young podcast, bringing you insights from the most innovative entrepreneurs and influencers of this era. Hosted by 17 year old entrepreneur, author.
Public speaker and branding expert, Casey Adams.
Now let's get right into the show.
All right everyone, what's going on?
Casey Adams here.
Welcome to the Rise of the Young podcast. On episode 11 today we have Zach Wenger and we're going to be talking about how he was able to grow his Snapchat following to a million views a day. And we're going to be giving insights about how you can potentially do the same as well as how you can grow your Snapchat. So Zach, first off, for the people listening that don't know who you are, if you can kind of explain yourself, tell them who you are as well as what got you started on Snapchat, right?
So first of all, thank you for having me. Casey, you're killing it right now and sooner or later you're going to be number one on podcasts. You know, you will be.
Alright.
So pretty much, yeah, I'm a social media growth strategist and I do it on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. But right now I'm specializing in Snapchat and yeah, I'm at a million views and pretty much Snapchat is the most engaging site. And in terms of conversions, I found the most success with Snapchat. So I wanted to focus on it and I found a few growth tips that can skyrocket your talent.
So yeah, that's awesome. And I'm really sure everyone's excited listening right now because it's funny because for me, man, like when I hear a million views on Snapdragon, that's just insane. I know, like a million views on YouTube, but there's tons of People who do that. But like Snapchat, man, I'm super excited to number one here for myself as well as the listeners. It's gonna be super fun. So moving forward, man. So this is my first question, and it is when. When did you start growing your Snapchat? And how long did it take to reach a million views a day? Right.
So pretty much I started over a year ago, so it's been a while. And at the start, I was tempting to quit just because of I was at a hundred thousand viewers for about four, four or five months and it wouldn't grow. And I was confused. I didn't know what to do because nobody at this time was big on Snapchat or even 100k big. So I was tempted to quit, but I found three pretty much ways to grow, and that's helped me grow all the way to a million. And now it seems I'm growing around 200 to 300,000 viewers a month, which is.
Wow.
Yeah, I think it's.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's amazing, man.
Like you said, you have three tips to kind of getting more viewers. I know there's a lot of people listening that they're. Whether it be trying to grow their personal brand or just get more people watching their Snapchat. So what would you say? Those are the. What are the three tips that you could give someone to actually start getting Snapchat viewers onto their page? Right.
So pretty much the first one and the most important one is getting your post to be shared with friends. And pretty much that's like a retweet on Twitter, a share on Facebook, but this is the Snapchat form. So pretty much if you have a post that you want to go viral, you got to make sure you put in it that, you know, share this with your friends, and you got to kind of educate them. So what I have learned to do is on some of my posts that I know will do well, I put in the caption, hold down this video and share it with your friends. Because on Snapchat, what you have to do is hold on to the Snapchat. And the bottom right, there's an arrow. And with that, you can choose all your friends. You can choose whatever you want, but you have your whole friends list to share it with. And that right there is like a retweet that's like a share. So that's Snapchat's form of growth, pretty much.
Okay.
And the second one pretty much is posting your account on your other social media site. So you got to get your friends into it in the beginning. So you can't just start from zero and hope to grow. You gotta get your friends into it first. So what I say, if you have a 400 follower Twitter with all your friends on it, you got to post on your Twitter, check out my Snapchat, put your link in, you got to start that. You got to tell your business friends and maybe you guys can connect in other ways. You know, there's plenty of ways to do it that way. And the third way is high quality post. Pretty much first of all, I mean quality in terms of a nice camera because Snapchat's pretty much all, it's all recording. So make sure you're not recording on a, you know, you know, make sure you're recording on an iPhone or something similar, something with a good quality and Yep, also quality meaning, you know, making sure your posts are entertaining, exciting, anything in that form, you know.
Yep, for sure. So with like the whole Snapchat in a way, I know that when we talk before this that you have a niche page on Snapchat. And for me, that's completely something new. I haven't really came across a lot of niche pages because Snapchat isn't like a Instagram or a YouTube where you can just like look at all these different pages. So regarding that, for the people listening, what are the benefits of having a niche page? And, and then for the people that really don't know what a niche page is, what kind of stuff do you post on your Snapchat page that's exciting, that catches interest so that people could listening right now could potentially do the same. Right.
So my niche page right now is no Chill Snap. And it's pretty much just a viral comedy page. Stuff you'd stuff videos you'd find funny that you'd want to share with your friends. That's why I thought that'd be the perfect idea to grow one of these because that's just instant growth right there. And the benefits of having a page like this is if you aren't as comfortable in front of the camera as other people. Because personally, me, I'm not the type to be in front of a camera and just shine. That's not really my, that's not my. Maybe you, Casey, you can probably pull it off. But me personally, I don't think I could be in front of the camera and take over and really catch the audience's eye. But that's why I thought a niche page would be perfect. I've been doing it actually. I'VE been growing these pastes since the seventh grade and it's been a while. So I pretty much, yeah, for me it's all about, I guess, confidence. If you have the confidence to grow a personal page and you have the confidence that your content is quality, I'd say go for it. But for people like me, if you guys aren't as uncomfortable in front of the camera, I say grow a new space. And the benefits of another benefit is companies, because you can show your post a lot easier because everyone knows what you're going to be posting. A funny video or whatever your niche is. If it's a cooking, if it's a cooking Snapchat show, you know what you're going to post. The personals, you could be doing anything. You know, you could be walking outside, you could be going to school, but you have a targeted niche. You're posting every single time, which you could target directly to a brand or anything. Pretty much.
Okay, perfect, man. Yeah. So regarding that, I know that you just touched on like catching companies eyes as well as that sort of thing. So when it comes to the actual, the business of having a page that gets a million views a day on Snapchat, what are some of the things that you've been able to do with that page as well as when it comes to driving traffic, what are the benefits that you've had regarding that aspect?
Right. So actually this happened about a week ago and there is this quiz page. My friend Adorian owns it and pretty much I drove 7,000 people to the site all at once. So I had 7,000 people just sitting on that site. This is what I'm trying to say about Snapchat traffic. It's different than other traffic. It's more engaging and it's a lot easier. It's more personal because what also with Snapchat, which I love, is that it's a one on one basis. So say if you were going to ask a question on any social media site, you'll get the most responses. On Snapchat, for example, I could even ask what's your favorite social media site on Facebook you're going to comment, it's going to be shown to the masses, Twitter to the masses, Instagram to the masses. But Snapchat, it goes straight to you.
And people I think have a more.
Confident, are more confident in telling you what they're into, you know.
Oh yeah, for sure, man, totally. And that's something one of my mentors, Ty Lopez, always talks about is Snapchat gives him like a personal way to reach his audience. Because it's not like any other social media site regarding, like, you're posting on your feed for thousands of people to just like it, comment on it, and they have like that public kind of thing going on and that regarding Snapchat, you can kind of show more behind the scenes, it can be more personal. So I totally agree with you on that. So regarding kind of having a page that's a million viewers on Snapchat, what would be the most critical aspect of someone growing their Snapchat? From the start, they just got the app, they're just posting stuff for a theme page. What's like the bare minimum? Like what, what should they be doing today once they finish this podcast and how do they go about it?
Right. So I say pretty much have a plan on what account you want to grow. And you have to make sure that you know it's going to grow. You have to, you have to also enjoy the page. You have to know that you can post consistently and you won't get bored. That's another. That's a huge thing, consistency and enjoying your page. You got to make sure that you're post because if you post once a day, that video can only get shared however many times. If you post five times a day. I told you earlier, Casey, the more you post, the better opportunity a post is to go viral and to get shared around. What I learned from my audience is that I actually asked the question, I said, how many times do you guys want me posting? And I kind of said like 0 to 5, 5 to 10, 10, 20. Just give me a number. And most responses were saying, as many as you can. We love your video. So I guess the main thing I'm trying to say here is consistency. That's probably the one thing you need to take away from this, you guys. First of all, you can't quit on it if it's not working, you can't quit. You got to just keep grinding through it and pretty much know, know your limit and how much you can post a day. Because I don't burn out the first day. You know, have a comfortable number you're comfortable doing with every single day and work on it that way.
For sure, for sure. That's. That's fire. So then also I know that a lot of people, like, when you think about a million views on Snapchat, that's just like, it's a huge number that, like people can't even fathom. So when it comes to actually building up to that, like, was there anything that Whether it be you had to pay for promotions to start growing that. Was there any, like money spent to grow it that the audience know about? Like, hey, these paid advertising work best. Or was it just something that you've been able to grow 100% organically?
Yes. Well, actually I have not thrown a dime into Snapchat. What I've done is I've done shout outs with other big pages. So if I own. Usually what we do is. So I'll give you an example. Let's just say we have my account and we have another comedy page. We say want to exchange shout outs and we leave an amount of views you want up. So say shout out for shout out. Do you want to leave it up for 100,000 views? And we have our own little setup, we have our own shout out video that will perform well on Snapchat. You can say swipe up if you guys love comedy or something in that nature. And pretty much with that shout out now their followers see my channel and their followers, you know, vice versa. So pretty much shout out. Yeah, it's what I was doing until around 600,000 viewers. So around 100,000 to 600,000. It was straight shout out for shout out with other big pages, which didn't cost me anything.
Okay.
From 600,000 to a million. It was straight organic. It was knowing what to post and knowing what would get straight around. Because content is key. Also because I also I hired a content creator when I was at 100k, hoping that it would take the workload off to me. But what I've noticed is the content stuck. And with that I was not growing anything. And once I pretty much fired him and just started it myself, I knew what would grow best. And so I would say from the start, you do what you think is best. Don't hire someone to do content for you. That's probably a big thing also.
Okay, cool. And then regarding finding these other pages to do shoutout or shoutout with, how did you go about finding these other pages that were. Whether that be the same size as yours, getting the same amount of viewers, or even the huge pages, where would you find these pages so that the listeners can get that value?
Yeah, this is actually like the hardest part of Snapchat because Snapchat does not go in detail of adding an email to your bio or anything. So that's probably one of the hardest things to do. But I'm working on right now creating a website of a whole list of Snapchat pages so anyone can easily just contact them that's what I'm working on currently. But right now this is like almost impossible to do because Snapchat does not allow that feature, which I have no idea what they do. Yeah, for sure.
And that kind of adds like the secrecy of like the private sort of thing. But you have that whole entire website being built. So when it comes to that, for the people listening, where something that they could, whether it be follow you or what kind of information you want to give them regarding, like figuring out and getting more information on that site. So when it does come out, they could go to it.
Yeah. So pretty much I'd be posting it on my social media platform. So. Okay. Yeah, on Instagram I have at sign and yeah, S I D N and Twitter is at Rehearse. And I also have a website if you guys want to check it out. It's viralbirth.net and there's a contact form we can email that way if you guys are more comfortable that way than just DMing me on Twitter or messaging me on Instagram. So either of those three options work.
Yeah, I definitely think I totally agree with you regarding, like, finding those big accounts. That's not the most hard part because I even know for me, like Snapchat, I'm on it all the time. But it's like you don't have that Explorer page where it's like they give you people to follow. So that's definitely cool that you'll be building that. And I definitely want the listener that are listening right now, if you want to know more about what Zach has going on with Snapchat, definitely whether you message him on Instagram, it's at s I g n as well as if you can DM me on Instagram acadams1 and you can say, hey, I want to know more about the Snapchat information and then I'll be able to send that to you. So that being said, Zach, I really appreciate you coming on. I just think it's so cool because I've literally never met someone that gets a million viewers on Snapchat. And regarding the niche pages, I've seen a ton on Instagram, a ton on Twitter, but it's definitely super cool to see what you got going on on Snapchat. So I really appreciate it.
Yeah, this is awesome. Thank you so much.
Absolutely, man. Yeah, to all the listeners, I really appreciate. Appreciate you listening right now. Make sure you subscribe to the Rise of the Young podcast. And that being said, I will see you on the next episode.
Peace Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it. On November 17th.
This place.
It's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise. Monarch Legacy of Monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV Plus.
