Katie McManus built a new account to 500 followers in 24 hours by posting two videos about running for her town's select board. She geotagged her hometown, explained how local office works in plain language, and asked people to follow. Her business account took seven months to hit 500 followers because the audience and ask were different.
Questions this video answers
About 500 new followers in roughly 24 hours after posting two videos.
March 5, 2025.
About 7 months to reach 500 followers and about 10 months to reach 1,000 followers.
Chapters
I got 500 new followers in 24 hours with two videos on a brand new account. And here's how. This is a screenshot of the account. The morning after I posted these two videos, I hit 500 followers with just these two videos up. And I just want to say this is why we don't compare our journey to other people's because this is not a business account. This is an account that I am using to do my campaign for my Town select board on. Okay? So I'm not selling anything on here. I'm not trying to convince anyone to buy from me. It is a completely different type of account from my business account. There are three things that make that account really easy to get followers for. One is I'm geotagging. So I'm tagging my hometown where I'm looking for people to vote for me. And so that makes it really easy for people to see the content and see me talking about the town that they live in and be like, cool. I'm interested in this because I live here. The second thing that I'm doing is I'm making it more about the View viewer, right? So I'm showcasing all the behind the scenes steps of running for Office and saying, hey, listen, I'm going to demystify all of this. So if you've ever thought about running for office, you can stop being intimidated by it because I'm going to go through it first. Okay, I'm going to show you that if I can do it, you can do it too. The third thing, I'm not selling anything. My biggest ask from that account is follow me, join the adventure. You know, ask questions. If you've ever thought about Running for Office, which is so different from accounts like this where I am showcasing my work, my expertise and inviting people to, to book a sales call and spend a lot of money to work with me. So for example, this account, this is the account that I use to run my business strategy company. This account, it took me about seven months, I think, to get to 500 followers. It took 10 months for me to hit a thousand, which is by the way the threshold for you to be allowed to have a link in bio and to be able to go live. So let's talk about this. If you're a small business owner and you're like me and you work with clients like across the country or like me from Australia to Saudi Arabia, it's going to be really hard for you to utilize things like geotagging because you can't geotag everywhere, right? So that makes it really hard for you to get in front of people who will be interested in following you by virtue of the fact that you are where they are. Right. The other thing to think about is that when you're talking about your business, yeah, you're absolutely talking to your ideal clients out there and you're making your video about them. However, not everyone is going to be your ideal client. Right. So your video is going to get pushed to a lot of people, but it's not going to resonate with a lot of people. Okay. So you're going to get a lot less engagement and fewer follows per video than you would for something that's kind of like a very easy crowd pleaser. We happen to live in the same place, blah, blah, blah. And number three, the thing to remember when you're posting for your business account is you are asking people to make a very serious decision about where they're going to spend their money. You're asking them to spend their money with you. All right? That is a money much higher threshold to get people on board with you. All right? So again, do not try to compare your social media journey with the social media successes that you're seeing out there online. Because chances are they are not apples to apples. They're probably closer to like Camels and refrigerators. They can both hold a lot of water inside, but the similarities pretty much end there. I'm Katie, your practical business strategist and I help new business owners leave their corporate 9 to 5 and replace their 6 figure income like and follow for more content like this.
