What you learn when you suddenly have 3 million followers
felt brave, might delete later x
This is an excerpt from our debut book ‘Make It Make Sense’ which is out now!!!! It would make my heart so fucking happy if you got yourself a copy, I love you so much x
What you learn when you suddenly have three million followers
By Lucy
Good attention is like a drug
When you start to go ‘viral,’ you can’t sleep. You’re up all night replying to every DM, comment, email. It’s an inexplicable rush that you’ll never be able to replicate. Once you get used to it, it will give you VERY unrealistic standards for each new post to live up to (only 10,000 likes? Flop). This amount of attention is not normal.
200k followers is the sweet spot
It will not always be good attention that you’re getting. I’ve found that any more than 200k followers and people start to see you as a corporation instead of a person. They can say whatever they want to you because you’re either Mark Zuckerberg or in a team of 50. You begin to lose the will to post.
You’ll feel like Hannah Montana
If you do it right, you get the best of both worlds, where your real life feels very separate from your online one. Now and again though, they merge, and it will buzz you out. Like the time I met a girl on a small walking tour in a foreign country who excitedly told me she read my newsletter. Or when I got chatting to the lady next to me on a long-haul flight who just had to send all her friends a selfie when she found out who I was. My favourite was probably the dad who screamed in my face that he and his daughter love me at a tiny beach in New Zealand after he asked me what I did for work. Who would’ve thought that a girl like me would double as a superstar?
The internet incentivises people to take things in the worst way possible
There’s a joke online that the quickest way to get an answer to any question is by posting something totally incorrect and letting the comments of people who ‘know better’ roll in. The only thing people love more than being right is when you’re wrong, and they get the chance to tell you so. A term I love, ‘the what about me effect,’ aptly describes how the algorithmic hell we live in has convinced us that everything we see should be perfectly tailored to us, which helps explain why people get so upset when something that doesn’t directly pertain to them finds a way onto their feeds (and thus they must comment on it, obviously). It’s helpful to remind yourself not to write with your worst critic in mind, or for an algorithm you might accidentally end up on.
The comments section never helped anything
Comments are great for validation and terrible for solving a historic and complex global crisis. Too much time in the comments section and you’ll get hives. Hot tip: imagine someone in your real life sitting and commenting nasty things under people’s photos and, when you realise you can’t, log off and get in touch with a real life person. It also helps to remember that platforms want interaction and algorithms are built to encourage it. The trolls are in some way just doing what they’ve been subconsciously told to do.
Unless you’re willing to sell yourself, you won’t be rich
It’s easy to see a big follower count and assume it equates to a stacked bank account. For some people, I’m sure that’s the case, but when you don’t show your face and aren’t willing to pose with random products, your online activities will be a lot less profitable. And when you do find an organisation that aligns with your interests, some people will still be angry that you’re ‘capitalising on’ the service you provide them for free every day. On the flip side, when you can’t provide that service because you’re working your café job, making money to keep your content free, people will be upset that you haven’t covered everything that happened that day . . .
. . . and so you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Best to get comfy with this ASAP. An idea that helped me come to terms with the fact that I’ll never please everyone is ‘stated preferences vs revealed preferences.’ For example, some people will be VERY vocal when you post about things that they don’t consider ‘news,’ yet every time you post a photo of Harry Styles it will perform at least five times better than any of your news-related posts. Don’t let this dictate how you operate, but keep it in the back of your mind.
You’ll be two degrees of separation from people you’ve obsessed over your entire life
Insane that being a fangirl online could lead to being trusted to host listening parties for Harry Styles or interview Lorde. Also insane to imagine that someone like Shania Twain is sitting in what I assume is a mansion somewhere, doing the same thing as all of us: sitting, scrolling and then hitting follow on some Kiwi chick’s Instagram account on a random Friday morning. Or her assistant did, at least.
In the same way that you don’t understand your best friend’s office job, people won’t really understand yours
A lot of people think they could do my job if they wanted to. They might suspect that my day consists of lounging around taking photos or getting dressed up for lunch with a skincare brand. That has never been my job. My job is great, but it also consists of news-induced screentime overload, pressure to always get everything right, trolls grumbling even when I do, inevitable hits to my self-confidence when I use the wrong word in a newsletter and hours of staying up trying to make sense of something complicated because someone in my DMs asked me to. I find it helpful to remind myself that if all those people really could handle doing this job, they’d be doing it.
People in your real life get realer
Your offline friends won’t send you screenshots of what people are saying about you online. They’ll remind you that no one you respect or trust in real life would say this to your face (or even think it) and that no matter how bad it gets, you’re safe.
No one wins when you ‘post through it’
At university we were taught that speed is everything in journalism, and that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. Turns out, that’s not a good formula when it comes to social media. You’ll really learn this when you watch a bunch of huge influencers (including the Prime Minister of Canada) share someone’s ‘viral’ infographic that you personally fact-checked and found to be untrue. As hard as it is to ignore all the people in your DMs telling you that your silence is violence, it’s ALWAYS better to make sure you’re using your platform responsibly.
Low-stakes errors are actually the best things ever
Making small mistakes in public is humbling, but every time I do it, I'm glad. Not only does it remind people that you’re human, but being in a constant feedback loop means you really learn to put your pride aside and admit when you’ve got something wrong. Also, making a low-stakes error is pretty good for engagement, because EVERYONE will let you know.
THE BEST PART OF ALL OF THIS IS YOU
You send messages of encouragement, leave a comment that something ‘changed your life’ and tell me you don’t give a shit if I take a break. You don’t care about engagement rates or typos or the ‘consistency of posts’. You vote in our polls and submit your stories and send me updates about what’s happening in your country. You don’t know what I look like, but you don’t care about that. You try to bring grace to the internet. You help me stay sane in the matrix.
Love this! I can't imagine I will ever have 3 million followers, however the principles remain the same for even 30 or 300 followers.
"When you start to go ‘viral,’ you can’t sleep." One of my post recently got a highly surprising number of views (as in the thousands) when my average is very far from that. I was already looking for a villa in the South of France only to be confronted with reality and my regular 20 views.