You Don't Need Followers to Grow on Social Media Anymore

The Game Has Changed

It's no longer about subscribers or followers. Let me explain what I mean by organic first, because people throw that word around. When you do organic gardening, you don't add pesticides. You don't add anything. It just grows naturally. Same with content. It's either organic, growing without any additional money or energy, or it's paid, where you're handing Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube money to push your content out there.

I'm going to recommend that you do not pay right now. Over the last couple of years I've helped grow several personal brands with a lot of capital behind them, and I still tell them to stay away from putting money behind their content. You want to let the algorithm get used to your content and help you find people organically, so it starts snowballing along the way.

Organic is the opportunity I want you focused on. It builds your personal brand, and it builds connections with people who can eventually become your customers.

The Attention World War Works in Your Favor

Right now the social media giants are in an all-out battle for attention. Call it a social media attention world war. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, they're all trying to keep people on their platforms as long as possible. And how do they do that? By letting you use the platform for free. If the product is free, you are the product. You're the person they're keeping on the platform so they can sell advertising opportunities to brands like you and me.

Here's the good news: you can use this battle for your own benefit. The algorithms have massively changed. They are no longer about how many followers you have. You can have zero followers. Zero. And still do massively well.

Here's one example. About two years ago, we posted a video for a client of mine for the first time. Zero followers on that Instagram profile. He got 1.7 million views. How do you explain that? Simple. The algorithm is no longer built on how many people follow you. It's built on your content and how many people could potentially be interested in it. It's an interest-based algorithm. Realistically, you could get more attention than competitors with 10 or 100 times your following. The playing field is level now.

Your Feed Is a Mirror

Want to know more about yourself? Like Michael Jackson said, stare at the man in the mirror. Open up your social media. Go to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, TikTok. What you see is who you are. It's a picture of what you're interested in.

The more you engage with a certain type of content, the more that content shows up on your feed. Sometimes it's so accurate it feels weird, like it was meant to be. That's how these algorithms are set up. Show me your social media and I'll show you exactly who you are.

This is why interest-based algorithms are the greatest opportunity we've seen. You can start from zero and grow quickly. But only if you create quality content, because these platforms will not show you to new audiences if your content isn't powerful, isn't valuable, isn't helping people.

What Quality Content Actually Requires

First, let me clarify what content even is. Videos, images, audio like podcasts, and text posts. Those are the four forms. Whether you create one of them or all of them, that's how you communicate to the world of social media organically.

Quality content comes down to three things. Number one, a desire to help others. This is where most people fail. They start doing content because they want to sell something, because they want people to convert. That doesn't work long term. You really have to want to help. Number two, value. Great content helps somebody improve a real problem they have. Do that long term and you will eventually win. Number three, a clear message. A lot of people use complicated words, things that are difficult to understand. Make it as clear and as simple as possible.

Find Your Superpower

Before you start creating content, figure out how you can help people with what you know. I call this your superpower. In my book Marketing Magic, on page 23, I talk about determining it. It's as simple as this: how can you make somebody else better? Whether you're a doctor, an artist, a gardener, a teacher, an accountant, whatever you do, you have a superpower.

Mine is teaching the basics of marketing and how to spot and jump on new opportunities. I've been doing it for a decade. My father's superpower was teaching people how to lose weight and improve their health in a simple way. He made 2,600 videos on that subject. Alex Hormozi's superpower is turning complex business problems into simple strategies for lead generation, sales, and scale. Grant Cardone, a friend and a client of my organization, helps people sell with confidence and think 10x bigger, and we help spread that brand to millions worldwide.

Your superpower guides how you provide value, and value breaks down into three categories: education, inspiration, entertainment. Some people mix them. My father was a great educator, but he was also a great entertainer. People got addicted to his content because his sense of humor was special. Gary Vaynerchuk, somebody I've gotten to meet and spend time with, is great at inspiration and a genius marketer. MrBeast puts a video out and gets 164 million views in the first month, and he's built massive success purely on his ability to entertain.

The Era of Organic Discovery

To prove how massive this opportunity still is, look at Louise Lee Holistic Skincare, a brand we brought from the Netherlands and partnered with. Ten years of history there, helping women with their skincare, but no presence in the USA yet. We put the founder, Debbie, on camera and started creating content. She has 10 subscribers. Ten. And her videos are getting thousands of views. 1,900 views, 1,100, 691, 158, 205. Every single video has more views than we have subscribers. Doesn't that tell you the opportunity is massive?

Now look at an established personal brand like Cesar Millan, the original Dog Whisperer. His Instagram got 40 million views in the last 30 days. And here's the mind-blowing part: 64.2 percent of all the content he's getting seen is being seen by non-followers. He has millions of followers, but his own followers only account for about 35 percent of his views. New audiences are being discovered by the millions every single day.

We are living in an era of organic discovery. The more you communicate with quality and quantity, consistently, the more visibility these platforms will hand you. It doesn't matter whether you have zero followers, ten, ten thousand, or ten million. Maybe this is the first time you've ever seen me. You might be a perfect example of organic opportunity, because I'm not paying to show you my video. I want to give you value and help you, and hopefully in the future you'll buy one of my services. That's exactly how this funnel works.

One thing to finish. If you talk to old people, you'll always find the same thing: they regret the things they didn't do, not the things they did. Don't be the person wishing you should have done this. Get started. Start building your organic content machine. Start helping others. Start impacting the world at scale. Build a legacy and you will see yourself expanding.