Social Media is something that I have no formal education in, but something I have first hand experience of and have thought about a fair amount over the last five years. This post is largely focused on Instagram, as that’s what I have the most experience with as well as being the most variable of the main platforms.

This post end up longer than I initially intended (and it doesn’t even feel like I went into enough depth!) so I’ll give you a brief summary here and you can read on if you want to expand on those ideas.

Essentially, you grow an account rapidly by making the best possible content you can of whatever form is most favoured by the algorithms at that particular moment. You shouldn’t use follower number as the main measure of success though, as not all followers are equal.

More = Better?

It’s very easy to think, especially if you’re just getting started, that more followers will always be better. In general that’s not too far from the truth. Having more followers can mean more reach, more visibility, and ultimately translate to more followers.

The real question is whether you benefit more from broad visibility or if you really want to get your content in front of a specific audience.

If you have a YouTube channel with monetised satisfying content, then there is a benefit from getting your videos seen by as many people as possible even if none of them click through to view your website.

If you make your money from selling a niche artisanal product, then you really want an increase in views to translate into more sales. Being seen more broadly has very little value if none of the viewers are your customers. In fact, it can be detrimental to focus on content with the broadest appeal if those followers don’t engage with content more specific to the work you sell. An example of this would be if a potter noticed that short videos of a certain process were the most likely to go viral on Instagram and started posting nothing else. This could be a great way to gain followers, but the followers would expect that type of content and that could become a problem.

A different version of this can be seen when a tiny YouTube channel has a single video go viral on a huge site like Reddit. A channel with 500 engaged followers can gain 50k new followers off the back of one video doing well on Reddit or being shown on a much larger YouTube channel, but those followers often won’t watch any other videos. A channel with 500 subscribers who are all active does much better than a channel with 50500 subscribers but only 500 active.

The reason it’s a problem to have a larger following that isn’t engaging with your work is:

The Algorithm(s)

There isn’t actually one algorithm powering Instagram, there are dozens of smaller algorithms that feed into the success or failure of a given post.

This means there are many different variables that factor into it (such as time of posting, keywords/hashtags, type of content, etc), but by far the most impactful for the success of a post is the way that people interact with it. Social media platforms want to judge how interesting a piece of content is, so they can show viewers the best content (or rather, content most likely to elicit a higher emotional response). The way they do this is quite simple really, they watch the behaviour of the first few people to see it.

Different platforms will handle the specifics of this in different ways, but the idea is the same. If the first people respond well (liking, commenting, saving, watching for longer, sharing, etc) then the content is deemed to be higher quality and will be shown to more of your followers and some people who aren’t following. If those people respond well too, then it gets an even broader audience, and will go viral if the response is positive enough.

The flipside of this is that if you post something those first few followers aren’t interested in, it won’t get shown to many others. This can make it difficult to change the content type/subject later on, if you build a following from a single type of content that doesn’t align perfectly with what you want your audience to engage with. This is where chasing a higher follower count above all else could be a bad idea. Having more followers but having a harder time reaching your target audience is a step backwards.

All that being said, having a larger following of people who are genuinely interested is always a good thing. Even if someone isn’t in a position to buy a piece right now, if they enjoy and engage with the posts that drive sales then they’ll help get the posts seen by people who do want to buy it.

So, how do you get more followers?

Content

This is going to be somewhat unique to you (how and what you make, what you want to share, etc) but at the end of the day the platforms are all built around content of some form and this is the most important thing to get right.

One vital thing to understand is that the content is a separate artform to the work you make. You can be an amazing potter with terrible content or a terrible potter with amazing content, the latter will have far more success online. It’s a separate skill that takes practice and time to develop.

Types

There are a range of types of content you could be producing. On some platforms it’s a much smaller decision as they’re more limited in options, but on Instagram there are many distinct types.

Images - These used to be limited to photographic stills, but increasingly there’s an audience for text based infographic posts
Grid Videos - Square(ish, they’re making strange changes to that at the moment) and under 60s long
IGTV Videos - These are technically rolled into the Grid Videos now, but Instagram still treats them differently. Portrait/landscape and longer than 60s.
Reel Videos - Portrait, under 60s. Allows for added music and more editing than Grid Videos.
Stories - Only last 24hrs, but can be saved afterwards.

Essentially, Instagram is trying to be everything at once. Reels are their response to TikTok and IGTV was their response to YouTube. This is useful in a lot of ways, as content can easily be reposted or repurposed over multiple social media channels.

You don’t need to make all of these types of content. There are advantages to being comfortable making a range of types, but you can stick to one type and do well.

Images

There are a couple of different kinds of image post you could make, especially after the relatively recent shift on Instagram towards infographics. There are pictures of finished work or work in progress, pictures of parts of the process or tools used for it, pictures of sketches or plans, pictures of the studio space, and personal pictures unrelated to your work. Then there are infographic images, which have always been popular on Pinterest but now do well on Instagram. You don’t need to do all of these kinds of image, and I actually think it would be detrimental to have a balanced mix of them. I personally focus mainly on the pictures of finished work and use videos for the processes (more on that below), but you might find a different combination works better for you.

If you’re going to post images of finished work, which I would highly recommend if you have physical products you want to display, then you want to aim for the highest quality images you can manage. This doesn’t require expensive equipment. I use a low budget photobooth setup and for the majority of the time I’ve been posting to Instagram I just used my phone camera.

If you’re aiming for a certain style then this might not be appropriate for you, but my photobooth setup gives me bright, diffused (ish), white light. This makes it easy to get consistent photos quickly with relatively minimal effort. The brightness makes it easy for the camera to get a good picture with minimal noise or blur. The diffusion means everything is relatively evenly lit and there aren’t sharp shadows. A consistent lighting colour is important too. When it’s right you don’t notice it, but when there are several different colours of light in a single image it becomes quite jarring.

Having a backdrop with a subtle pattern helps, especially if you are using a narrower depth of field. In this case I just used a little white patterned wallpaper stuck to a board. Quick, easy, and can be changed out for other designs/colours with minimal effort.

If that is still more work/money than you want right now, check out the tips from Rebecca at The Maker’s Playbook for ways to make the most of natural lighting with a phone camera.

Ultimately though, you want to be taking the best possible images you can, that are visually appealing and accurately show the product in a way that helps people understand why they would want to buy it. I don’t think you need to have professional quality photography, but there absolutely is a minimum quality required if you want to stand out.

Infographic posts are a relatively new type of content on Instagram, as images with text used to do badly, but there’s a definite trend towards them at the moment. This is a different skill to photography, and I would only recommend trying to make them if you have specific content that you feel is worth the effort. In my case, I have a backlog of these blog posts that I can convert to infographics and I used to be a graphic designer, so it’s relatively easy for me to produce them. They have been some of my most popular content (in terms of saves and follows), but I’ll talk about the types of followers further down as this isn’t necessarily a good reason for you to start making infographics.

Finally, personal pictures. This is a preference, and there absolutely is room for personal content on a business feed if the business is just you, but I limit non-ceramic content to one or two posts a year. I use Stories for anything personal, as it separates the two kinds of content and lets people opt out of it if they’re not interested.

Videos

Photos are great for making sales, but videos are what will really grow an Instagram following. I think this is both a conscious decision on IGs part as they compete with TikTok, and a natural consequence of an algorithm that rewards engagement and a format that doesn’t give you everything at once. You can scroll past an image and take most of it in, but you have to stop and watch a video.

You don’t have to make videos to grow an account, there are some accounts that have grown very successfully with no/minimal video content (e.g. Callahan Ceramics), but I would definitely recommend it if you can.

You don’t need a dedicated camera and computer with editing software, a smartphone is good enough at both recording and editing to get by. If you are in a home studio, or can find a way to control it in a shared studio setting, consider your background and lighting. One of the cheapest improvements for video aesthetics is to have a nicer background, and it could be as simple as rearranging slightly. Similarly, being able to control the lighting will give the same benefits to video quality as image quality. I use the same LED light panels to light the studio around the wheel for a diffused bright light in all weather conditions, which makes it much easier to stay consistent. If you are using a phone to video, I highly recommend OpenCamera on Android instead of the default app. It allows you to lock focus (avoiding the camera trying to refocus every time you move), lock exposure, and white balance (again, stops the camera overreacting to any change when you move).

Filming and editing is a skill that takes time and effort to master. I’ve been trying to get better at it for years and I’m still not where I'd like to be (which is basically Florian Gadsby’s level), but I’m getting closer. If you do want to improve from smartphone quality, then the equipment I use now is the Sony a6400 (US Link / UK Link) with a Sigma 30mm f1.4 (US Link / UK Link). The 4K resolution paired with a prime lens gives a quality that wouldn’t be possible with the lens of a phone.

There are a couple of different routes you can take with video content. You’ll probably be recording the same parts of your making process for all three, but I feel there are a few different approaches:

Satisfying - This is the sort of content that does well on TikTok and in Reels and shorter grid posts on Instagram. It would typically be relatively short clips assembled to show a full process in a short space of time. In my experience these tend to do better with several different angles/processes combined into one video, rather than just editing down a single clip, and ideally reveal the final product at the end. These can have a lot more virality and reach, so most people viewing a popular post won’t be familiar with your work (and maybe won’t be familiar with pottery at all) so making a video with that in mind can help increase the broad appeal. The algorithms favour the use of popular songs on these, but that’s a stylistic choice you might not feel is suitable for your work.
Relaxing/ASMR - This does well on YouTube and Instagram to a lesser extent. Longer, slower videos, typically with natural sound if you are in a setting where there isn’t a lot else happening.
Educational - This can be informing your customers about your process or targeted at other potters/makers. These could be similar in video style to either of the previous types, with captions or narration added to an otherwise satisfying/relaxing video, or they could be in the form of a demonstration or narrated video. These work well if they’re under 60s on Instagram, and can be much longer on YouTube.

All three have their place and there is a lot of overlap. I feel they serve different purposes and different audiences though, so it’s worth being intentional with how you approach your videos. In my experience, the shorter they are (within reason) while still showing enough to be interesting, the more likely they are to go viral and get more followers. This is basically how TikTok and IG’s Reels function, with a built in positive feedback loop allowing exponential growth if you hit a sweet spot. You might have guessed from the first section that I’m not convinced this is always a good thing for makers.

On YouTube, you have a similar choice of content options and a similar problem if you go down the route of maximising followers. Only the Satisfying and Relaxing types of content will go viral, the Educational types of videos are far more limited in reach. I have a mixture of all three on my channel, and the majority of my follower growth and adsense revenue come from the handful of Satisfying videos that have gone viral (1m+ views). The advantage to YouTube is that you can use playlists to separate content types and it seems to do a fairly good job of serving both audiences with the content they want, so it’s not as problematic to have the majority of your followers only there for one content type.

Stories

These aren’t really a way to grow an account, so much as strengthen the feeling of a personal connection you can have with people on Instagram. They’re a very low risk way to share more personal (not necessarily serious, just not business related) things that are going on, and an easy way to share tests and process shots without needing the same quality as a grid post.

They’re also a great way to interact with people through the Polls/Quiz/Question additions. You can do Q&A stories where people can type a question into the first page of the story and you can share the question with your answer. It has its limitations, but it’s actually a pretty good way to do an Ask Me Anything. Or you can let people put suggestions into the question box and you can share them as individual polls. These types of stories can be fun and will generally get better engagement than stories with no interactive component, but they do suck up a lot of time.

Another advantage to stories is the ability to link directly to websites (which you can’t do in the caption of a post) and share other people’s content easily, then save them to the top of your profile page.

All this said, stories can be ignored with minimal cost to growth if they’re not something that appeals to you.

Caption

Again, this is a personal choice and the right option is whatever works best for you, but there are several broad categories of ways to caption a post on Instagram. You can post relevant information about the content, explaining the technical parts of the process or the thoughts behind it. Florian Gadsby’s Instagram feed is a great example of this type of caption. Another option is to post a caption that relates to your life outside the studio rather than to the content. This can be a good way to build a more personal relationship with your followers, but can also be harder to maintain consistently. A lower effort way to get engagement is to ask a very simple question like ‘which one do you prefer?’, which will get a high number of comments than either of the previous type but (I believe) the algorithm does include comment length in the assessment of post engagement quality.

If the content is pretty self explanatory then a single line of text can be a very effective caption, especially if it’s humorous. In general though, the effort that goes into a caption comes across when viewing it, and posts with low effort or no caption will not be as successful.

Giveaways

These are a separate type of post. Used effectively, they can be a great way to reach a high number of people who are interested in your content. Used ineffectively, they can gain a load of followers who are only interested in the free thing and won’t engage with any of your other content.

I have two different types of giveaway. The first is essentially a reward for best comment, with things like name suggestions for new glazes or correctly guessing something that would be difficult to do if you weren’t familiar with my work. This gives high numbers of longer and more engaged replies, and typically on a post showing a new design (which is a useful type of post to be highly visible).

The second type is closer to a standard giveaway, where entrance into the giveaway only requires that people are following your account and tag a friend who might be interested. It’s easy to see how this might add a load of followers who aren’t interested in your work, if you have a broadly appealing prize. However, they can be very successful if the prize is only of interest to the followers you want. A great example of this would be my Foot Trimming Tool. If I have a giveaway for those it only appeals to potters. Nobody else is going to bother following in order to try and win it.

Hashtags

The advice for Hashtags changes regularly, as the way in which they factor into a post’s success changes with algorithmic updates. You should be using some hashtags as they are one of the ways the algorithm knows how to categorise your post and how it decides who to show it to. I would suggest using hashtags that describe your content and ones that will reach your ideal audience (more on that below). The easiest way to get an idea of what tags to use is just to see what other potters are using, and add/remove to suit your work and audience.

Audience

This goes back to the first point made in this post. If you’re looking to get more followers, you ideally want to know what kind of followers you need and make content with them in mind.

As you’re reading my blog, the likelihood is that you’re a potter too, but this concept applies more broadly. The people who will buy your work are probably not your peers. There definitely is an overlap, a lot of the potters I know (including me) will purchase work from other potters, but your sales are most likely to be to people who are fairly unfamiliar with the medium. This means there’s a balance to strike with the technicality you show and describe in your content. You want to show things in a way and at a level that makes sense to a layperson or beginner, helps to put your work into context, and makes it stand out from something you could buy in IKEA.

The same logic applies to things like hashtags. When choosing a tag, it’s worth considering who would be viewing it. A lot of the pottery tags will be seen almost entirely by people looking for pottery content, whereas you’ll reach a more specifically interested audience by targeting an intersection between pottery and coffee for your posts about mugs (#coffeemug or #coffeetime for example) or between plants and pottery for your posts about planters.

That said, there are times when making content specifically for other potters can be a good idea. If you have something where they are the ideal audience (for me it’s my pottery tools, but for other potters it can be online or in-person classes) then making additional content (like this blog) that also serves the same audience can give a good introduction point to you and your work. The same goes for monetised YouTube channels, it can still be worth producing content specifically for an audience who might not purchase your work if you’ll get genuine engagement.

Another great reason to make content more specifically targeted at potters is to aid the community. I learnt the majority of what I know about ceramics from the free resources that other people had shared before me, and I’m so glad to be in a position where I can carry on that tradition. There is no way that my account would have grown the way it has if I hadn’t been happy to share processes, and I like to think I’ve helped a few people along the way.

Pulling those strands together, the best way to think about it is probably to look at the intersection between the people who you can provide value to and the people who can provide value back to you. You will get a much more engaged audience if you are producing content of interest and value to them, and you’ll find it far easier to convert those followers into sales if you’ve been intentional in getting your work in front of the right people. This isn’t a cynical exploitation, there are people who would genuinely love to have your work in their hands but aren’t aware of you yet. It benefits both of you to find each other.

Time

Finally, it takes a while to grow an account. I’m not certain this is still the case, but it used to be that on Instagram the first 1000 followers were the hardest and it would accelerate significantly after crossing that threshold. It took me a year to reach 1k and after 4 more years of posting pretty much daily I’m at 170k.

The more you try to speed the process up, the greater the risk of followers that aren’t your actual audience. This could be from posting content with the broadest appeal, it could be from paying for promotion from larger accounts (don’t do this), or buying followers (really don’t do this).

The better your content and the more you can post of it the less time it will take for your account to grow, but most larger accounts have been going for a number of years and it generally takes at least that long. You shouldn’t judge your success by comparing your account stats to anyone else’s, there are countless factors (including a lot of luck) involved.

Caveat

I’m well aware that someone with a decent number of followers saying that follower numbers don’t matter is similar to millionaires telling you that money isn’t everything. Even if there’s a truth at the centre of the advice, it seems easy to say when you’ve already ‘made it’. I’ve definitely benefitted from a higher follower count in a number of different ways.

But very early on I received advice about being intentional with the type of follower you want, and I feel that’s been very important for how I’ve grown the account in a way that aligns with me and my goals. So hopefully the same advice is helpful to you too, wherever you are in your journey.

Summary

Really, the conclusion is two very simple points.

Aim to make the best content you possibly can, and think more about the quality of followers than the quantity.

If you like this sort of content and want to support the creation of more, I now have a Patreon specifically for it or a page on my website if you just want to make a single donation.

Dec 10 How To Grow Your Social Media Following