The time I became an Instagram influencer

As I began shooting my first movie in 2013 one of the crew leaned over to me and said “You should post behind the scenes (or BTS) photos on Instagram”, I looked back “Instawhat?” was my reply. I missed the whole Myspace thing and reluctantly joined Facebook around 2009 after several years resistance, I joined just to see photographs from an event I attended. I picked up on Twitter quite late and then what? Another social media channel I needed to pick up. But rather than chiming in late it seemed I was in the right place at the right time. The problem being I did not have the interest or the understanding and despite the futile effort I had a couple of stabs at it in 2014, with little interest.

In 2016 as we prepared for the premiere of the film we shot; I took to Instagram to shoot a photograph. As I posted it a colleague said, “Your supposed to hashtags”, “Eh?” I replied. The same photograph I took minutes apart one with, one without hashtags. The one with hashtags instantly picked up double the likes of the original. So then, suddenly the penny dropped.

Over the next few days, I posted images with and without hashtags as I was testing the theory, sure enough the hashtags ruled out and so started a habit. Each day around the same time I added pictures. But what I did was a thing of science, in the 2000’s I wrote for a number of Websites Ciao, Helium, Dooyoo and Triond all now defunct, replaced by the likes of Vocal and Medium. These websites taught me something powerful, they taught me the power of mutual admiration. If a member of any of those sites read my work, I went and read three of theirs. The result? A relationship between them and I formed. And that relationship built the income of both parties. So I opted to adopt this pattern. While I’d see the posts of everyone I followed those that liked my photos but I did not follow back I would not see, so heading over to their profiles and liking three of their photos bought them back to me. If they followed me, I followed them back, If they did not follow me then I just kept heading back to their profile and liking their posts every time they liked one of mine.

The science of Instagram became simple to me very quickly. Meta-locate every photographs geography, use hashtags and as well as liking the posts of your following, like three posts of every person who liked your recent posts and build your fanbase. It’s a simple and effective routine that would take up two to three hours of my day each and every day, between finding the perfect picture and looking after my following.

When I posted my first image on Instagram I had around 26 followers, all of whom I knew personally, over my two years of virtually no activity I gained another 50. But when in 2016 the penny dropped my following blew-up. I made my first 200 followers in 3 days of adopting my new principle. Two weeks later I had 1000 followers, two months later I had 10,000 followers and so on. Before I knew it I was generating 1000 followers a day, my rule of three abandoned because I’d never get away from my phone. My post likes went from getting a hundred likes, to 500 likes, 1000 likes, 20,000 likes. It literally made my head hurt, how could one average Joe just generate this following.

One day a company messaged me, it was a brand I was familiar with, they asked if I would like to collaborate, I said “why not” and gave my address details as requested, 24 hours later I had received their product, it was a camera that I used for my next 50 posts. Then another company, a much more prestigious one made contact, the same thing. Then a mobile phone maker, somehow, I’d hit the Richter scales of these companies. But what I never really knew at that time, was that it was not my following they were interested in, it was my age. I was 44 years old, having and IMDB profile and Wikipedia page allowed these companies to not just look at my following but look at my age. I had no public following based on my film, it never was successful enough to generate that level of interest, so my following came simply off the back of my Instagram capability, but companies dug deeper into my internet mentions.

This revelation never hit me until I was contacted by Instagram, they wanted me to come and discuss my methods with them. What became obvious was that at 44 years old I was considered a pensioner in social media terms and the power of this was that I became a powerful influencer, why? Because people in their 40s upwards have more disposable income.

Before I knew it, I was doing seminars and invited to speak in New York, The Ukraine and Australia the world became my oyster. But the very thing that made me popular became my undoing, because the downside of being “Insta-famous” in your 40s is that you have life commitments, children, pets, property, maybe a more senior role, or maybe its life goals you are worried about not achieving before you shuffle off this mortal coil. I felt my Instagram time was eating into absolutely everything and then a job I had been striving for suddenly became available. While Instagram had its rewards, like all the sites I wrote for I was very much aware that in the blink of an eye those rewards could be taken away, I needed to focus on a secure financial future. The lessons from writing online where I earned £40,000 a year and suddenly lost it all in a six-month period still ringing in my head.

Initially I thought the way out was to just not go on Instagram for a few days, but the followers kept following and the messages kept coming, messages from brands, people looking for help, opportunities and of course news of that wealthy relative I never knew I had who left me a few million dollars. Stepping out of my Instagram world for just a few days was shocking, I was getting over 1000 notifications a day, without doing a thing.

The one thing I did not want to do was delete my account, so I started systematically removing followers and removing people I followed to get my life back. I slowed down to a comfortable 35k of followers and now sit at around 31k. Now I post once in a blue moon and get anywhere between 100 and 500 likes and virtually no messages, although I regularly speak at different events, I scale down my talks to smaller groups.

With all the above being said, good and bad I won’t lie, I miss my moment to shine and learned much along the way. The time I spent on the platform taught me a lot about methods, process and structure. As our world returns to normal, its amazing that a social media platform can actually teach.