My First 50,000 Followers

For years I dismissed Instagram and never worked on it — a big mistake. Why it is never too late to start building an audience on social media.

Today my Instagram passed the 50,000 mark. Thank you to everyone who watches and reads what I make.

I remember being shown Instagram for the first time back in 2015. Back then the platform struck me as awkward and lacking any real depth.

I thought it made no sense to post photos of myself or take pictures of my breakfast.

For many years I did nothing with Instagram and treated it with prejudice — and that was a very big mistake.

A little over three years ago Instagram started working with video and IGTV appeared, but your videos could only be seen by your followers unless they made it into recommendations. Then came the “TikTokification” of every social network: an endless feed of video content built around your interests.

Of the three formats — photo plus text, audio and video — speaking to camera is the one closest to me.

So for the last year and a half I have been posting a lot of video on Instagram. For the last 35 days I have written a text post every single day, and only now am I gradually starting to understand how to attract a new audience. So you could say I am at the very, very beginning of the road.

Despite 260,000 followers across all my social networks, I still do not consider myself a blogger, and I am surprised when someone describes me that way.

If it feels to you that you are too late to start building on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or YouTube — believe me, you are not.

There are very few good creators. If you think otherwise, try naming ten bloggers in any single niche off the top of your head that you could comfortably recommend to a friend. If you set your mind to it, you can become one of those creators.

As soon as you learn to make quality content, the platforms themselves will push it to a huge audience.

And to learn that, you only need to invest 10–15 hours once into figuring out how it is done.

All the answers are on YouTube and in Google.

You do not need to be a professional creator to start. But you do need to start in order to become one.

You can be a single mother of three, a seventeen-year-old first-year student or a fifty-year-old taxi driver — thanks to social media, tens and hundreds of thousands of people can learn about your idea, book, song, product, service or fundraiser for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, completely free of charge.

So what is stopping you from stepping into the public arena?