2M Followers but No Sales: The Dark Side of Social Media Businesses

Yo, what's up, Hustlers! It’s Mr. Nugget again so get ready for some real talk in today's edition of Business Nuggets. We're switching things up a bit with our new series called 'Founder Nuggets'. We're diving deep into both the wins and the losses of businesses, picking apart what makes them tick or what makes them tank. Let's get real and learn from the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Backstory:

It’s 2019

There’s this girl called Ariana Renee (Arii), an 18-year-old sensation with ~3M followers on IG and 800K subs on YT. That’s more than the population of Uruguay🤯.

She had big dreams. A glamorous life, luxury cars, etc.

She took photos of her all over the beaches of Miami and posted them on social.

It worked! She got so many followers. All her posts got 1000s of likes and comments. She is officially a “big creator“ now.

So, she decides to capitalize on this big following and cash in.

Time to start a business:

She decides to make a clothing line called ERA (typical🙄!)

She signed a deal with a supplier, but they had one condition:

“Minimum order of 36 shirts must be placed to be able to send order packages and produce the entire collection.”

She laughs it off & says “I've got 3M followers. Why should I worry about not selling 36 shirts?🙄“

🚀 Launch day finally arrived!

She launches her clothing line & promotes it on IG and waits eagerly for the sales to roll in and generate some cash💰!

But, her day went silent.

She could not even sell 36 T-shirts!

Later she decided to close the brand and refund the money to the few that had ordered them.

Hard Luck Arii!

Mistakes:

What went wrong? Why couldn’t she make 36 sales even with such a big following?

Arii made 2 grave mistakes:

1. No real value

   Though Arii had a big following she didn’t have any value factor. Her account was some random unrelated pictures of herself.

2. Wrong approach to Promotion

   If you look at Arii’s IG page you will find that she didn’t promote the brand with pictures of her wearing the product.

This is another classic example of:

Followers ≠ Cash

Likes ≠ Cash

If you build your audience in the wrong way, none of those matters.

And now for the interesting part,

if you have an audience and want to monetize it the right here are some things you should learn from Arii.

If you don’t have an audience and looking to build an audience, subscribe to the newsletter as there is high-quality sauce coming for ya!

Lessons:

Here are 5 hacks to avoid Arii’s mistakes:

1. Become an authority in your niche:

   • Show that you know what you’re talking about

   • Put out your unique perspective

   • Keep sharing what you learn

   • Build in public

2. Keep your followers warm

   You have to understand that not all of your followers will be your customers. But you should write content that will keep them coming back to see what you’ve posted.

   Create content that solves problems.

3. Build a Content Strategy

   Write content on a broad topic to attract a lot of people & Write niched content to attract your clients.

4. Don’t Disappoint them

   Listen to them carefully.

   Try different things to find what makes them happy & double down on it.

   Overdeliver.

   Post testimonials to get more leads.

5. Promote yourself shamelessly

   No one will promote your product the way you do it.

   Keep promoting and people will buy it if it’s good.

That’s it for the first edition of Founder Nuggets. We hope you learned something new from this. It’s an interesting story and a lot to learn from.

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