When starting a new social media account, it's easy to fall into the trap of asking your friends to follow it.
Hey, I've always dreamed about vlogging about my garden, can you follow my new account please? 🙏🙏
You might have a clear vision and a big dream of becoming an inspiration to people, but you haven't yet experienced the hard work and challenges that come with creating a new social medai account.
Whether you're planning to do comedy, singing, dancing, gardening, or just sharing your opinions - do yourself a favor and don’t ask your friends to follow your new account. Let's look at two very different scenarios.
You create a new TikTok account and ask your friends and family to follow it. Initially, you will get a small bump in followers, but we'll soon see how this will come with a big cost.
You then continue by posting a few videos, and the first ones might get a boost thanks to how the algorithm works. But then, you start to notice your views aren't as high as you expected. You might have hoped for thousands of views, but instead, you’re stuck with a few hundred, which might feel like a failure.
Am I embarrassing myself? Do people not like me? Is what I'm doing really cringe?
Even though your friends might not say it - it is easy to get these kind of descructive thoughts when the momentum slows down and you are stuck with 300-500 views on your videos. The low view count starts to feel connected to your self-worth. This can lead to catastrophic thoughts and an overwhelming sense of failure.
This negative cycle is hard to break. You might start making jokes about it to your friends, trying to be sarcastic or not take it too seriously. But deep down, this could really hurt. You didn't succeed as fast as you thought you would, and that might be enough to make you stop posting altogether and give up on your dream.
In this scenario, you don't ask anyone to follow your new account. You might still start off with a few thousand views on your first two videos (because of how the algortihm works). But when the views start to drop, you probably won’t feel as bad, because you didn’t ask anyone to follow you and no one is watching your videos fail. So it doesn’t feel like a big failure as much. Instead, you might see it as a learning opportunity.
The reality is that nearly every successful person on social media has gone through a similar process. All creators have seen their video views tank initially, or at least at some point in their career. It wasn't easy, but they kept going. They didn’t let failure affect their morale, and they didn’t give up on their dream. They kept their passion alive and continued posting.
Becoming big on social media is often the result of grinding it out, posting consistently, and learning along the way. You need an experimental mindset—trying, failing, and trying again until you get it right. Once you find that formula, the momentum will allow you to grow and take over your niche.
If your friends are watching you fail over and over, it could take a toll on your mentality. If they are not aware of your attempts, successful or not, you might not feel the same preassure, and that could be the difference between giving up and becoming really successful.
Key Takeaway: - Don’t invite your friends to follow your new account when you are just getting started. If people are watching, any low-views videos will feel like a failure in the eyes of others, and might cause you to give up too early.
Think about it like this: if you decided to become a comedian, it would be terrifying to perform the first time in front of your friends and family. The first time you try, you will likely fail, and it will definately hurt. If I were to become a comedian, I’d rather go to a city where I know no one and try my material there first.
So, don’t invite your friends to follow your new TikTok account—at least not at the start.
PS: It’s a great feeling to invite your friends to follow your account once you’ve already built up a few thousand followers!