FOLLOWER FORMULA
LESSON 1
Getting Your
Instagram Ready
to Go
Follow these simple steps, outlined in these next few lessons, to complete your foundation for the Follower Formula and get your Instagram growth jump started!
Today's steps are simple:
Make sure your Instagram account is public. If you don't want your personal account to be public, then create a second account that you'll use to grow online. If you choose to create a second account, name it your name - not anything product-related.
Make sure your bio is clear! It shouldn't be anything like "Young Living Distributor #" or "here to help you buy oils". This looks very salesy and will make it difficult for you to make personal connections. Make it personal and about who you are, not what you do or what products you share.
If you have an existing Instagram account that you’re going to use, do a sweep of the posts already shared. Let's keep it personal and not potentially looking spammy. In other words, no posts about oil sales or generic graphics. Delete as needed so we can start fresh!
LESSON 2
Choosing Topics
When we show up on Instagram with a goal to use the platform strategically, we need to have something to share about that is more defined than just whatever we’re thinking about or doing that day. A great way to do this is to pick 5 diverse themes we love talking about.
These are topics not related to wellness but instead, things you love chatting about from your everyday interests. These could be topics like hiking, homeschooling, road tripping, scratch cooking, or gardening. Other people that love these topics are your people, the people you're going to connect with.
We’ll learn how to infuse Young Living into our sharing as we go on, but for the purpose of choosing your topics, these should be things you are passionate about, find it easy or fun to talk about, and have no problem figuring out what to say about, outside of Young Living. With your list of topics created, put them somewhere you won’t forget - a phone note, your computer, or your planner. These topics will define what your Instagram sharing will focus on!
LESSON 3
Setting Up Your Highlights
Now that we have our topics, these are the themes we will use as a template for what we share, both in our stories and in our posts.
An important step when just establishing your account is setting up some story highlights. Highlights are a very popular way of helping people have a quick view into who you are and what you’re about, and the five themes you’ve chosen are a big part of the “who you are” that you’re wanting people to get to know right away. Highlights are stories that are saved and kept on your profile as long as you keep them up. Highlights are often viewed when someone first follows you. Highlights are an essential part of Instagram for you to leverage!
It’s time to go on Instagram and set up five highlights, one for each one of your topics of interest. If my five topics are hiking, homeschooling, road tripping, scratch cooking, and gardening, that means I should have one highlight for each of these themes. All I need to do is create a story sharing my experience or love for this area and highlight on my profile with the title, such as, Hiking.
Instagram is an evolving platform, so we won’t talk too much about how to create a highlight - search for the most current way to do so if you’re unfamiliar.
Our finished goal for today’s lesson is to have five highlights set up that easily make clear what we enjoy the moment someone comes to our Instagram feed and sees the titles of our highlights. Way to go!
LE$SSON 4
Creating an About Highlight
Now that you’ve got some easier highlights about things you love to talk about under your belt, let’s create two more key highlights - starting with About Me.
Your "About Me" highlight should be a brief introduction of who you are for anyone who is just finding you on Instagram. As we go on, this will be a great way for people to learn more about you when you first connect - and will likely be the first thing they tap on when they view your profile and decide whether or not to follow you.
Feel free to make the title of this highlight your own - “Meet Me!” or “Who I Am” or “What I Love”. Just stick to making sure the title is clear for anyone who doesn’t know you and is an obvious place to begin.
Quick tip - your About video should include things like who you are, your family dynamics (are you married? do you have kids?), what you do for a living, what you love to connect about in brief (your five themes!), and this is an appropriate place to mention Young Living. Just make sure it isn’t the only thing your video is about so it feels more like a short picture of who you are, versus anything that seems like your goal is to become friends just to chat about Young Living. We always want to be authentic and show up as our whole selves! We become friends with people for many aspects of who they are, and connecting over wellness is the cherry on top!
LESSON 5
Creating Your Oils Highlight
With your five theme highlights and your about highlight set to go, there’s one more important highlight we want to create - and that’s one about Young Living and you.
You can call this “Oils” or “Oily Love” or “Wellness” - whatever you prefer; just once again, don’t make it cryptic. Make it plain for someone to have an idea of what to expect from the title.
This "Oils" highlight should be a brief overview of the Premium Starter Kit.
Keep this highlight as timeless as possible, and make it just a brief taste. Instead of giving an in depth walk through, think a sneak peek or preview of why you love this kit.
To keep this timeless, leave out things like pricing or what all comes in the kit - we want to keep this relevant for a long time, no matter what changes come to the kit as time goes by. A great way to approach this is to do a quick peek into the wellness kit you use every day and your cute diffuser you use with it. You can choose whatever you want to showcase here - whether it’s oils, Thieves, NingXia, Savvy - but make it personal. Talk about why you love it, and keep it compliant (no health claims!). Instead of “this oil is great for…” think about saying where you use it and with whom. “I love using Peace & Calming with my toddler; we diffuse it in his room every afternoon at nap time and it smells like magic!”
From the standpoint of your viewer, this highlight is more about you than the product, and that’s what is really going to result in someone connecting with you to enroll. Make it personal, make it you, and have fun!
LESSON 6
How to Use Your Stories to Create Growth
As you learn to make showing up in your stories a habit, just start with sharing about the next thing on your theme list. If your five themes are hiking, homeschooling, road tripping, scratch cooking, and gardening, talk about hiking on Monday - this can be as simple as showcasing the hiking boots you have or talking about what you’re looking for in a good hiking sock. On Tuesday, story about homeschooling - maybe a glimpse of your curriculum lineup for the day or the cozy spot you have your kids hard at work in. Wednesday, talk about your favorite road tripping tips, or memories, or what you’re planning on next. Stories don’t need to be polished, they just need to connect your viewer with your world, and it’s always great if they prompt conversation.
Looking for responses? Infuse questions into your stories - while you’re talking about those hiking socks, ask if anyone has a good recommendation for ones they love. Ask what curriculum friends have used for math. Ask for ideas for good road tripping destinations with kids - show people you invite feedback into your world. As we go forward, more and more people who share that same interest will see your stories and that you are ready to engage about those interests you share in a fun and simple way!
There’s something else we want to be infusing - and that’s peeks into our Young Living lifestyle. A great way to do this is to showcase Young Living very naturally in the topics we are already talking about - a diffuser in the homeschool room, taking Peppermint on my hike, using Vitality oils in my cooking - but it’s also a great practice to show up in stories and talk about Young Living on its own every now and again. A solid way to do this as you begin is to add on a story about Young Living every time you finish rotating through your topics. Show your oily workspace, or something oily you’re loving in your everyday routine. Stories are snapshots into your everyday life, and Young Living integrates with both your themes and your everyday life in other areas, so show these in the midst of focusing on your topics of interest.
Get a reminder set on your phone, and remember to rotate through all five of your themes to keep connecting with people who follow you based on one of those interests. Get started and keep going, and you’ll be in great shape to create a habit of showing up in your stories!
LESSON 7
What About Posting?
We’ve talked a lot about stories, and that might have you wondering what role your feed (posts) should play.
While stories can be really informal, we want to make sure your feed looks beautiful, so it may be a bit more time-consuming to show up here.
Stories are king, so make sure your stories are regular and happening on a daily basis first and foremost. If you have to choose on a given day whether to post or story, story first - your posts don’t have to be quite as regular, although we still want to keep your feed active.
This is where your five themes come in really purposefully. Rotate through each of those themes every time you post to your feed. Your goal, every time you post, is to add value to your follower, and your five themes are a great guide for staying productive and keeping ideas in front of you for doing so! A key difference between your stories and your posts is that your posts have an ability to be shared - so think about what you can add to the conversation of planning road trips, or what recipes someone might want to share if one of your themes is cooking. Think of long-term value in your feed, more than the peeks into your life that stories provide.
Make sure the photo you’re posting is well shot, and use a preset in an app like Lightroom or VSCO to use on all your photos you’re posting to make your feed look congruent and attractive. What about posting about Young Living? Keep your post strategy simple, integrating Young Living into what you’re talking about. Because your stories and highlights point naturally to Young Living within your lifestyle, we want to make sure our posts do the same thing, not deflecting from the main areas we are posting about, but instead drawing in those people who share our interests because we are naturally connecting those topics each of us enjoy with this YL lifestyle.
As the heart of the Follower Formula is about to showcase, posting about these five interest themes makes it really easy to connect with other people on Instagram interested in these same topics!
This creates an expectation from people following us of the kind of content we share and value we create!
Set up a posting calendar on your phone - these could be reminders or calendar alerts - and remind yourself every day to show up and add value through your posts!
LESSON 8
What is the Follower Formula?
With our Instagram foundation now built, it’s time to dive into the actual Follower Formula! Make sure you have our tool handy (printed is ideal), and let’s get started! Print here.
If you don’t have access to a printer, I highly recommend you copy on paper the Follower Formula printable outline. This will be essential to helping you be successful with connecting on Instagram and building friendships!
The Follower Formula helps connect a good profile and posting strategy with finding people to actually connect with. It takes the guesswork out of whom to talk to and about what, and helps us create a real system of ever expanding our circle with people who don’t already use Young Living. Best of all, it’s made to function on a platform that is ideal for connecting with people we don’t know! Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, it’s common for people to have public accounts and it’s obvious if someone is likely open to creating relationships with people they don’t know. How can you tell? If someone has a private account, they are likely more closed and not ready for relationships outside of the people they already know on Instagram. But if someone’s account is public? If they’ve used Instagram for very long at all, they’ll know this invites people they don’t know to connect with them, and if they’ve kept their account public, that means they are someone you could become friends with.
So out of all the people on Instagram, which ones do you look to get to know?
Get ready to dive on into the Follower Formula, because we are ready to go!
LESSON 9
Creating Your Hashtags
So far, we've created a cohesive account + bio, chosen 5 topics of interest we love talking about, cultivated our main highlights, and learned how to create compelling stories + posts - and today, we are talking about how to start meeting new people!
Hashtags are an essential part of learning how to connect with other people in a productive way!
First of all, hashtags help you get found! Add about 8 hashtags in the comments of each new post (not the actual text of your post, which can look messy and detract from people connecting with you). Think through which hashtags you choose - they should be related to your themes! In other words, are you making a post about homeschooling? Your hashtags shouldn’t be random - they should be hashtags other homeschoolers would use.
What hashtags would the type of people you want to connect with use themselves, if they were searching for a post about homeschooling, or making a post about homeschooling? Create one set of 8 hashtags for each of your 5 topics. Make sure each hashtag set is unique and specific to your topics.
Want to make sure these are good hashtags to use? Search these hashtags on Instagram and make sure these are hashtags other people use. Choose hashtags in the 20K-100K follower range. Why not choose hashtags with a million uses? If hashtags are too popular, your post will never have a chance to be seen where people can find you by searching it. If hashtags aren’t popular enough, not enough people are searching it and it won’t do you much good to use it due to lack of popularity. That’s why 20K-100K is our sweet spot!
Make sure your sets of hashtags are saved where you can easily access to copy and paste, such as on a note in your phone. Whenever you post about one of your themes, find your curated set of eight hashtags for that theme and paste (spaced out like this: #hashtag #hashtag #hashtag) as a comment on your post.
Do not choose hashtags that have nothing to do with your topic. This is not the time to use hashtags like #YLEO when you’re talking about homeschooling. Who uses the hashtag #YLEO? Probably other Young Living users...but who uses the hashtag #homeschool? Other homeschoolers, and that is exactly what we want to do when we use hashtags - connect with other people on the same topic of interest or theme we’ve chosen.
And guess what - this is how you'll start to connect with others, too, as we'll talk about next!
LESSON 10
Search with Hashtags
How do you find people to connect with on Instagram? Hashtags!
We’ve set up hashtags for our posts to help people find us, but we can also do the same thing in reverse to help us find others interested in the same topics as us!
Use the search function of Instagram to look up hashtags related to your interest topics. These can be your eight hashtags to begin with, but don’t be afraid to venture beyond those.
Our goal - to use the same kind of hashtags related to our topics of interest to find other people interested in the same things as us! Especially in beginning growing an account on Instagram, we want to connect with others in the same ballpark of followers as us - within a couple thousand followers or so. If someone who has 100 followers is looking to connect with someone with 20,000 followers, that larger account probably spends a lot more time answering messages and isn’t looking for friendships the same way a smaller account would be.
We can do this by finding posts from others using our chosen hashtags (or other hashtags related to our interest themes) - but we can also, sometimes more simply, connect with others who “like” the same posts as we do from larger accounts.
So let’s use this example - if I decide today I want to connect with others who share the interest of homeschooling, I may search the hashtag #homeschoolersofInstagram. The posts that Instagram shows me at the top are typically the most interacted on, popular content - so they are more likely to be from larger accounts. Instead of searching for a post from someone with close to my amount of followers, I could decide to click on the likes and work on connecting with other Instagram users who also liked this post. They are likely interested in homeschooling, if they liked a homeschooling post, and I may find it easier to find others with a similar amount of followers by using this method, especially in beginning to grow on Instagram.
As referenced before, once I click on someone’s name, I’ll be able to see whether their account is public or not, and if it is, I can begin creating a relationship with them.
Get familiar with how to search on Instagram - go try out everything we’ve talked about together in this lesson, because in our next lesson, we are going to whip out our Follower Formula trackers and get to work connecting!
LESSON 11
The Big Picture of the Follower Formula
Let’s look at the Follower Formula method as a whole before we get going on our Tracker. Here is the Follower Formula method:
1 - Connect through hashtags related to your 5 topics of interests. Choose people with a couple thousand followers or so of your follower count (connecting with people who like the same posts as you is effective for finding smaller accounts) and write down their @username on the first line. Connect by reacting to a story, leaving a meaningful comment, + following them.
2 - Write down what hashtag you found them through on the second (#) line -- this will help you remember one of the key things you have in common.
3 - On the third section, tick a circle every time you practice one substantial interaction, such as a comment, message, or story reaction.
4 - Write down your current follower count at the top & bottom. It will take longer for some people to follow you than others, so don't focus on who followed you but how many followers you have total.
5 - Add new people every day + follow up with people on your list every day (such as 5 + 5). Additionally, talk to one person on your list about YL.
Ready to go? Make sure you’ve got your tracker handy - https://www.dropbox.com/s/cmmndn8mrala58l/FollowerFormula.pdf?dl=0 - and for your very first Follower Formula tracker, write down your beginning number of followers at the very top of your sheet. This is your starting number and will allow you to track how many new followers you gain over the course of completing 25 interactions with the Follower Formula. Expect this process to be a little slow at first and then snowball over time!
Next, let’s break down this formula one step at a time and do this together!
LESSON 12
Leaving a Substantial Interaction
Let’s dive deeper into what we’re tracking and how we’re doing it by taking a closer look at the first three steps of the Follower Formula from our last lesson!
We’ve searched a hashtag related to one of our topics of interest (such as #homeschoolersofInstagram), we’ve found someone with a public account whose account looks like they share our interest (they clearly homeschool, based on their bio and posts), and now we’re ready to connect.
On our tracker, we need to write down the @username of the person we are connecting with on the first line.
At this stage, we are going to do a few simple things. First, we are going to follow them. This says, hey, I want to get to know you! Some people teach the practice of following and unfollowing to bolster numbers - we aren’t going to do that. Not only does it not really have a long-lasting advantage, but it also goes completely against the goal of creating real relationships. We always want to present ourselves as authentically looking to create relationships, and that means if we follow someone, we really care about knowing them, which requires following them and seeing what they share. Follow with the intent to form a relationship, and if it doesn’t work out, then unfollow at that point, but not before.
Next up, if they have an active story, we want to make sure to watch and react to it! The more substantial a reaction we can make to create a conversation between ourselves and the person we’re connecting with, the better.
Based on how substantial our reaction to their story was, we will need to decide if we also need to leave a meaningful comment on a recent post. For a first-time interaction, it is a great practice to respond to their story and a post. After the first interaction, follow up interactions can be just one or the other, since we will no longer be a brand new face to them and don’t need to make as much of an impact.
Next, we want to write down the #hashtag we found this person through on our tracker to help us remember one of the key things we have in common that connected us - so if I found this person through #homeschoolersofInstagram, that hashtag goes on my tracker next to their name.
Lastly, we will want to tick the first circle to indicate we’ve left a first substantial interaction.
LESSON 13
Keeping the Formula Active
Every day we work our Follower Formula, we are going to want to check in and tend these new relationships we’ve begun.
A great way to keep this process manageable is to do the 5 + 5 process - connect with five new people every day, starting the process from the beginning and adding to the lines of our trackers, and going back and creating new substantial interactions with five people we’ve already started a relationship with. Every substantial interaction is a circle tick, and we want to consistently connect with everyone on our list until we’ve gotten through all ten circles.
LESSON 14
Integrating Young Living
How does Young Living factor into how we’re connecting?
Taking people through the ten circle process is going to help us create a real bond over a shared interest before we ever get to a stage where we’re introducing an invitation. An invite to a virtual event to a stranger seems spammy, but an invite to a virtual event to someone with whom we’ve created a real bond makes sense. It’s natural to get around to how we spend our time, and YL events should be a part of that and it’s natural to invite someone to be a part.
As we go through the Follower Formula, we want to use the 5 + 5 (5 new connections + 5 follow ups) but we also want to challenge ourselves to 1 Young Living conversation every day, making it 5 + 5 + 1.
This “1” is going to be a relationship we believe is ready for the invite. If I’ve connected with someone through #homeschoolersofInstagram and I’ve created eight substantial interactions, we might end up in a conversation about focus in the homeschool room. This is a natural place for me to come in with that “1” Young Living conversation of the day and talk about how I make sure to set the diffuser every morning with GeneYus because it makes such a difference.
If it comes up in conversation naturally like that, why push myself to make sure I’m doing 5 + 5 + 1? Why not just 5 + 5? Because we all have a tendency to do the bare minimum, and not push ourselves - but if I know I have to have one YL conversation in some form, that’s going to help me push all my conversations that way, and it makes me bite the bullet and make sure my social media focus is productive for my Young Living business.
LESSON 15
Instagram Lives
Now that we've talked about learning to provide value through our content (that these people we are forming relationships with are going to be seeing and hopefully responding to) AND connecting with new people we didn’t know before on Instagram, let's talk about Lives!
Instagram has another feature that can be very helpful for taking our Instagram game to the next level, and that’s through Lives. This is THE way to create longer class-like content where we can more overtly reach people we're connecting with about oils.
We want to pick a day of the week that can be our "Live" day. We need to create class-like topics to go live about related to our 5 themes, where we can add value to our followers in a deeper way, while infusing oils.
A great example is if I decide I’m going to do a live I call, “The Focused Learner”. Because I’ve connected with a lot of other homeschoolers, I’ve been storying and posting about homeschooling, it totally makes sense for me to talk about aspects of homeschooling more in depth, and what an opportunity to really link how I use oils in this area of my life in a deeper way, all while staying on topic of something I’m passionate about and have built my Instagram around being a big part of my life. This adds legitimacy and is much more likely to resonate deeply with my audience than something unrelated, like my skincare routine.
Weekly, I can share in my story that I’ll be going live - in this example, I would say I am going to talk about focus in the school room at home since that’s been a big thing for us, tease it a bit, ask people for questions or struggles they’ve had that I can integrate into my live - and once I go live, this video will be up for 24 hours. At this time, it’s also possible to make my work stretch even farther, by saving my Live to my phone when I finish going live, then uploading to IGTV! This allows me to save this Live indefinitely in my profile feed, from where I can share to my story - and once again, Instagram is always changing, so search the most current way to do this.
Consider putting weekly Lives on your calendar - something longer than story content, but no longer than about 15 minutes.
LESSON 16
Inviting from Instagram
With the Follower Formula in full force, we’re going to meet a lot of people - people that share our interests and that are perfect to introduce to Young Living as a lifestyle in those same areas that connect us! One thing we’ll want to do as we grow is get to invite them to team events!
Not sure what your team has going on? Talk to your upline about where you can plug into business training and give the people you’re meeting a chance to dive in with you.
Today, our assignment is all about connecting with our upline and plugging into things that are already happening. Do they have online events available to be a part of? If not, can you create some events with them that you all promote and invite to that happen on a weekly or biweekly basis? If they do, virtual events are a great way to get those you’ve connected with most deeply to a very overt conversation on the Young Living lifestyle.
We want to invite in a couple key ways…
1 - Your 5 + 5 + 1 can include that “1” being an invite to an upcoming virtual event that makes sense for them to come to. (For example: someone you’re connecting with is pregnant with their first child and there’s an upcoming event on pregnancy, birth, and motherhood with oils)
2 - Use your story to invite people in. You’ve been sharing everyday parts of your life, and this is an everyday part of your life, too. Talk about the event that is coming up, the topic of what's going to be shared on a personal level. Did you start using oils when you became a mom? Share that. If they are looking for a way to really invest in a more natural way to support their body and home and this new little human, you get it - it made a huge difference to you because you were there and thought that, found this information that is being shared on this online event that’s about to happen, and this lifestyle has been the way you’ve done motherhood ever since. What you're doing here is sharing thoughts and feelings and inviting others to take the same journey you did. Once again, share from you, not “about” the event.
We have to be doing regular stories and inviting people in, to be a part of our lives! They can’t come if they don’t know about it.
LESSON 17
Leveraging Your Insta Influence
Remember how we talked about naturally sharing the everyday things of your life, like your Young Living lifestyle, to your story? A great way to do this is to create a list of 10 products you love - and to make these regular occurrences on your stories. Become known for that girl who has the get up and go juice, or the girl who knows how to keep your teeth white naturally. Find products you love and can champion to your community! These are natural products to integrate into your IG Lives and Stories, through the lens of those five themes!
LESSON 18
Keep on Tracking
What happens when you finish one of those Follower Formula trackers?
Write down your new current follower count at the bottom of each sheet. It will take longer for some people on any given individual sheet to follow you than others, so this isn't about how many people on a specific sheet followed you -- it's about how many total followers you have when you finish this Follower Formula page. As you fill out page after page, this will help you see your progress and how many new people you need to connect with to gain a certain amount of followers.
This is a great place to audit where you connect best. Struggling with one of your interest themes? Switch it up. Not connecting with one of those themes enough? Focus there. Our stories and posts focusing on these five areas only is a good use of time if we’re connecting with people from these five areas. These will be the people that really resonate with our content, so we want to be finding people from all five areas consistently.
On your very first page, you’ll have written your starting follower count at the top when you begin - then always fill in the box at the bottom when you finish.
LESSON 19
What to Do After Ten
When you've ticked all 10 circles, you will likely have a new, invested follower - and if so, now is the time to put them into the Life Steps app so you intentionally work on talking through YL with them! This ensures every solid connection goes through the "YL" process.
LESSON 20
Rinse and Repeat
Now that you’ve learned the Follower Formula process, keep going! What you’re doing is all up to you, so if at any point you’re ready to share about a new theme, don’t be afraid to freshen things up. Integrate everyday life moments into your stories - it’s a place to showcase the aspects of your life you want to share. Just keep your main themes popping up, too. Repeat this course as needed! This is your space and your people you’re connecting with - have fun, make real relationships, watch your Instagram circles grow, and watch your hard work pay off as you invite into the world of Young Living day after day and week after week.
Congratulations on getting started with The Follower Formula! The key is consistency!