K atie c ouric

Good Content for Lasting Growth
Ray Chan, CEO and cofounder of 9GAG, an online platform for humor
with over forty-one million followers on Instagram, has learned a lot about
achieving massive growth on the platform. He suggests using other
platforms, if you have them, to drive people to Instagram. Then he suggests

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comparing your account to the best accounts in your niche and getting ideas
from them. Chan also explains that his team is continuously testing different
hashtags and post formats.
For example, a current video-formatting trend people use to stand out is
having big captions at the top of videos to catch people’s short attention
spans. This originated on motivational posts with black frames at the top
and the picture below. But these trends change, and you shouldn’t rely too
heavily upon them. You always need to listen to your user by way of
monitoring your analytics.
Chan recommends that instead of searching for growth hacks, you
should focus on creating great content and a great community. He uses the
stock market as a metaphor. Many people try to get rich quick, or in this
case build a bunch of followers too quickly, which is not a good long-term
strategy. Building up a solid platform over time is like picking a good stock
and holding on to it for a while.
What often happens is people look for quick tips to grow their accounts,
which is like trying to pick a stock that will quickly rise. But great investors
don’t look at the short term; they try to find stocks that will rise consistently
over time. And that’s what Chan’s team tries to do. They still have to learn
the tricks and understand the latest trends and formats, but you never know
whether a trend will have long-term benefits until you test it over time.
To have growth on Instagram you have to constantly stay up-to-date.
The core principle is thinking about what your users want to see. Creating
good content that your user likes is the not-so-secret secret sauce.
Chan’s team has two personalities when they create content. On the one
hand, they use empathy to figure out why certain content works in the eyes
of their viewers. And on the other hand, they become very detached from
the content to create distance and space, which allows them to make
changes to content that doesn’t work. Chan notices that many people get too
attached to their content, which prevents them from testing and learning to
see what their viewers want and how people respond. It’s the difference
between being an artist and being a commercial artist. He feels that Andy
Warhol was an example of someone who was both. If you want to be
commercially successful, you probably have to be willing to change a little
bit of what you’re creating and keep your users in mind.

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Joivan Wade adds that you don’t have to guess what your users like. If
you have a business profile, you can use the insights page to see your most
viewed posts in the last year. This helps you understand which content your
users are actively engaging with and allows you to create more content of
this nature.