How do you build a following?

Thoughts on Instagram? Has the best engagement rates, and I'm far more familiar with building an Instagram following

 

All this time I thought you were Chicken...

Anyway, I'll find you on Twitter then

As for building a following - yeah as others have said, get on Social Media and start interacting. The less often you post about yourself and your work, the better. Your own work should occupy something like 1% of everything you tweet I think (or some other real low percentage). People follow you for information or because they find what you have to say useful, inspirational, funny or otherwise enriching to them.

For me, I've decided interaction is the single quickest, easiest way to building a following. Finding truly valuable content takes time and then because you don't have many followers, it doesn't even get that many hits. Whereas retweeting and commenting on other people's content is easy - you browse it like you might Facebook and start sharing and commenting. I got 100 followers a week doing this and by the end of the first month I was at 500 followers.

I've since lost steam and basically check it out everyday but I only really scroll through 5 or so tweets and may interact in one or two max. My followers are still increasing but nowhere near the same rate. I'm on... well, 670 followers (an increase of let's say, 70 since the start of Feb) and we're not at the end of Feb yet so I guess I'm wrong, my followers are increasing at roughly the same rate lol. 670 doesn't sound like a lot but I've only been on Twitter since the New Year. People tag each other all the time and if you build a reputation of being helpful, other people will recommend others to follow you (currently I have maybe 3 users who tag me all the time in hashtag games as well as #FF recommendations, all of which helps build your following because the former helps you get involved and interacting with the community and the latter is endorsement from others). It also helps if you follow back on the list of #FF, which I occasionally do and then I see my follower count increase.

Is it useful? Who knows. But it can't hurt. There're sometimes tweets where people ask for links to your books where authors support each other.

I think the most useful thing about Twitter might actually be all the pitch contests. I've already been involved in two pitch contests, one of which I actually got an agent "like", which was a request to query. I sent it a month ago and nothing's come back yet, but then waiting several months is hardly unusual in publishing so basically who knows. There's gonna be #pitmad soon in March which I think involves getting a mentor who will help you get your MS to publishable standards for free. These contests happen regularly and having a following helps with exposure, which then helps with the chances of someone important or influential seeing and liking your stuff.