Take a moment to ask yourself — how does your audience grow?
Your answer to this question is your growth hypothesis. Regardless of whether you want to grow your audience on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, it is the single most important question you need to be able to answer as a content creator after you have found content-market fit (more on that here).
While content-market fit is about figuring out who your audience is and what content serves their needs, your growth hypothesis is your plan for how to reach more and more people over time. It is called a hypothesis because it is a strategy that you need to test to see if it works and adapt over time. Growth loops have become an increasingly common framework for answering the growth hypothesis in tech startups.
I’m not here to give you tactical advice for hustling your way to more followers - as a tech product manager and startup entrepreneur my goal is to bring valuable strategic frameworks from the startup world into the realm of content businesses.
In this article, I will explain what a growth loop is and how you can leverage them to create exponential audience growth.
Why should you care about growth loops?
Imagine if you had to choose between the following two growth strategies:
- Strategy A leads you to reliably add 100 new followers per week
- Strategy B leads you to reliably add 10 new followers per week, and each follower gets one friend to follow you each week
Which strategy sounds better?
If you do the math, after 10 weeks strategy A would lead you to 1000 followers and strategy B would lead you to 10,230 followers. This is because of the magic of compound growth. If each new follower brings you another person per week, you are doubling your follower count each week. You don’t need to invest as much time and money to source new followers with ads and promotions because your audience is doing the work for you.
This is the basis of the growth loop framework, and it is used by top tech companies worldwide to fuel their exponential growth.
The growth loop
Growth loops are “closed systems where the inputs through some process generate more of an output that can be reinvested in the input” (from an article by Reforge). Here is a diagram adapted from the same source:
The basic growth loop adapted from Reforge
What this describes in practice is a situation where the actions of users (or followers), directly result in more users/followers.
A real and familiar example might help make this clearer. Everyone knows Zoom since it blew up during the pandemic, but it used to be a small new entrant into a market full of big competitors including Skype, Cisco and Microsoft (source).
Zoom used the following powerful growth loop to rise to hundreds of millions of users: any user of Zoom could create a virtual meeting and invite anyone by email, even if they were not a user of Zoom. This might sound obvious now, but think back to when Skype was the tool of choice. In order to call someone on Skype, you both had to have Skype accounts and be connected within the platform.
To call someone on Zoom, you just needed their email address. This made Zoom more frictionless, and each Zoom user who created a call with a non-user was introducing someone new to the platform (source). Even if only some of the new users ended up creating accounts on Zoom, it was still enough to lead to compounding growth.
The average number of new users that each additional user brings to the platform is also known as the k factor (source). Not to trigger another pandemic memory, but the k factor is kind of like the r factor used to describe the contagion of the coronavirus (how many new people are infected by each person who catches coronavirus).
Now that I’ve shown you the power of growth loops, I will explain 3 different growth loops that you can tap into as a content creator.
Three growth loops you can use as a content creator
Growth loop #1 — the social sharing growth loop
In the social sharing growth loop, an existing follower shares your content either to all their followers via reposting or to a specific person via a private message. This leads to new people discovering you and some percentage of them following you. These then become new followers who will see your content and share it with their networks. You can see how the loop continues to reinforce your growth as more people follow you:
The social sharing growth loop
While it may seem like this growth loop just ‘happens naturally’ if you’re using a social media platform, there are things you can do to drive it. Anything you do that encourages people to share your content will add fuel to this engine, but strategies generally fall into two buckets:
- Produce content that people are naturally inclined to share
- Incentivize your audience to share
Some examples of content that people are naturally inclined to share: funny videos, educational content or something that has some FOMO attached, like a time-limited deal. It goes without saying that the content has to already resonate with your audience for them to want to share it.
There are a multitude of ways to incentivize your audience to share your content, which will depend on your exact situation. One example I can think of is as a newsletter writer you could consider giving your audience referral codes and grant them a free month of the paid newsletter for every new subscriber they refer (read more about how PayPal pioneered this strategy here).Another classic example is the giveaway that asks people to tag their friends in a post.
Remember that the strategy you choose has to fit to your content and feel like a win-win to your audience or it could fall flat.
Growth loop #2 — the social ranking growth loop
This growth loop happens naturally on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. These platforms already have discovery built-in — they have mechanisms like ‘related content’ and ‘people you should follow’, whereby they may recommend your profile or content to people who have not yet discovered you.
You are more likely to be recommended in this way if your content gets a lot of engagement relative to the number of people who saw it. If 10 people saw your video and 9 of them watched it all the way through and commented on it, you have a very high engagement ratio and the platforms will take this as a signal of quality. The content will then be ranked higher on the platform and surfaced to more users who don’t yet follow you.
The social ranking growth loop
Again, this growth loop might seem like it ‘just happens’ on social platforms, but you can influence it by trying to increase engagement with your content. Try to hook new viewers into your video by avoiding long-winded introductions and encourage them to leave comments by replying and making yourself available. On Twitter you may tag people or ask questions to turn passive viewers into engaged followers.
Think about how this growth loop can work for you with your specific situation and focus on the framework and strategy rather than just the tactics mentioned.
Growth loop #3 — the meta UGC growth loop
The user-generated content (UGC) growth loop is how platforms like Instagram and YouTube became so big — by creating ‘user-generated’ content, the first content creators attracted other people to the platform, who then started creating their own content and attracting more people and so on.
As a content creator, you are already producing UGC and thus contributing to the growth loop of the platform you use, but you can also encourage your followers to create content in response to your content and use that to fuel your growth. If users produce content in response to yours and attribute you, then anyone who sees their content will also see yours.
The meta UGC growth loop
There are several examples of this growth loop that will make it more concrete. Duets on TikTok are a very well-known example — if a follower takes your video and produces a Duet of it, all of their followers will then also be exposed to your video. Twitter is another example of a platform that has this growth loop built in — the retweet allows followers to produce their own content in response to you while still quoting you.
A third example I have come across is a popular blog that has a very active comments section and regularly creates new posts that are aggregations of popular reader comments on a specific topic. I’d imagine that the readers featured would be inclined to share the post in which they are mentioned, creating a combination of a UGC and social sharing growth loop.
Growth loops are one of the most powerful ideas behind the exponential growth of some of the biggest tech startups (ironically especially the startups offering content platforms). I hope that I have shown how they can be an essential framework for thinking about how to expand your audience sustainably and consistently with little continued investment. Let me know in the comments if you discovered any growth loops for content creators that I didn’t think of.