How Dorie Clark gained 500K+ Instagram followers in 5 months

Dorie Clark (0:00)

I have multiple author friends that pay a firm seven grand a month, and they have beautiful looking content. But my growth has been better than theirs, and it's empowering to realize that money is not the variable that is buying you success.

Jay Clouse (0:27)

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today, we have a banger. My guest today is Dorie Clark. She's a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, four-time Thinkers50 honoree as one of the world's top business thinkers, and longtime faculty member at Duke and Columbia Business Schools. First, a little backstory. I was on an author trip earlier this year where everybody there, bestselling authors, really impressive people, and they were all using Instagram to sell their books. I came home knowing that I had to figure this out, but it's been really hard. I personally have not cracked this yet. But I've really been studying the platform and the creators growing on it. In particular, I noticed that Dorie had really started gaining traction and fast. Dorie is, by her own description, a LinkedIn person. She has close to 500,000 followers on the platform, which I'd estimate to be in the top half of a percent on the platform. But in January of this year, she decided to learn Instagram, and she started with 22,000 followers on an account she'd had since 2015 that was mostly personal photos. For the next four and a half months, she treated Instagram like a part-time job. 10 to 20 hours a week and 99 reels. But she says her net gain was about 350 followers. 35% of those videos earned her exactly zero new followers. But in June, it turned around. Her videos brought in more than 146,000 new followers across June and July, and by September, she was past 400,000. That's obviously a really big number, but there's a bigger reason why I was excited to talk to Dorie in particular. She didn't win by buying production value.

Dorie films and edits all of her videos herself. All of it is self-taught over the last couple of months, and her approach feels like one we can all learn from. So in this episode, we talk about the stretch of time where nothing worked and why she didn't quit, including the single data point from another creator that gave her permission to keep going. We get into the first video that did break out, why celebrity reactions are an entry point for strangers, and the Dolly Parton video that actually got her on TV in Chicago.

We also get deep into her workflow, including the document she created to make all of this easier by working with AI.

I really love this episode, I hope you do too. We'll get to that full conversation with Dorie Clark right after this.

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SPEAKER_3 (3:57)

So good, so good, so good.

SPEAKER_4 (3:59)

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Jay Clouse (4:18)

Dory, hello. A couple of LinkedIn learning instructors sat down to have a podcast.

Dorie Clark (4:24)

That's right. Hey Jay, I'm so glad to be here.

Jay Clouse (4:26)

I'm excited to have you and I've been just so blown away watching the transformation into Dory Clark, Instagram celebrity over the last few months. I'm really excited to chat about this. I think probably the best place to start. I first became aware of you because of our tie to LinkedIn, and I saw your courses on LinkedIn, and I know you have a big presence on LinkedIn. So I think the big question is, why Instagram at all?