An Instagram impresario explains: It’s all about the comments.
David J. Bertozzi for BuzzFeed
Within sixty seconds of posting a new picture on Instagram, Elliot Tebele can tell if the photo will go viral. If it gets 500 likes in that first minute, that's a good indication.
Tebele's Instagram account, @FuckJerry, has over 650,000 followers, for whom he serves up a daily selection of about five pieces of internet ephemera — memes, funny pictures, screenshots of tweets and text message conversations. After those first 500, the posts regularly go on to get thousands, if not tens of thousands of likes within a few days.
But likes, however coveted, aren't what cause an Instagram to truly spread and rack up followers for the account. "It's all about the comments," Tebele said. "The way I think most of the followers come in, is people adding their friends on the photo."
According to Tebele, who is 23, when a follower sees a photo they want to share, they'll usually post a comment tagging friends' usernames, prompting a notification, as a way of passing the post along. Those friends often do the same with other friends, resulting in thousands of comments and thousands of new followers. If you're not a celebrity or well-established brand — and maybe even if you are — this is the way to spread on Instagram, and fast.
Being a celebrity on Instagram — often considered the most private of the major social networks — is a peculiar brand of internet fame. Countless style and food bloggers have spread on Instagram by posting artfully-cropped photos of themselves or their creations that have voyeuristic and inspirational appeal. But curating pictures that might make people laugh, like @FuckJerry does, is a different game. Of course, other accounts post memes and funny photos, but most are either more self-promotional, affiliated with a brand or website, or don't have as many followers.
The account's logo — the turquoise and purple logo from Solo cups of the 90s — is a good indicator of what works best on the account: "in" jokes for the masses.
Tebele said he painstakingly sources the small collection of photos he thinks his followers will like. He regularly finds photos on Tumblr, where he initially had a blog of the same name before moving primarily to Instagram, but also receives a deluge of submissions from followers through private Instagram messages, and the occasional email. "It's literally a full-time job," he said.
That, at least, is the plan. A few months ago, Elie Balass, a childhood friend from Brooklyn, who graduated last year from Stanford, joined to see if they might turn the Instagram popularity into a viable business. They are both very tall and thin, and look like they could be brothers.
One strategy has been to launch additional feeds — Tebele now also runs @KanyeDoingThings (self-explanatory), @NBACourtside_ (basketball photos), and @JetstreamOfBullshit (short movie clips, everything from Pulp Fiction to Road Trip)
Compared with food or style bloggers, there is a somewhat less clear path to creating a money-making brand, but they are considering apparel and advertising. They have posted only a few sponsored pictures, and they must be funny and on-brand with the account's sense of humor. On Instagram, in particular, they said, people are very sensitive to advertising — "the audience tends to bug out" — so they are hesitant about alienating and losing followers.
"I'm not really making much off it now, but we're trying to build a full website with humor content. And then there's some apparel in the works, some funny t-shirts," Tebele said.
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