What It Means To Join The 100K/100K Instagram + Twitter Club
There are a few 100/100 members at Barstool. A bunch of women have it (Ria, Fran, Kayce, Ellie). Seems to be a lot easier for women to get it, and that’s great. I champion the fact that women gain instagram followers more quickly at Barstool than their male coworkers. And nobody cares about twitter. That’s easy. If you work here long enough, guy or girl, you’ll get to 100k on twitter. But very few guys have 100k on instagram. That’s a special club: Dave, Big Cat, KFC, PFT, and Francis. Wow. If the ’92 Dream Team mated with the band members from 2000 ‘N Sync, each pair producing a child…
I dated a girl once who cared a lot about instagram. She told me that once you hit 100k followers, you’re enshrined in a special club of Instagram’s elite. That’s a real number, a milestone that separates recreational users from true movers and shakers. She called herself an influencer, and that definitely influenced me to end it because I grew up in the woods with a dial-up modem and family values that saw us discussing our day around the dinner table, passing share platters of multi-colored carrots and commenting on the sweetness of the corn. Farm-to-table, knowledge-to-brain. Anyone who cares that much about instagram doesn’t envision that life for our children. Instead, she wants two daughters who become brand ambassadors for a bikini startup and a son who does those fitness-comedy sketches that KB dislikes because his body is a 6. Point is, just because I’ve been knighted on Instagram doesn’t mean I can date a woman with as many followers as I have. She’d be a nightmare.
Drake once said “The first million is the hardest.” To this, energy investor T. Boone Pickens, whom I just learned is a real person and not a Looney Tunes chicken, replied:
This same logic applies to social media growth. The first 10,000 were hard; the first 100,000 were MUCH harder. There were a few times where I thought I’d plateaued. The 70s were extremely slow and difficult. It took me months to turn the corner into the 80s. Christ, from 77-78 thousand, it was a crawl. I’d gain 20 followers only to lose 30 the next day because of a bad post. That’s when I started deleting IG on the weekends for peace of mind. It was like lifting heavy without replacing the calories post-workout.
Caleb was my great white whale (he’ll be in the club within a week). To be honest, I never thought I would catch him. He was always 15k ahead of me, and we were growing at the same rate. During that rough 70s period, he stretched his lead to 20k. Those were dark times. I love his work but I wanted to keep pace with him and I was falling behind due to my bad decisions and lack of inspiration.
But then, the GOT songs. I went from 79k to 100k in three weeks. The followers flooded in and today, I finally reached the promised land. The first person from Maine ever to build a 100k instagram following. I never envisioned this for myself, but now that it has happened, I must say I’m delighted. Absolutely delighted.
As it turns out, having 100k followers on instagram doesn’t mean as much as I thought it would. We use the same bathroom as the quintuple-digit guys, use the same elevators, etc. The biggest difference is that if Dave and Erika decide to fire a 100/100 guy, they need signatures from all of us, as well as a letter of termination from Peter Chernin himself. And we all know that’s never going to happen. Because we have each other’s backs. We all know that each of us, individually, is too valuable for the company to lose. We’ve been made. We are too big to fire.
What am I most proud of? Probably the balance. I have 101k on twitter, 100k on IG. That means that people care equally about what I have to say and how I look. You never see that. Most followers are either readers or masturbators, but I’ve captured that elusive bunch who actually enjoyed both the articles and the photos in Playboy. And that’s how it should be.
PS- if you think any part of this blog is a joke, you don’t know me.