a16z's Social Media Insights: How They Grew from 0 to 100K Followers in a Year—What Did They Get Right?
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a16z's Social Media Insights: How They Grew from 0 to 100K Followers in a Year—What Did They Get Right?
Long-form posts: Upload full videos directly to social media platforms instead of sharing YouTube links, summaries, insights, etc.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by Ish Verduzco, Head of Social Media at a16z
Translated by TechFlow
Recently, a16z's social media accounts surpassed 100K followers, reaching this milestone in just one year. In this article, Ish Verduzco, a16z’s Head of Social Media, shares key lessons from their journey and outlines future plans.
Key factors contributing to our current success:
1) Highly shareable content
Thanks to our excellent editorial team, I have consistent access to high-quality materials such as research reports and interviews. I focus on turning these blogs and podcasts into social-first content, often including prompts at the end encouraging audiences to read or listen to the full version.
2) Community management
Beyond creating highly shareable content, I believe community management has been crucial to our rapid growth—especially during the first six months after launching our social accounts. During launches or announcements, I spend several hours each day responding to mentions and actively engaging with users. This creates a flywheel effect: more people discover our brand, visit our profile, and a portion of them choose to follow us.
3) Community questions
I’ve reduced this practice recently, as it feels like everyone is now asking questions solely for engagement. My original intent was to pose thoughtful questions targeted at specific audiences, aiming to ensure every reply added value for readers of the associated articles.
4) Off-platform promotion
This was one of our primary methods for gathering an initial audience. Leveraging existing channels like email newsletters and podcasts helped significantly, especially in the early days. It gave us essential momentum, ensuring that when we shared strong content, there was already an established audience ready to amplify it.
5) Leveraging existing networks
I’ve made efforts to follow our employees on social media and assist them in creating and editing posts. This helps extend our brand’s reach through their networks. While it requires significant effort—working one-on-one with dozens of individuals—the payoff is clear: both individual profiles and our brand account see increased engagement.
Looking ahead, I plan to double down on producing even more social-first content.
This includes long-form tweets, uploading full videos directly onto social platforms instead of sharing YouTube links, and posting summaries and insights. The goal is to make our social content more immersive and sticky, while recognizing that a certain percentage of users will still seek out the full source off-platform (blogs, podcasts, etc.). Clearly, shared links are hurting our organic reach, so limiting the number of links per post should help.
Currently, we are active on four platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, Farcaster, and Instagram. Our largest audience is on Twitter (72K), followed by LinkedIn (26K), then Farcaster (2K), and Instagram, which we’ve only recently joined. We also use YouTube primarily as a repository for long-form videos, while experimenting with short-form content. For now, I expect we’ll maintain this setup, as adding another platform would stretch our bandwidth too thin.
Here’s an interesting observation: although our Twitter audience is over twice the size of our LinkedIn following, our performance on LinkedIn is actually stronger—measured by average engagement per user.
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