This past weekend our class took a field trip Detroit where we met a variety of entrepreneurs and innovators in the media world.  But there were two people who really stood out.

The first was Eric Thomas, who has built a following for his writing on LinkedIn. This was really interesting to me considering I’ve never used Linkedin and never saw it as more than a place to find jobs — not create jobs.

Eric has more than 12,000 followers, so I pulled him aside to talk to him about how he built his brand and how I could do the same with my podcast. He told me I was on the right track and that I should stay true to my voice that’s the most important thing. This really resinated with me because confidence has been something I’ve really had to work on when it comes to standing by my convictions so to speak.

The next person who really interested me was the Shanley Pearl who runs Hungry In Detroit. She impressed me by the simple fact that she was able to build such a strong following (more than 13,000 followers in Instagram!) in just a short amount of time.

Instagram is the platform I use the least and have the least activity (just over 100 followers) so seeing how she built her brand so fast off the same platform I am struggling to build was eye opening. Instagram works really well for her brand because food is great eye candy for her viewers.

The thing that stood out the most to me was how intricate and detailed oriented her posts are. The content she mades definitely drives up her followers, but it was interesting to hear her openly talk about following methods and the use of hashtags to grow her numbers.

This was great advice for me because my main social media presence lies on Twitter.  I have 587 followers and I would like that number to grow as fast as possible. So although Instagram is a different platform, I find that the tactics of following and using hashtags have resulted in an increase of followers by about 20 in 5 days which is a lot more than my normal pace of 1 to 2 new followers per week.

Overall the trip to Detroit was an amazing experience, meeting all these different innovators with different paths really inspired me because it showed me everyone can find success and no story is the exact same, we all different journeys and destinations.