Building a Community on Instagram Through Memes and Being Real

Thanks for tuning in, I’m Rafael and I’ve been running Monday Iron since 2021. Starting out with just a meme page on Instagram, I’ve been able to build a great community, newsletter, and overall marketing channel for myself and the other brands that I work with.

I’ve done consulting for fitness clothing and supplement brands, directly making memes and other content for them as well as showing them how to make it on their own.

I stepped away from it for awhile to continue pursuing my career in the trades and focus on the Monday Iron brand, but I am looking to work with a couple brands again [Update 7-19-2024, I’m not].

So, I’m putting out this outline of how to build a strong online community on Instagram and ultimately help you sell more stuff and create more flag carriers for your brand.

I know this stuff works because I still do this on the daily, and the supplement company that I did work for had some of their best engagement while I was on the grind for them.

The guiding principle can be summed up with “try to give more than you take.” If all your Instagram feed is photos of your product, none of your customers, and graphics of your ongoing sales, don’t be surprised if people aren’t clicking on your profile.

I’m going to list the barebones outline and go into detail after that.

Take Inventory

• Who’s buying right now?

• Outside of fitness, what does your audience do?

• Who’s on your team?

Appreciate your people

• Reply. It won’t kill you.

• Bring your people together (Discord)

Go into the mines

• Where to find inspiration and templates

• Safe tools to download and edit

Create, publish, analyze, repeat

• Lizard-Brain Content

• Brute Force Memeing

Most importantly: Be a part of your own community

• Actually care

• Acknowledge your die-hards

• Comment on other people’s stuff

• Act like a real person (The admin approach)

Let’s get into it.

Take Inventory

Who’s buying right now?

You likely already have an idea of your current customer; but if you don’t, look at your top customers and get a general understanding of what areas they live in and how often/what channel they’re purchasing from most. Standard stuff, but helpful.

Outside of fitness, what does your audience do?

This will take some extra work, but it can be helpful in getting insights into how your audience thinks and effective topics to integrate into your content.

What other pages do they follow outside of fitness? Are they big Joe Rogan Listeners? Do they like anime? Outdoors stuff? What movies do they watch?

Some of these will just be guesses, but finding commonalities in interests outside of fitness is going to help you make content that builds a stronger sense of community.

Who’s on your team?

Not only should you consider the people directly working in your company, but who are your athletes and other affiliates of the brand? For example, Ryse has Noel Dyzel, Gorilla Mind has Derek, LeanBeefPatty, Shizzy; BPI has Mike O’Hearn, Tommy Gunn, Method Man; the list goes on.

The point is that other than these people directly promoting your brand, they’re associations that you can use as meme material to elevate your brand’s awareness. If you spent anytime on Instagram this year, you probably saw a million Mike O’Hearn memes; that trend even spilled into non-fitness niches, which was impressive. These memes drew a lot of attention to BPI Sports.

Appreciate your people

Reply. It won’t kill you.

Especially if someone takes the time to comment something hilarious, a thoughtful observation, or something of the sort, a “like” or a single emoji reply goes a long way.

Since I genuinely like people and I had to build an audience from nothing, this was normal for me. If someone took time out their day to comment on my post from my page that doesn’t normally get a lot of traffic, I replied.

Bring your people together (Discord)

The Instagram channel feature is a decent tool for bringing people together and closer to your brand, but its still a one-way channel outside of emoji reacts. You’re still just talking at your audience instead of with them. (Also Zuck prevented me from making one forever)

Discord is one of the best tools for bringing together your community. It’s basically a message board that you can split into different topics, rooms, host voice chat rooms, online events, etc. For Monday Iron, it’s been a great place for lifters to shoot the shit about training, nutrition, memes, and life.

While it won’t always convert into direct sales, it’s like people are meeting at your club and having great conversations.

Case Study: Klout Pwr and Klout Krew – these are prime examples of bringing your community together and showing off your supporters.

Go into the Mines

Where to find inspiration and templates

For Instagram memes, the best place is going to be tapping on a reel and scrolling the endless Reels void or just scrolling a feed/explore page that you’ve trained to show mostly memes and entertainment.

Maybe this is your personal account, maybe you have to make a new account and guide its behavior, just get that algo set up. The difference between this and your normal daily scrolling is that you’re specifically looking for memes from other pages or random video clips that you can use to fit your brand/niche.

Don’t steal people’s work and try to cover it up, it can chip at your online reputation. If you use someone’s template and you didn’t remake it or change anything, just throw a tag, not that hard.

Aside from Instagram and TikTok, Reddit is a great place to look for memes and templates. r/GymMemes has given me a lot of great inspiration, especially in the early days where you’re not exactly sure where to start. r/MemeTemplatesOfficial is also a great place when you’re getting started.

Safe tools to download and edit

On my iPhone, I use Inst Down from developer Renjith George to download Reels and YouTube videos. (Sometimes it will tell you to log in to download, do not do that shit. Download the video a different way if it says you NEED to log in or else. The app says it’s totally safe, but I’ve never tried to find out because I am not an idiot.)

For editing, HitFilm is really good for text-tracking memes like this. I believe you can also do this in Adobe Premiere, it’s an effective meme format that drove brands like Friday Beers to the top.

Hitfilm Express is free, but the paid version has been worth it for me. Super easy to use, ton of tutorials on YouTube for all special effects.

CapCut is an outstanding editor for memes, most longform content, and adding automated captions to your videos. It’s also a good cloud storage tools since the chuds at Adobe decided to axe the Creative Cloud program that we’ve all been paying for.

Adobe Express on mobile is a great tool for social graphics in general, but I’ve found that it’s also a very quick tool for photo memes and the social media presets guarantee that what you see in the app are what your audience will see in the feed.

Adobe After Effects is going to be a super-effective addition to your tools because that is the best way to make clean green screen templates that have endless meme potential. The unique thing about this is that not everyone has the capability to make green screens out of any video. Some apps automate the process, but if you want the cleanest one possible, you’ll want to look into After Effects.

Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator will be helpful for more complex memes where you have to take subjects and put them in different backgrounds or have them holding custom objects.

Adobe Creative Cloud has treated me well for cloud storage. Super easy to use to get files back and forth between my phone and computer.

Create, publish, analyze, repeat

It’s the same stuff every time you post. Make some memes, check to see which ones get commented about or shared on people’s stories the most, use that feedback to see what topics, joke structures, and templates resonate the best.

Lizard-Brain Content

I always had a different perspective coming up because just as a creator, I didn’t want to be a repost page or only have basic memes that a 13 year old could come up with and take little effort to make.

But sometimes that’s what is most effective; and as a brand, no one really cares. You could post a meme from 2008 saying “WHEN THE PREWORKOUT HITS” and people won’t think any less of you. The expectations for brand memes are low, especially when starting out.

So whether it’s a very short and to the point low-effort meme or a shitpost, it can be an effective tool in reaching larger audiences; just don’t abuse it by doing low-effort stuff all the time.

Brute Force Meme-ing

This strategy is a killer. It’s just doing 7-10 slides as a single post, all memes or entertainment content. Friday Beers does a great job at this, it’s worked really well for my page and other creators I’m close with, and it’s not complicated.

For one thing, if you have just 3 banger memes in one 10-slide post, they all get shared, they all contribute to the likes on one post, juices up the numbers and impressions, pretty straightforward. But the really cool thing is that if you have 9 memes and they’re actually good and people feel entertained, having one slide of promoting something at the end won’t hurt you. Because you’ve given enough in those first 9 slides that no one thinks, “ANOTHER MF PROMO.” It’s a very effective way to earn the right to ask your audience. Aside from the obvious point that if the first 9 slides are shareable content, your ad gets trojan horsed onto people’s feeds and explore page. I don’t see a lot of fitness brands using this, so I think it’s important to put out there.

Most importantly: Be a part of your own community

Actually care.

I still live a normal life with a normal job and all that, so it’s easy for me to appreciate when people show the page love or DM me or comment under my posts. Because I just like making stuff online, and people like it enough to give me some of their attention. So when someone DMs or comments something about hitting a PR, new content they’re doing, or personal stuff, I try to take the time to have a conversation with them.

As a big brand or even an admin, that may not be an easy headspace to get into. And that’s fine, because the expectation isn’t much. Even if you comment or DM back a simple “LFG,” fire emoji, whatever, that acknowledgement goes a long way.

Acknowledge your die-hards

If you see the same guys commenting under your posts all the time, interact with them. They’re taking time out of their days to leave something funny, they’re probably sharing your stuff, the least you can do if throw a like or a comment back.

Even someone as huge as Rick Boogs goes through and likes almost all of the comments on his post after a certain time. It may not even be him, it could just be a social media manager; but again, that type of acknowledgement goes a long way and can turn a normal audience member into a flag carrier for your brand.  And who knows, that person might even be able to directly help you promote your stuff.

Comment on other people’s stuff

Whether it’s other creators, getting in early on comment sections on huge pages, comments are one of the best ways to grow for a couple reasons.

Especially if you can make a good joke or a thoughtful comment that people resonate with, that’s going to lead to more people seeing what your page is about.

Slim Jim is a company I see all the time in Pubity posts, garnering a ton of likes, follows, and comments. It’s part of what’s given them their growth outside of posting things that people actually enjoy and acting/sounding like a real person.

I can personally vouch for the comment-on-big-pages approach because if I get in early and get traction on a funny comment on a massive page like Pubity, I can trace back a ton of traffic to that single comment.

Act like a real person (The admin approach)

Instead of sounding like a company, have one voice for the Instagram page that is just a guy. Mug Rootbeer, Gatortails, and Northwest MCM Wholesale, and Slim Jim are some pages that do this well. A lot of successful pages with a lot of traction don’t have to worry about this, because many are literally just a guy or a couple people that are admins, so they talk and caption like normal people.

Basically, it feels like you’re watching your buddy makes memes and post stuff, and it’s just easier to relate to *company page* admin #3 rather than *company*.

In Closing:

The bottom line is that if you want max exposure and people to rally around you, post things that people actually want to see. Right now, max traction belongs to the best memes, or the most attractive people. Pick one, have both, get some sales.

I’ve driven sales for myself and the companies I partner with using only memes and edits, no paid advertising yet. Looking more into that this year, but it’s pretty amazing how far just making jokes and caring about people can go in terms of your bottom line.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, have a good one.  

(I’m doing car sales rn, I wrote this when I was going to get back into social media consulting - If you want to buy an Acura or a sick used car hit me up)