Growing #BornZillennial

I created a private Facebook group that is celebrating 90K members less than a month since it’s inception. I was lucky enough to gain a majority of my current members in a few short days, but as the immediate flood of new members has decreased, I’m focused on growing #BornZillennial slowly but surely.

#BornZillennial

Hashtaging on social can significantly increase the visibility of a group, issue, or topic. I’ve begun to brand my social media posts with an original hashtag: #BornZillennial. As the group continues to grow, and members become involved with the Zillennial mindset outside of the Facebook group, I want to increase the visibility of this hashtag across all platforms. No matter where an individual is online, I want the #BornZillennial hashtag to be the source of Zillennial life.

Here’s an example of utilizing the #BornZillennial hashtag on Twitter. I’ve also seen group members including it in their own posts. My ultimate goal is to encourage more and more people to use it outside of the Facebook group.

Thought, it’s important to note that original hashtags can take time to catch on, so it’s important to use general, yet relevant, hashtags to reach a community and penetrate the conversation. #Zillennial is not a crowded hashtag, but it has a presence on social platforms already. I posted a TikTok after the group had begun gaining members that shared the best posts so far. This was done mainly to further incentivize TikTok users to join if they hadn’t already. I included #Zillennial and the video is now in the top five most viewed / liked videos under a hashtag with a combined 8 million views across all videos. Though I can’t directly see who joined because of this follow up video, the comments would suggest it helped gain hundreds if not a few thousand additional members.

I’ve also attached #Zillennial to three additional TikToks that all rank in the top 20 most viewed / liked videos under the hashtag.

Utilize other communities

As the group was gaining traction, the host of a podcast focused on navigating your early 20s reached out for an interview to describe the Facebook group and the Zillennial mindset. They shared the post with their community on Facebook and Instagram, and I shared their posts to my personal pages as well as Born Zillennial. I’m sure at least one person joined the group from the Unchartered 20s platform as they commented beneath the post saying they’d just joined, as shown below.

Additionally, the host shared some of the insights with me and the episode has received 110 plays so far.

Influencers

Influencers hold great power on social media today, and that power isn’t limited to the massive influencers that probably came immediately to mind. On my original TikTok, verified user @onlyjayus commented as shown below.

She’s known for sharing psychology facts and discussing Gen Z culture. I replied to the comment inviting her to join and see if she thought she could find a sense of belonging, but the notification was probably lost in her notifications. Additionally, I reached out to her through Instagram DM’s to see if she would join the group.

Something else that I thought was simply incredible was group members reaching out to influencers on their own accord. After one group member posted a book series from her childhood, it received thousands of likes in the group. She took it upon herself to reach out to the author of the series on Twitter to let her know there’s thousands of Zillennials reminiscing on her books.

The group member reached out to me after the author responded and I was blown away! I took the liberty of quoting the tweet and including the #BornZillennial hashtag. Though I’m not sure it gained the group any members, it’s one of a few Tweets that mention the group, and hopefully we can increase salience on Twitter in the future.

On a final note, I have a goal that I’m not sure yet how to achieve, but I think it would be pretty cool if I could mobilize the group to pull it off. Though they may not be influencers, or Zillennials, or even on social media, I want to find some of the random people from our childhood that no one has kept up with. I’m thinking of people like the models on the front of the Girl Scout cookie boxes, contestants from Kid Nation, or Alex from Target. I’ve mentioned the idea in a few comments throughout the Facebook group and members seem on board.

As I work to track them down, I think it would be really interesting to bring some of them into the group for a live video chat to ask questions and engage other group members.