Organic Social Media Growth | Interview with Jenay Rose

Full video transcript

Hello and welcome in everybody to today’s live interview that we are reporting here. Myself Darby Rollins joined today by Jenay Rose, who has extensive experience in the world of organic marketing, especially on Instagram and TikTok. Today’s conversation covers a deep dive into Instagram — what’s working right now, current trends, and the state of the organic social media marketplace, with open floor time for Q&A from the community.

Jenay’s background: in 2017 she left a corporate position to become a life coach, starting with just 10,000 followers and no plan to monetize. She’s since served over 700 clients, sold more than 10,000 units of her courses and digital products, and helped propel her own business and her students to tens of millions of dollars in revenue through organic social media. She’s known for her trademarked four-step BOSS method — build, offer, sell, scale.

Asked about her transition from corporate to entrepreneur, Jenay described herself as a “slow burn” rather than an overnight success. She never fit the corporate mold, started sharing her personal yoga journey on Instagram, and had about 10,000 followers by the time she quit her job. Brands began reaching out, but she found she preferred working directly with people who DM’d her for help — the organic community she’d built naturally pulled her toward coaching, well before “online coach” was a widely accepted profession (around 2019 is when she says it became recognized as a full industry).

Looking back, she says the thing she did well was always listening to her audience rather than pitching things she hadn’t validated — this took her from a six-figure business in 2017-2018 to her first million-dollar year by 2019-2020. Her biggest mistake was looking outside herself at competitors. She now tells clients to “keep your blinders on” and never study their own niche, calling the common advice to “engage with your niche” the opposite of what she’d recommend — watching competitors too closely leads to sounding like everyone else. Instead she suggests looking “next to” your niche: as a business coach, she pulls inspiration from fitness, life, or therapy content rather than other business coaches. She noted that in 2024 it’s no longer enough to post consistently with good information — you’re competing with the best creators and brands in the world, so personality on top of information and value is what differentiates an account.

On finding the right message, Jenay described a first-things-first market research process: having actual conversations with your ideal customer (she uses a roughly 30-question customizable template) rather than guessing. She stressed specificity — “trying to talk to everybody is like trying to talk to nobody” — because the algorithm needs specific signals to know who to show content to, and a resonant piece of content should make the right viewer feel like “he’s inside my brain.” She distinguished messaging (who you’re for and what you say) from mechanisms (hooks, captions, CTAs, hashtags, geo-tags), saying mechanisms are lipstick on a pig if the messaging isn’t right — some of the best-performing posts use no hashtags or mechanisms at all because the messaging alone works.

For anyone unclear on their niche, she recommends starting from problems you’ve already solved for yourself, since you’re always your own first customer. She introduced the concept of an ICA (ideal client avatar) — building a specific person with psychographic detail (what keeps them up at night, their goals, what they’ve tried that hasn’t worked) as the foundation for messaging. She also laid out the three content categories: educational (tips, value), promotional (case studies, offers, launches), and relational (opinions, myths, personal story) — recommending a rough 33/33/33 split. She emphasized that people follow people, not brands, citing Duolingo and GoPro as brand examples that succeed by having strong personality and experiential content rather than “flat lay” product shots. She also cited Poppi as an example of a brand that grew almost entirely from organic social content before scaling with paid spend — her broader point being that proving a concept organically first, then backing what performs with ad spend, is now a more common brand-building path than heavy upfront paid testing.

Shifting to profile setup, Jenay drew a distinction between “aesthetic” (visually uniform feeds, matching cover photos) and “cohesive” (consistent brand recognition through style, font, or colorway without needing a logo watermark, which she says the platform penalizes). She then walked through her own profile live: a simple, clean cover photo; a username matching her real name (recommended for personal brands, since business names can change); a name field treated as searchable keyword space, similar to on-platform SEO; a three-line bio structure of an “I help X to Y” statement, a results-driven question, and a call to action (she favors “DM me” over a link, since DMs open a pre-qualifying conversation and signal engagement to the algorithm); highlights functioning as mini sales pages (about me/story, work with me/offer, client wins, Q&A); and up to three pinned posts (story, testimonial, current offer) that she treats as bingeable content rather than posts optimized for engagement.

On the algorithm, she described it as trying to maximize time on the app by learning from a user’s actual behavior — what they’ve engaged with, followed, clicked into, and how much of a given reel they watched — rather than just likes. New accounts get an initial visibility boost as the platform tests where to place their content. She cautioned against delegating content strategy to a social media manager before you understand what performs and converts, since a manager’s job is typically to post, not originate strategy.

On consistency and workflow, Jenay recommended posting for the audience you want, not the one you currently have, and gave herself and her clients rough milestones — for someone learning on their own, a 90-day window with a lead-based goal (not a follower-count goal) before deciding whether to get outside help. She described her own batching process: pulling trend research into one sitting, filming in one sitting, writing captions in one sitting, then scheduling roughly 10-14 days ahead, while staying nimble enough to jump on a fast-moving trend when needed. She noted native in-app schedulers can’t attach trending audio to reels, so audio-dependent reels usually have to be posted live rather than scheduled.

On cadence, her minimums: three times a day on TikTok to generate enough data, and three to four times a week on Instagram for brand presence — rising to seven to ten times a week if the account is meant to drive lead generation. She cited a personal example of a plastic surgeon client focused on brand presence rather than lead volume, versus her own account, which she said has generated over $5 million organically, primarily through Instagram.

On automation, she said the only Meta-approved DM automation tool she’s aware of is ManyChat, alongside Instagram’s native auto-responder (up to four clickable question options for new followers in DMs). Her experience with ManyChat has been mixed — great for some students and for simple consumer qualification flows (she described a concert-ticket resale brand that collects information via ManyChat and returns a quote), but she’s also seen it hurt visibility on some of her own older-account posts, and cautioned that Meta can flag or disconnect third-party plugins unpredictably. Her advice: use it earlier in an account’s life if it works, always offer an option to reach a real person, and be especially cautious with it for consultant/coach businesses, where DM conversations themselves are valuable market research a bot can’t replicate. She noted TikTok DMs still have no comparable automation option.

Closing the interview, Jenay’s parting advice was not to take platform feedback personally — a post underperforming is data, not a verdict, and content creation is a skill that takes practice like any other. She encouraged leaning into the controversial or vulnerable topics other creators in a niche avoid, since that builds trust. She described social media as a long game, noting she’s had posts reach 17.9 million views that converted to nothing, and posts with only 10 comments that led to significant sales — with some people buying immediately and others following for years before converting. She emphasized that the underlying messaging skill is platform-agnostic and transfers across channels, since it’s ultimately about what resonates with the audience and builds trust, not the mechanics of any one platform. She can be found on Instagram at @jenayroseofficial.