5 Things That Grew the BAM Instagram to 100K Followers

When we first launched BAM (originally known as Broke Agent Media) four years ago, we started a brand-new Instagram account for the media page.

My initial thought was that growing it was going to be easy.

The Broke Agent already had a few hundred thousand followers. Byron Lazine had a big audience. We had other creators with big audiences. Surely a few story shoutouts, feed posts, and collabs would get us to 100K followers in a few months.

Boy was I wrong!!

It turns out growing a media account is WAY harder than growing a personal brand.

Especially with the way Instagram works today. The platform loves small creators, personal brands, and accounts with one, specific direction. A media company with no face as the logo and a bunch of different topics doesn’t exactly check those boxes.

But we managed to grow @nowbam into one of the biggest and most engaged media accounts in real estate. 

It wasn’t because of one viral post or because I spammed The Broke Agent audience with 1,000 shoutouts.

Here’s the exact strategy we’ve used.

1. Quantity: I’ve posted 3,637 times on this account.

If you take anything away from this blog, it’s that I have been relentlessly consistent.

I haven’t missed ONE day.

There wasn’t one viral post that changed everything. There wasn’t some secret growth hack. It was getting up shots every single day for four years.

Some posts get 1,000 views. Some get 100,000. Some completely flop. It doesn’t matter. We’re posting again.

People love to talk about quality over quantity, but quantity is how you figure out what quality actually looks like.

You need enough reps to understand what your audience cares about, what hooks work, what formats work, and what gets people to actually follow you.

The next 3,637 posts will come even quicker because we have doubled our volume since starting the account.

2. Quality: It’s the most valuable content in real estate media.

I may be biased here, but I truly believe @nowbam is the best follow in real estate media.

That’s because we’ve always tried to create the perfect mix of industry news, strategy, marketing, and entertainment.

When we started BAM, we looked at the existing real estate media landscape and saw a lot of ads, useless quotes, and news that didn’t actually help an agent do anything. It was just headlines.

Rates went down. A Keller Williams team joined eXp. The CEO of Compass said something.

Now what?

What should you say to your clients?
How should you use it in a conversation?
How does it affect your business?
What should you post about it?

That’s the difference.

Our tagline is “The Daily Playbook for Agents” for a reason. The goal is that you consume something from BAM and immediately know what it means for your business or what action you should take.

If you want people to follow your account, give them a reason to need your content.

3. Variety: Packaging and topics matter.

One of the biggest things we try to avoid is packaging fatigue.

If every post looks the same, eventually people stop seeing it.

We’ll post a carousel breaking down housing stats, followed by a clip from one of our podcasts about an Instagram DM strategy, followed by a hot take from Byron, followed by a green-screen collab breaking down industry news.

Different faces. Different formats. Different topics.

But all for the same audience.

You don’t have to pick ONE type of content and post it forever. In fact, I think that’s one of the easiest ways to make your account stale.

The subject can stay consistent while the packaging constantly changes.

4. Collabs: Audience crossover.

Unlike a lot of media companies, BAM is built around its creators.

Our brand IS the people who contribute to it.

Because of that, we’ve always wanted to collaborate with as many great creators as possible.

Almost daily, we’re cross-pollinating our audience with one of our creators or someone else producing valuable content for agents.

I’ll actively reach out to someone who posted something great and ask them to collab with BAM. It doesn’t have to be someone who works for us. If it’s valuable to our audience, I’m interested.

Collabs are still one of the best ways to grow on Instagram because you’re putting your content in front of an audience that already has a reason to care about your subject matter.

Don’t just think, “How do I get more people to see my content?”

Think, “Who already has the people I want to reach?”

5. Evolution: Recalibrate constantly.

We aren’t married to anything we’re doing.

That’s probably one of the biggest reasons the account has continued to grow.

If a particular topic stops working, we stop forcing it.
If a format starts working, we do more of it.
If Instagram changes how it’s distributing content, we adjust.
If the audience starts consuming information differently, we adjust.

What worked on Instagram two years ago isn’t necessarily what works today. What works today probably won’t be exactly what works two years from now.

Too many people find a strategy that works and then keep doing it long after the audience has moved on.

You can’t get emotionally attached to your content strategy.

Pay attention. Recalibrate. Keep going.

What agents should take from this

You don’t need to post 3,637 times or become a real estate media company.

But you do need to stop treating Instagram like a slot machine.

Post a Reel. Check the views. It flops. Get discouraged. Disappear for two weeks. Come back when you have another idea. Repeat.

That’s not a strategy. Your brand is built through reps.

Every post teaches you something. You learn which hooks stop the scroll, which topics your audience actually cares about, which formats fit your personality, and which posts turn a random viewer into someone who remembers your name when they’re ready to buy or sell.

That’s the real lesson from growing BAM.

The goal isn’t to go viral. The goal is to become known.

Known for your market. Known for your expertise. Known for your personality. Known by enough people in your community that when real estate comes up, you’re one of the first people they think about.

That’s also exactly what we’re trying to help agents do inside our BAMx community.

We give agents the content ideas, weekly social templates, video scripts, hyperlocal strategies, live audits, trainings, and AI tools to help you actually build a brand without waking up every morning wondering what the hell you’re supposed to post.

We’ll give you the playbook.

You still have to get up the shots.

Check out our community here.

Because 3,637 posts later, that’s still the closest thing I’ve found to an Instagram growth hack.