🔴 The fake news that built a cult following

Welcome back to Self-Timer, our written Q&A series featuring one creator’s greatest hits, hardest lessons, and growth strategies.

Today’s guest is Annie-Mai Hodge, a social media strategist who built Girl Power Marketing into an agency and a 500k-strong audience across Instagram and LinkedIn, without a degree. For three years, nearly every one of her weekly platform roundups has included one update she made up, creating a mini-game as her audience races to spot it first.

In this issue:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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Annie-Mai Hodge is a social media strategist, newsletter writer, and recently, a mother. Based in Norwich, England, she started Girl Power Marketing (GPM) in 2020 to document what building a marketing career looks like without a degree.

Her Instagram page passed 1,000 followers in its first month.

By 2023, GPM had grown to roughly 50k followers across platforms and brought in its first freelance clients and brand deals. Her brother made leaving her full-time job easy: go full-time, he told her, and he’d pay her salary as a freelancer to run his agency’s socials.

In the last couple of years, Annie-Mai has made content for Canva, Notion, Snapchat, Adobe, and HubSpot, and co-created a social SEO workbook with HubSpot. Her work has taken her to dinners with Pinterest and onto international stages with brands. This year, she was a guest speaker at HubSpot’s annual conference, UNBOUND.

Additionally, she’s building her newsletter, The Social Tea, which covers TLDR social media updates and what they actually mean for marketers. All of this, she says, has been built slowly, sustainably, and without losing herself.

She’d been a team of one until she hired her childhood friend Ella last year to cover her maternity leave, and hasn’t looked back since. She’s staying on — keeping everything going and, most importantly, keeping Annie-Mai’s sanity in check.

Subscribe to Annie-Mai’s newsletter, The Social Tea. Follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram.

The answers below have been edited for tone and clarity. Bolding and italics our own.

Annie-Mai: I started posting on LinkedIn more than six years ago. I was doing cold outreach, and posting was a way to stay front of mind with clients. Since I was already posting on Instagram as Girl Power Marketing, I started posting under that handle on LinkedIn, too.

I tested a lot of different content, and found that my unique selling proposition was just me being me. I’m quite heavily tattooed, I speak my mind, and I stand up for what I believe in. I wouldn’t call myself the most brand-safe person, but the brands and clients who work with me already align with me, because there are no secrets. Who you see on LinkedIn is who you get in real life, and I think that’s what people are drawn to.

The biggest accelerator has been my weekly social media roundup (Editor’s note: read more on this in the Greatest Hit section, down below). People have tried to copy it, but it’s known for the listicle format and a made-up update, and you can’t replicate that. Everything comes down to the fact that it’s me.

These days, growth is slow and steady: around 3,000 to 4,000 LinkedIn followers a month. At its peak, it was 7,000 to 8,000.

Also, at three months postpartum, I relaunched my then-neglected newsletter on beehiiv, because apparently I wasn’t busy enough. I stripped it back to TLDR social media updates and why you should care, and committed to one edition a week.

I haven’t missed an issue since. In 30+ weeks, I’ve gained nearly 4,000 subscribers and earned five figures through my newsletter, more than in all the previous years combined.

Annie-Mai: I look for patterns rather than letting one post that flies or flops decide what I do next. If something consistently doesn’t resonate, I strip it back and reverse-engineer it. Is it the hook? The caption? Is this even a format that works for me?

Video, for example, doesn’t tend to do well for me. When I do post one, it gets one of two reactions. People are shocked and excited and comment, or they scroll past because it doesn’t register that I’d post a video.

I also repost a lot. If something underperforms, I’ll tweak it and post it again a month or so later. Most people don’t remember what they saw while doomscrolling, and we know messaging has to be repeated before someone trusts you enough to act. We’re so busy chasing trends that we forget the fundamentals of marketing.

Annie-Mai: I posted it on a whim one weekend before I flew out. Brands could buy a small, medium, or large sticker spot on my laptop, priced from a few hundred dollars up to $800. They’d come to Boston with me and stay on my laptop for six months. I’d only seen one other person do it before, and I credit them in the post.

I made around $4,000, which paid for my flight home, the first first-class flight of my life. It was well out of my comfort zone, and it goes to show you should go for things even when you think they won’t work out.

Annie-Mai: Without a doubt, my weekly social media updates. They started because I was tired of reading a 500-word article to find the one relevant sentence about whatever the hell Meta was up to.

So I wrote the updates I wanted to read: one sentence on each piece of news people actually need to know.

Then people started copying them, and not just bots. Actual directors of marketing agencies. So I slipped in a fake update and ended it with: “And this is the fake update for the people who steal Annie-Mai’s content.” It caught people out, and my audience loved it. So I kept going, inventing features I wished the platforms would launch, like Instagram bringing back the activity feed. (Please, Instagram, I live for the chaos.)

Three years later, the fake update has its own cult following. I’ve missed it three times, and my audience made it very clear that was three times too many. People tell me it’s the first thing they look for. They chat about the lore in the comments, suggest features, and keep track of which predictions have come true.

Some have, in some form, like “LinkedInIRL” (in-person networking events at LinkedIn HQs) and YouTube launching its own version of Spotify Wrapped.

They come for the useful updates, stay for the nonsense fake ones, and connect with each other over both.

Annie-Mai: My process is very manual, and that’s how I like it. I follow social media news all week for work, but every Sunday I go through my sources properly and handpick anything worth knowing into a Google Doc.

There’s no secret sauce or complicated scoring system. It’s mostly: does this matter to the average marketer? Will it affect how they work, or is it another obscure feature they don’t need to worry about? Although if something is funny or absolutely diabolical, that can earn it a place too.

Then I read each story properly, check for follow-up developments and earlier context, and summarize it in one sentence with the source attached.

In the last three months alone, the roundups generated 1.1M impressions, 9.2k likes, and 2.1k new followers on my personal LinkedIn. (Editor’s note: She estimates at least 100k of her 140k+ LinkedIn followers came from the series.)

The roundups have also brought brand deals, international speaking gigs, and paid work writing custom roundups for marketing agencies and for social media platforms themselves.

Annie-Mai’s income fluctuates month to month, but like many creators we’ve interviewed, she leans on brand partnerships.

Here’s how a strong month breaks down:

Annie-Mai’s tech stack runs about $2,600 a year, less than one strong month of her newsletter revenue. Nearly 80% of it goes to the two channels she owns: her website and her beehiiv newsletter.