✌️ From 13K to 27K followers in 60 days (Guest post from Tayla Burrell)

Hey Metricooler,

This week we're doing something different. We're handing the newsletter over to Tayla Burrell, the creator and writer behind Dangerously Educated, who built a workflow connecting Claude and Metricool to grow from 13,000 to over 27,000 Instagram followers in under three months. Real workflows from real users say more than anything we can write ourselves. I'll let Tayla take it from here. Check out her newsletter and Instagram for more of her work, and if you’re new to Claude, Tayla's free Claude MBA will get you set up 💛

Buuut one more thing before we start: we have free stuff!

We have 4 extra tickets for DMWF Global, taking place in New York on September 9-10. One of the world's leading marketing events, with talks from people at Google, Meta, Red Bull, and CNN, plus plenty of time to network with other professionals and hang out with us if you're around.

Here's what to do if you want one:

First ones in get the tickets. Easy peasy!

“I posted on Instagram every week for four years and clawed my way to 13,000 followers. Then in eight days I gained 3,674 new followers and got a job offer off the back of my content. In the 60 days after that, I grew to 27,500.

What changed was how I looked at content. I stopped guessing and started treating it like pattern recognition.

If you can find the patterns in which topics do well, which formats engage a cold audience, and which angles make people stop scrolling, you grow. If you can't, you stay stuck.

Doing this manually takes hours: scrolling competitor pages, digging through old posts, trying to read your analytics, and connecting the dots yourself. So instead of being the analyst, I built a board of content advisors. Four agents that run through Metricool, connected to Claude, each with a specific job.

Here they are:

I don't have time to create three pieces of content a day to find out what hits, and I've spent too many evenings doomscrolling for "inspiration" instead of creating. The Scout solves both.

Through Metricool's connection with Claude, I can point it at the top accounts in my niche and have it pull their best-performing posts from the last few months, then hand me back the patterns underneath: the formats, the hooks, and the topics that perform best. The point is never to copy anyone, just spot the patterns and combine them into your own style.

First, add your competitors in Metricool under the Instagram analytics section:

Then, with Claude and Metricool connected, use this prompt:

Claude will map out a number of steps it will follow to complete this task:

Across 13 accounts in my niche, Claude found the same four-part format outperforming at every follower count:

The thing that flopped was the generic "here are the top 10 AI tools" listicle with nothing attached to it. It also found that reposting the exact same Reel word for word, a few weeks apart, can still land in the top 10; proof you can reuse a winner instead of always starting fresh.

I'd also recommend doing this with creators outside your niche. I often look to creators in the personal branding, personal finance, and self-development space for inspiration. Taking their formats and applying them to my niche creates a unique combination that performs well but feels fresh, and differentiates me from what everyone else is doing.

This second advisor looks inward.

I have Claude use the Metricool connector to review my own posts, identify my top performers, and tell me what they have in common beneath the surface numbers.

Almost every piece of traditional advice recommends posting Reels for growth. But my carousels beat my Reels, and not by a little. Claude found they get saved more than five times as often, and every single time I've posted the same idea as both a carousel and a Reel, the carousel wins.

This is the underrated half of pattern recognition. You're sitting on months of your own data, where every post is a tiny experiment your audience already voted on, and most of us never go back to read the results.

The most powerful part comes when you apply these insights to your existing content skills. Over time, I identified two distinct patterns that made a carousel perform well and added two paths to that repurposing skill. Now, each newsletter I write is converted into one step-by-step carousel and one bigger-picture carousel.

Finding what's working and chasing it is how you go viral, but it isn't how you grow. Virality is reverse-engineering top posts and jumping on trends. Growth asks harder questions.

Is your content moving people from viewer to follower to fan, or just stacking up views that go nowhere?

Is it pulling in the right people, or the men who decide to show up the one time out of 400 that you posted a video with a bit more cleavage (unfortunately speaking from experience)?

This is why the patterns from the first two advisors don't always go straight into my content plan. They usually feed into my strategy first.

Give Claude a voice note on your brand, target audience, positioning and content strategy, then use this prompt:

I follow that up with:

My entire niche runs on Reels; often, hype and FOMO Reels. If I'd followed what works, I'd have shifted half my content calendar and tried to keep up. But my own numbers had been telling me for months that the carousel is the format my people save, share, and follow me for. And hype is not part of my content strategy.

A competitor analysis tells you what's popular. Advisors tell you what's popular and right for you.

I do not let AI write my content, and I never will. What the Idea Generator does instead is hand me a list of angles to get my ideas flowing, starting points grounded in what already works and what fits my strategy, so by the time I sit down to write, I'm building on something that's more likely to land.

And because Metricool schedules your posts as well as tracks them, once the board hands me the angles I want to run, I can prep my content in the same place, without leaving the workflow to go copy-paste captions into Instagram at midnight.

The patterns and the planning can come from the data. The thinking has to come from you, because that's the only part that was ever going to set you apart.

I'm still the Artist. The difference is that this year I finally gave her a Scientist to work with.

To run your own board:

1. Create a Metricool account.

You can start free:

2. Connect your own accounts in Metricool, so the Historian has something to read.

3. Add at least 5 competitors from your niche, plus 5 creators you admire from outside it. This is what feeds the Scout.

4. Connect Claude to Metricool: Customize > Connectors > Add a custom connector > paste https://ai.metricool.com/mcp and log in.

5. Download the skill and upload it to Claude (Customize > Skills > Add > Upload a skill) to run all four advisors with /content-advisors.

Grab the free Board of Advisors ➜

Finally, take 3 intentional actions off the back of your findings - whether that’s planning out content more intentionally for next week, updating your strategy, or building out a Claude skill that repeats this process for you on a weekly or fortnightly basis.”