A page for Black women of every shade, grown to 274K on Instagram.
I started it as a page I enjoyed running, with no launch plan. It grew to 274K followers on Instagram and 87K on Facebook, and creators and small businesses started paying to be featured.
- Community building
- Content curation
- Creator relationships
- Promotion packages
Instagram followers
Facebook followers
accounts reached in one week
interactions the same week
Chapter 01
The voice
Uplifting Black queens of all shades.
A portrait, a beauty look, fashion, a cultural moment or an affirmation, all of it still had to feel like BlackCocoaGirls. Posts came from relationships with models, what people were talking about and what was trending.
31 posts and Stories
Caption ideas and hashtag groups were ready so I was never starting from zero every day.
34 posts and 26 Stories
A post gives a creator a lasting place on the grid. Stories let me share faster and point people to something timely.
Chapter 02
Growth
It grew in stages.
Drag through the stages. Most of the growth came from posting every day, reading the comments and keeping in touch with the people I featured.
The page at around 124K followers.
One stretch went from 116,907 to 179,742 followers, with some days adding thousands.
Another stage of the page, at 190K followers.
Where the community stood on Instagram in October 2026.
Chapter 03
Both sides of growth
New follows, and who left.
A seven-day view showed 5,312 new follows and 1,131 unfollows.
Chapter 04
What the audience did
Reach was only part of it.
One reporting week: 427,706 accounts reached, 1.43 million impressions and 116,329 interactions.
Reach and impressions
One reporting week.
Likes, saves, shares and comments
The same week.
Chapter 05
Who was watching
People found the page well beyond my circle.
In one audience view, 46% were in the United States, with Brazil and Nigeria also among the leading countries. New York, Atlanta, Lagos and Houston appeared in the city breakdowns. That international audience later shaped the promotion requests.
Chapter 06
The service
People started paying to be featured.
Models, creators and small businesses DMed asking to be featured. They paid us for promotion. We did not pay models to appear.
Chapter 07
The messy parts
The hard parts.
The Instagram account was locked or disabled more than once amid suspected unauthorised access, with customer features to manage while working through support. It made me think harder about record keeping, how I talked to customers and how much of a business should sit on one platform.
It taught me how a community gets built: have a clear point of view, show up every day, credit people properly and say yes when they ask to pay you.What I took from it
