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Today our @YoungMindsUK Instagram account that today hit ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOLLOWERS!! 
This is an appreciation thread for @ZzShirin, @TomBoon94 and everything they and their team did to create this inspirational community of support on our channel.
This is an appreciation thread for @ZzShirin, @TomBoon94 and everything they and their team did to create this inspirational community of support on our channel.
It was doing ok, tootling along on 10k followers until 2 years ago @TomBoon94 posted this. You'll recognise this sort of thing from a load of charity accounts these days, but this simple idea, to take a quote from a young person and humanise it on a post-it, changed our approach
We were sourcing these incredible real life stories from young people. Through our Instagram we were now able to generate this little messages of hope, advice, reassurance and solidarity. They always came from young people, and linked to a deeper story, so they really resonated.
We were lucky to have, in our receptionist @jenspringall and our content officer @zoeleec, two brilliant illustrators. So we started to mix our simple written notes with more crafted content, with the same ethos.
Sometimes it felt important to hear from young people directly, so we also created video content to achieve this. @TomBoon94, who manages our social channels, is self-taught but makes exquisite content that works perfectly for the platform.
Instagram is full of awesome mental health contributors, so we have reached out to them to promote their work on our channel. Win/win.
Influencers like @danielhowell and @BellaRamsey have played a massive part too, reaching into new audiences for us and getting our advice and support to more young people.
Reading the comments under any of our posts you can always see how much they mean to people. They help people to feel less alone with what they are dealing with.
This account is all about what we can give to you as a follower. But that means on the rare occasions that we use it to promote a petition, a survey, an event or a bit or merch, the response is huge. We are building an army of young people who really want to give back.
I could honestly bang on about this account all day but I'll leave it there, only to make sure its clear that I take no credit for it, other than that I am REALLY good at recruiting and keeping the most wonderful, committed, talented people in my team.
Actually, one more thing. Arsenal legend Tony Adams does this on 90% of our posts and it makes me smile every time.
