Welcome!

Why did I create chemistryfamous?

I actually don’t know why I created chemistryfamous. I wanted to start an Instagram page, and the first thing that came to mind was to create an online molecular gallery. I’d never seen anything of the sort, and thought it would be an interesting project.

Deciding on a name

During my junior year as an undergraduate, I built a website called “99 Problems but Orgo Ain’t One” to help students perform better in Organic Chemistry I & II. As the website accrued hundreds of hits, I was consequently becoming ‘famous’ among my fellow classmates.

My favorite moment was when I was buying textbooks at the university bookstore. The cashier asked for my student ID (as required) and then said “Oh! You’re Ramis, you built the chemistry website, right?” I replied, “Yeah, you’re in my class?” She said “No, I’m not in chemistry, but I heard about you through some friends”.

In light of these events, my roommate at the time, Escobar, suggested I call the Instagram page ‘chemistryfamous’.

It was a name that was easy to remember, looked slick, and rolled off the tongue nicely. I ran with it.

Phase One: Getting The Ball Rolling

I. My first followers

I would follow a few hundred people and wait for them to follow me back, then purge them all. A cheap, time-consuming, and extremely boring process.

II. Ideas

In the early stages, I would create images about anything that interested me (and most people, in fact): Cocaine, THC, Nicotine, Meth, and things of that nature.

III. My first posts

Extremely basic. Looking back, I’d even say they were cringey. No information, tacky color themes, little effort. I was proud of them at the time, though. Take a look:

IV. Hashtags

At this primitive stage, I used a small list of unrefined hashtags. I didn’t know how important it was to have strategic hashtags at the time. How things have changed…

V. Presentation

I pulled a random image of an atom off Google Images and used it as my logo:

My biography had only my personal IG handle: “@ramisnazir”

Phase Two: Things Get Interesting

I. Pharmacies

About three months after the creation of chemistryfamous, I ran out of ideas to post about. I had gone through all the popular, extremely well-known compounds and came to what felt like a dead-end.

I happened to be in a pharmacy while thinking about what to do with chemistryfamous. Lucky me, because the next month’s content was practically lying in front of me at CVS. I took pictures of the ingredients in a ton of medications at the pharmacy.

From that point forward, I would ‘farm’ ideas from ingredients labels on food, medicine, drinks, cleaning supplies — anything that had a label, pretty much.

• Sometimes, I would come across compounds in my coursework. I would create their infographics, which would help me study for the course while also creating content. I love to hit two birds with one stone.

II. From pictures to infographics

I started adding information to my posts — a decision that has been instrumental to chemistryfamous’ success. Take a look at some of my earliest infographics:

III. Organic followers

A few weeks later, I had reached one thousand followers — a huge accomplishment. After crossing that barrier, I finally started to get organic followers (people that naturally find your page and follow you out of pure interest), and immediately stopped with the ‘follow & unfollow’ strategy I was using in Phase One.

IV. Hashtags

I started utilizing a full set of thirty hashtags. I still hadn’t refined the list, though. Slowly getting there…

Phase Three: Getting Serious

I. Outsourcing the work

About five months in, I started to call on my followers to give me suggestions for content. Not only did they love giving recommendations, but it made my life easier — I did not have to constantly conjure up new ideas, and my content would always be curated to what the people wanted.

Whenever I created an infographic around someone’s suggestion, I gave them a shoutout in the description of the post. This built follower loyalty and appreciation, and also turned chemistryfamous into a community.

To this day, I still rely on suggestions from my followers. Now, I have to use a list on Excel to keep track of them all!

II. Organic followers

Until I reached about 15K followers, I did nothing to “feed” my follower count. It was completely ‘au naturale’.

III. Post optimization

I began experimenting with the appearance of my posts. I asked myself questions like: Should I use a background image or keep it as a color? How many lines of text should be in the picture? What size font should I use? Should I use the same font for each post? Should I include an image of the pill, or the medication bottle, or just stick to the molecular structure? Should I include “@chemistryfamous” somewhere in each picture? You get the point.

I ironed out all the kinks.

• Today, I stick to colored or textured backgrounds. Nothing fancy, or distracting. I want the molecular structure and the textual information to to be the main focus of my images. I sometimes experiment with borders and colored text for the sake of aesthetics.
• I write enough information so that 35–50% of the image is textual real-estate, at most. I make an effort to maintain 9 lines of text in each infographic, but not more; I learned that after 9 lines of text, you get diminishing returns. The text must also be large enough so that it can be easily read on smartphones. Accessibility is everything.
• I always use the “@chemistryfamous” tag in every infographic, because people often share my infographics on their own pages without giving due credit.
• I avoid using extremely scientific or technical terms in my text. Chemistryfamous is supposed to be for everyone, and not only for chemists. I’ve had a lot of fun finding a balance where newcomers can understand the information and advanced chemists are still able to learn a thing or two.

Take a look at my more recent infographics:

IV. Hashtags

I became serious about my use of hashtags. I created an Excel spreadsheet where I keep lists of hashtag sets that differ in the popularity of each hashtag. See below:

I engineered my main hashtag list so that I had a healthy combination of large, medium, and small hashtags. I found that this recipe gave me the greatest exposure. I’m currently experimenting with other hashtag sets that are top-heavy, bottom-heavy, and so on.

V. Presentation

I changed my logo to something a little more vibrant:

Also, I lengthened my biography to this:

Phase Four: $$$

I. Presentation

The first thing I did in Phase Four was design a custom logo to give my page that premium aura.

First impressions are everything:

I decided to completely cut out my biography so that the people who visited my page would be exposed to more of my content without having to scroll past a block of text that no one reads anyways.

We rate people as attractive or not in half a second on Tinder. I believe Instagram works the same way; you have a finite number of seconds to convince a new visitor to stay, and that isn’t going to happen if the first thing they see are sentences instead of your compelling content.

That’s just my opinion though.

II. $1.80

The $1.80 strategy is a technique I discovered online. It involves going to the top nine posts within ten hashtags, and leaving your ‘2 cents’ (i.e. a comment) on each of them.

This strategy will net you followers because IG often displays the comments from larger accounts underneath photos, while hiding comments from weaklings 😉

Users will click on your handle when they see your comment, and that might convert into a follow. I’ve been experimenting with this strategy a little bit in Phase Four.

III. Monetization

As I approached the 20K mark, I started aggressively marketing for small businesses and large companies.

There are two ways that I’ve monetized chemistryfamous:

1. Affiliate programs

Advertise a product and make commission on each sale.

2. One-time-payments

The business pays a one-time fee to advertise their product on your page, but you do not make any commission.

I started with #1, and quickly realized I was making peanuts for the amount of work I was putting in to create the advertisements and for ‘littering’ my feed with them.

I switched to #2, and made the businesses responsible for providing the visual content that would be the basis of the advertisement. It was at this point that I started generating a steady revenue stream from chemistryfamous.

The #2 approach is especially useful because it allows you to be compensated for the followers that the business’ page would receive, even if no sale was made!

IV. The Elevator

Instead of pulling the money out of chemistryfamous to buy myself expensive drinks at Starbucks (which I did in the beginning, mind you), I spent it all on advertising chemistryfamous on even bigger pages.

I’ve made connections with admins of IG pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, and I often pay them to put my infographics on their feeds and stories. This method has netted the greatest number of followers in the shortest amount of time, by far.

The Future

I will make another case study once I reach the 50K mark, and once again at the 100K mark.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this has been useful.

Check out chemistryfamous on Instagram or Facebook!