This is how you become a cat influencer.

Coline Doebelin, an R&D Analyst at Accenture Interactive in the South of France, started to post for fun the day she got her cat.

At first, she just wanted to check if she could get followers.

I always wanted a cat but I couldn’t get it until I got a job and was stable in that sense. And as soon as I got my cat, I started to learn that a lot of my friends had and loved cats.

Coline Doebelin studied computer science and engineering in France and now she works as an R&D Analyst at Accenture Interactive in the South of France.

When I started I had nothing planned. I didn’t open this account to become an influencer. One day I started to share content with people and they were interested.

Oh, were the people interested! Cats and people have enjoyed a close relationship for thousands of years now. Cave paintings of cats date back 10,000 years, and ancient Egyptians considered the animals to be sacred, even mummifying some felines just like humans.

But once the internet made its appearance in our lives, cats became an internet obsession.

The New York Times described cat images as “that essential building block of the Internet.”

And according to this CNN article, about 6.5 billion cat pictures exist on the web.

It’s a cat story with a twist

When Coline started she decided to use Instagram and opened an account called @neline_the_lioness, and in just 6 months she gathered 10,000 followers. But today that account is not growing as fast. “Right now I’m mostly speaking about nutrition, offering ideas for recipes for cats. And to my surprise, once I started to speak about ingredients, meals, and balanced diets for cats, I had to open a new account on Instagram (@Thelittlecarnivore) because the original audience was not interested in this new topic.

I’m really passionate about the topic of feline nutrition and now I post recipes and nutrition information on my website The Little Carnivore, videos on my YouTube channel, and some fun videos on TikTok. Some of the content is in French and English”.

Coline has two cats who are the stars of the show: “Néline, who is a three-year-old Norwegian Forest cat, her coat color is black amber blotched tabby, and white. She is full of energy and terribly curious. She loves playing and could do it all day long. She enjoys going out on walks. And Praline is a two-year-old Norwegian Forest cat, her color is black amber smoke. She is a little mischievous creature but also very cuddly.”

A brief history of internet obsession with cats

Feline celebrity status is a hard club to belong to, and in 20+ years the internet has given us a good collection of Cat fathom:

Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami started the website I Can Haz Cheezburger in 2007, where they shared funny pictures of cats. This site allowed users to create LOL cat memes by placing writing on top of pictures of their cats. This site now has more than 100 million views per month and has “created a whole new form of internet speak”

The first cat video on YouTube was uploaded in 2005 by YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who posted a video of his cat called “Pajamas and Nick Drake. As of yesterday, it had 219,174 views.

You might remember Grumpy Cat (Tardar Sauce) who by March 2013, was such a popular internet meme that she attended South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival, hosted at the Mashable House, where she appeared for two hours each day as Grumpy Cat.

But perhaps the Kardashian-of-the-cat-world is without a doubt Maru. Who holds the record for most views for an animal on YouTube with over 325 million views.

There have been many studies and many articles dedicated to answering one of the most popular questions of the internet era: What’s the obsession of the internet with Cats?

Research has suggested that viewing online cat media is related to positive emotions and that it may even work as a form of digital therapy or stress relief for some users.

A University of Texas study concluded that people who prefer cats are more introverted, sensitive, non-conformist, and creative, and these traits are shared by many Internet users.

And the prestigious Museum of the Moving Image in New York had an exhibit in 2015 called ‘How Cats Took Over the Internet.

Fans, influence, and $

Coline is really happy to have transitioned from posting pictures of her cat to a more meaningful topic like cat nutrition, but she sees the effect content has on growth.

“As soon as I stop posting content, I start losing followers, and many of my content creator friends have the same experience. The biggest challenge is to grow while keeping the engagement. It’s harder to engage when you serve 100,000 people.”

My goal now is to educate people about nutrition which is a significant change of mindset, to go from my cat is cute to education and the benefits of homemade diets. And even though I have just 5,000 followers on the nutrition-focused account, compared to the 100,000 on the original account, the engagement is higher. People are more involved and more interested in nutrition than in just cute cats. There is plenty of room for all types of content in the Cat universe, that’s one of the features of the internet, but the competition for attention is ruthless, and the demand for original and relevant content could feel like a full-time job for creators.

“Finding the time is the biggest challenge.”

That and the balance between all the channels I have. It’s hard! I take pictures, I edit the photos, I write the articles for the blog, I research nutrition topics and ideas… Basically, my whole time outside Accenture is dedicated to creating, posting, managing, and growing these accounts.”

And yes some cat owners make substantial amounts of money from their social media presence. One of the most popular ones is Nala the cat, a Siamese-Tabby mix, who was rescued from a shelter at five months old and is based in Los Angeles. Now seven, the blue eyed-beauty has 3.9 million Instagram followers and is reported to earn as much as $625,000 (£483k) a year from appearances and brand endorsements.

When I started to see the potential for my original Instagram account, I decided that I had to experiment and learn on the go. I also contacted content creators that I admired and I learned from their headlines and their hashtags. But nothing works best than just seeing what works best with your audience. I did a lot of experiments, that’s for sure. But I didn’t want to get lost in the analytic world. I wanted to mix it with my intuition too.

“And to learn what works on each platform requires patience too.”

It took me 6 months to reach 1,000 followers on YouTube, but it was much easier on Tiktok to reach 14,000 fans.

The quality of the video edit is important for Youtube, but it takes more time to get it right and makes it harder to be consistent, which is essential to drive growth.

The number of followers could be distracting, almost an obsession at the beginning, but now I am more interested in engagement, conversations, and relationships.

I am an influencer, but I prefer to call myself a content creator. I know my posts influence people so yes, I am an influencer.

Follow Coline on Linkedin