Written by Grace Kohn
Are more followers really better?
At the beginning stages of social media with MySpace and Facebook, the goal was always to have as many “friends” or “followers” as possible – giving the user virtual bragging rights. Twenty years later, at first look, follower count still seems like a big deal. Now, that is not the case.
Social media for small business is all about the audience. Your audience is built from your customer base and friends of your customers. Customers unfollow due to a multitude of reasons: lack of engagement, lack of quality content, hard salesy content, an abrupt tone shift, and many more.
Lack Of Engagement
Engagement goes both ways. How often your customer engages with your posts is important to track but engaging with your customer’s comments is crucial! Showing your customers that you care about what they say can encourage brand loyalty and humanize your account.
Hard Salesy Content
SALE SALE SALE! In your face, loud, salesy content all the time is a turn off for everyone. Keeping your content real by showing and not telling is best! Showing your customer your personality, your brand values and your product, pushes the sale without being pushy.
Lack Of Content/Quality
If you are not consistently posting quality content, your customer will forget about
you and lose interest. Try to post every day, if possible!
Tone Shift
It is important to stay true to your brand mission, values, colors etc. when posting on your accounts. You need to stay recognizable to your customer in order to build trust. Your followers like to know what to expect from you and what they will get out of following your accounts. If you are planning a rebrand, try to ease into it or do a countdown so that your followers are prepared for what is to come.
Keep in mind that if you see a big influx of followers coming or going – and you haven’t gone viral recently – they are likely bots. “Bots” are computer run accounts that are meant to mimic human activity to perform social media interactions at a large scale. Bots artificially boost account engagement and are usually not good for your account as they are illegal on most social media platforms.
Although a large number of followers can build your credibility with those that are not familiar with your brand, your audience will not care about the number on the screen, rather the content that you create. If you consistently produce educational, fun and engaging content, you can retain your audience and even gain new followers faster than you might think.
