Your follower count doesn’t matter. There we said it. You must be thinking ‘what do they mean, it doesn’t matter? If follower count doesn’t matter, what does?’ There are many factors that contribute to the success of your brand on social media (and we talk about a few of these in this blog post).
Social media makes it easy to compare our “success” to others’. As an outsider, it’s hard to judge a business if sales, profit and revenue numbers are private, so we revert to the next best thing: their popularity on social media and in this day and age, your follower count on Instagram specifically. But there are a few things wrong with this judgement.
The amount of followers does not equal the total number of sales. Of course, the two can be (and often are) related, but more followers does not guarantee more success for a number of reasons. Having a large, uninterested audience will do nothing for your bottom line compared to a loyal, engaged following of any size. Instead of blindly increasing your follower count, it’s more productive to slowly increase a smaller group of people highly interested in your product.
You should also consider your product as it relates to the audience on each social platform. Generally speaking, lifestyle brands with an audience that skews younger tend to perform better on Instagram. If you’re selling a product to an audience that doesn’t fit this, perhaps high follower growth is not in the cards for your brand on Instagram. And that’s okay. You may find more success on Facebook or on Pinterest.
To combat the follower race, you should stop playing the comparison game before you even start. Not everything is always as it seems on the internet. With the rise of Instagram as a business tool and the judgement of legitimacy based on follower numbers, some accounts have tried to take the easy route by purchasing followers and using bots to increase their following. While this inflates their total follower numbers, it does little for engagement and impressions, which are important metrics for digital marketing success and conversion.
If follower count is what you want to focus on, then go forth and conquer that growth. However, if your follower number is getting you down and affecting your focus, just ignore it. Commit to creating high quality content and developing loyal relationships with the followers you already have.
Now you may be wondering what to do now that you have permission to stop worrying about that silly number on your account. Reach out to us today to talk about a custom social media strategy and management program. This will give you the knowledge and tools to go after a targeted audience for more sales and engagement.