Size Doesn’t Matter When It Comes To Social Following
For many social media marketers, the sum of their success is the total number of social followers they have. They tout the number as some type of badge of honor and seem to believe that they are the superior marketer when they meet someone who has a smaller social network. Don’t sweat them. Social media marketers still measuring success by their follower count are like web marketers that still measure success by page views (please tell me you don’t do that too). They’re looking at the wrong KPI.
You’ve worked hard and built a good sized social following. That’s great and shouldn’t be discounted, but the number of followers is much less important than two other factors of your social audience: their level of engagement and how qualified they are. Why do these two trump the total size of your social following? Lets take a look at each and see why they’ll get you much further than simple size.
Engagement Of Audience
Simply put, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 200 or 200,000,000 followers if they aren’t engaged. Look at almost any social account with a very large following and you’ll see that they generally have a much lower rate of engagements than those with smaller followings. What good is it to have a huge following, if only a small percentage of those people engage with what you’re posting?
Building better engagement is a topic we’ll dive deeper into in a later post but determining what kind of content your audience loves takes testing different content types, messaging, frequency, and more. Play around and see what works best for your channel. While there are many that will tell you the type of content or messaging that will work, few recognize that every network and every audience is different. What works for one, might not work for another. Get ideas from others but you’re going to have to test and find what works best for your particular audience.
It should be noted that while engagement levels are generally related to how well the content shared resonates with their following, there are there are other factors that can cause them to drop. Spammers, bots, and other junk accounts often follow large legitimate accounts in order to appear more legit themselves and with hopes of being followed in return. For example, some estimates believe half of Barack Obama’s Twitter followers are fake and Justin Bieber recently lost 3.5 million Instagram followers when they pruned fake accounts.
Engagement rate is more important than follower count because a highly engaged audience can get your messaging much further than a low engagement following even with a much higher follower count. Here’s a look at engagement rates from a couple of my own accounts. The graphs show the average engagement rate over a 1 month period. The one on the left has over 50,000 followers, while the one on the right has just 25,000. Do the math. Which would you rather have? The one with the higher number of followers (left) or the one with the more engaged audience (right)?
Quality Of Followers
Engagement alone isn’t a measure of a great audience. While it’s great to have an audience that’s highly engaged with your content, it also has to be made up of the right type of followers. If you sell IT services but your audience is made up of retired seniors, it doesn’t matter how much they engage with your content, they’re never going to buy from you.
Measuring the quality of your engaged followers is simple. Dive into those sharing your messaging (looking at retweeters is a good way) and I’m sure you’ll find there are some that often engage but their profile makes it clear they aren’t your target audience. Many times these are bots or other junk accounts that are looking for legit content to fill their feeds. If you’re just going by your engagement numbers, you’re including these in your success, when in reality these followers will never become customers.
You should take this analysis even further by not only looking at who is engaging with your content but who is in their network. Generally the assumption is that a retweet/share is great because a message resonated with a member of your audience and they’re now sharing it with their audience. But who is their audience? As a message gets shared and re-shared, it sees a less and less engaged and targeted audience. Think about your own Facebook account. You may care about this social media analytics post but if you share it with your Facebook friends, how many of them really care about social analytics? Not many most likely. Just think about all of the articles the people you follow share, which you have zero interest in. Generally, only a small percentage of the audience your content is shared and re-shared with will fit your target demographic.
Assessing who is engaging allows you to build a better picture of the quality of your following and if you’re really engaging people that matter to you. Verifying that current customers and qualified potential customers are truly engaging with your content will give you a much better picture of who your following is. Don’t simply assume you’re engaging the people you wanted to engage; know you are.
Engaged, Quality Followers > Pure Follower Count
Just measuring your social success by follower count is far from meaningful. Building a following that is made up of highly engaged followers that are within your customer profile will get you much further and allow you to achieve far greater success with your social marketing. We often see small social accounts crush accounts that are hundreds of times larger simply because they have a higher caliber audience.
Forget building follower. They’re great but you’ll get far better return by investing your time in building a great audience that’s highly engaged and aligned. Create a quality channel, with highly engaging content and you’ll be able to build a highly engaged audience who’s profile aligns with that which your content was created for. If you build that, the followers will come too, but they’ll be far higher in value. As always, quality over quantity. Let others brag about their follower count and smile, knowing you’ve built a far better audience.
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