In today’s social media-crazed age, brands and influencers are obsessing over their follower count. Some even go so far as to buy followers or use automated engagement tools to make themselves look better on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But, does follower count matter when it comes to success in digital marketing?
Does Follower Count on Social Media Matter?
One of the first tips the “experts” in social media marketing tell you is to grow your brand’s following on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But, most of the time, that’s not a crucial element of your business’s success online. It plays a part, but it’s not the end-all, be-all we once thought it was.
Sure, when you think about why social media followers matters, it looks great to people discovering your business online. When you have thousands of followers already interested in your brand, you can look more legit and experienced in your industry. Those followers are often like a vote of confidence from people who have engaged with your business online previously. It can show people who are new to your brand that you’re trustworthy—popular, even.
However, it’s not as much a measure of your business success as you may have originally thought. Influencers and brands often use some shady methods to grow their following that isn’t always in their best interest. They seem to think that the number of followers they have equates to some type of monetary value. Simply having more followers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get more business, though.
Things That Matter More than Follower Count
Digital marketing best practices are all about creating and distributing content that’s the most valuable to your potential customers and making sure it reaches the right audience. It’s our job as marketers to figure out how to best reach them at the right place (or platform) at the right time. However, if your social media following is saturated with fake bot accounts or people who care little about your business, no one’s going to resonate with that content.
Here are some digital marketing efforts that mean more than just the quantity of your followers:
Engaged, relevant, and interested followers
Quality over quantity is always a good place to start. Avoid wasting your marketing budget creating great content, only for it to be ignored by your fake or bought social media following.
Instead, focus your efforts on growing the right amount of relevant, engaged followers. You want people to want to follow you. Research brands and accounts that are relevant to your business and your target audience. Engage with those accounts to encourage more people to follow your brand. That way, the accounts that end up following you will already be interested in what you post about. The online relationship will be more genuine, and in turn, more valuable to your business.
Traffic to your website (that’s optimized for conversions)
One of the main reasons brands use social media is to drive traffic to their website. But what happens when those followers get to your website? You want your site’s visitors to engage with your brand, or in other words, to convert. After they come to read your content, you want them to take an action like reaching out to contact you or to make a purchase.
It’s important to strategize how to get traffic to your site, (like proper social media marketing and SEO for instance). But, it’s even more crucial that your site is optimized to achieve conversions. Make sure it’s easy for a visitor to find out how to get in contact with your business. Your correct name, address, phone number, and email should be easily accessible (and clickable) in your site’s header.
Also, make it easy for visitors to fill out a form to contact you to ask questions or show interest in your products or services. Embed form fills on multiple places on your site, like your homepage, services pages, and contact page. Make them simple and easy to locate so people can fill one out quickly and without distraction.
Gaining more traffic to your site and placing easy-to-find calls to action can grow the leads your business gets.
Pages ranking on the first page
Organic rankings are a great way to bring more business to your brand. Many people tend to trust and click on organic search results more than paid ads. Also, when people search keywords online, they’re in a specific section of the sales funnel—meaning, they’re literally looking for a brand to provide them with an answer or solution.
When your brand shows up in those results, the person reading your content will be much more likely to engage with your brand or make a purchase. They were looking for you! You just have to do a little work to make yourself more visible online. They’re much more likely to continue engaging with your brand than that bot who follows your Twitter account.
Subscribers to your email newsletters
Similar to people searching for your content or services in organic results, subscribers to your email marketing are also voluntarily looking to read your content. When someone subscribes to your email newsletter, they’re willingly giving you their email address, proclaiming, “I want more content from you!”
This gives you the opportunity to interact with them monthly, weekly, or every few days to remind them about your brand. Use email marketing tools to announce new products or services—maybe even offer them a discount for being a loyal subscriber. You’re much more likely to find success of monetary value from email list subscribers than Facebook followers.
We’ve Got the Secrets to Social Media Marketing
Post Launch is a social media marketing agency dedicated to finding better solutions for your online marketing. Sure, we can help grow your followers, but there are so many more avenues that’ll help your business succeed. Talk to us about them today.
