Let’s look at why Vanity Statistics don’t matter.
As a service-based business owner, do you believe that you need to have thousands of social media followers to reflect yourself best online?
When growing up an Instagram account, it is not uncommon to receive numerous direct messages from businesses selling followers.
Has this ever happened to you?
While it is a normal goal to gain followers, this is what tells us we are growing and doing a good job. That our audience enjoys the content types; helpful provides value and connects you deeper with them while building up a sense of trust and familiarity.
However, it seems very counter-intuitive to me to pay for that following!
Each to their own but truth be told I find it a little frustrating.
Social media is social; the point is to connect, engage, entertain and be visible.
To truly gain a targeted audience, who take value from what you share & may convert to a customer. This audience then needs to have been built via a genuine interest in your content or services by authentic connection and engagement.
There is no shortcut!
Paying for a load of random followers does not equate to genuine engagement.
Have you looked closely at some of those big accounts with over 10K followers?
The ones that if you look closely, you can see they have paid for their followers. How can we tell?
When looking at such an account, a tell-tell sign could be general post-interaction.
If posts on that page show very little engagement, in measurements of likes, comments and general interaction seem to be quite low in proportion to their account’s size; this doesn’t look right.
Generally, how you measure your engagement & growth is relative to your audience size.
If your account has 200 followers and each post gets between 6-10 likes and comments, this is a good proportion to measure engagement.
As your account grows, the number of likes and comments should increase, it is telling you that your audience is engaged and genuinely interested in your content.
Less than 1% of your overall audience size interacting with your content equates to a low engagement rate.
Between 1% – 3% is considered average and a good engagement rate.
Anything above means amazing!
So, going back to an account with over 10K followers, you would expect to see at least 200 likes per post?
As a social media manager, I would feel a fraud if I paid for my audience.
When you are starting to grow a new profile, don’t be put off because unless you have mighty attraction superpowers or a new strategy you wish to share with me, of course, there won’t be many followers.
But that’s okay and does not negatively reflect on your business or you at all. It’s normal!
The fun and learning come within the journey and where real knowledge & confidence comes from.
Enjoy experimenting with your profile as it organically grows, pay attention to the trial-and-error process; it is so valuable and insightful.
? By doing, you learn what content types, posting frequency, engagement methods, hashtag experiments work for you and your audience.
? How would you understand what works & what doesn’t if you’ve gone from 100 to 10K followers in a few weeks?
? It is better to have 100 genuine followers who enjoy your content and interact instead of thousands of random people, possibly bots also who have no legitimate interest in your brand.
? It may even harm your algorithm having an account filled with randoms & bots who don’t interact with your content. Why?
On Instagram, when you share a post, it is only shown to about 10% of your audience.
When people start interacting, this communicates to the algorithm that people like your content.
The more people respond the more people see your post because it is now being put in front of a wider audience. That’s how the algorithms work.
To read more about algorithms check out this read from Later Media
Don’t harm your profiles before you’ve given them a chance to grow organically, it may take a while, but there are such valuable insights to be found along that road.
Do you need an extra pair of hands?
If you need a social media manager who will get into your head and the head of your ideal clients, devise a strategy to pave the way forward for why not book a free get to know you call with me and let’s see if we are a natural fit for each other.
