Do you ever feel like building a social media following is an uphill battle? The endless posting, commenting, and sharing can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re just starting out.
You may be wondering if there’s space for your brand in a seemingly saturated market. When you see a similar brand taking off on social media you may think to yourself,
“What am I doing wrong? Is there some secret formula I’m missing?”
As marketers, we’ve all been there. As entrepreneurs, we all dream of a thriving online community eager to engage with our brand! But the truth is, there is no magic formula. It’s about finding the right strategies and staying consistent.
In this guide, we’ll ditch the quick fixes and explore real ways to build a loyal audience and spark meaningful connections for your brand.
The Pitfalls of Focusing on Follower Count
When we’re approached by clients for social media management, one of the things we often hear from them is, “I want to increase my follower count by X by such and such date.”
Some clients want 4,000, while some want 40,000. In their eyes, the more followers they have, the higher their mark of success as a business.
However, social media following is not a true indicator of a brand’s success, and in many ways, it can be misleading.
Why Follower Count Can Be Misleading
At its foundation, follower count is one of the easiest metrics to observe on social media. At a glance, it can give someone an idea of how many users have shown enough interest in a brand or individual that they’re willing to fill up valuable real estate on their feeds with their content.
There are a couple of reasons why follower count IS important:
- It offers immediate visibility and shows how large of a reach a brand may have
- It enhances a brand’s perceived authority or credibility
- It indicates a greater number of opportunities for engagement, as the greater number of followers often implies a greater number of interaction opportunities.
You’ve likely come across Instagram accounts that have well over 100,000 followers. However, when you look at the ratio of follower engagement to follower count, the disproportion is clear.
With that many followers, a post with a few comments and less than 100 likes seems suspect, offering one of the many examples of inflated numbers and bot accounts. Oftentimes, these followers were purchased, and unfortunately, there’s harm in this kind of inauthentic growth.
Sure, other brands will consider potential reach when looking for sponsorships or partnerships, but beyond follower count, what they’re often looking for is a deeper sense of interaction and engagement. As such, purchasing followers for the sake of quantity can ultimately hurt your credibility.
The Value of Engagement
Brand engagement is the bond followers have with a brand.
While it may sound a bit esoteric, it’s a measure of the connection, dedication, and loyalty reflected by those individuals. Brands with higher engagement often have a more active and long-lasting relationship with their customers.
From a more tangible standpoint, engagement is a catch-all term to describe how followers respond and connect with your posts, whether via likes, comments, shares, or direct messages.
While follower count may give you the audience, it’s engagement that measures how captivated and compelled that audience is. It measures how you build trust and relationships, and most importantly, drive conversions.
Building a Loyal Audience
Building a loyal audience is a key part of any successful marketing strategy, and if you want to foster authentic engagement with your followers, you have to be authentic yourself!
Over 88% of consumers say authenticity is crucial when deciding which brands to support. When people perceive your brand as genuine and transparent, they become more likely to support you.
Some actionable strategies here might include:
- Sharing personal stories
- Sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses of your business or daily life
- Sharing user-generated content
- Taking time to respond to comments and messages.
The key here is getting involved with the conversation your audience is having. Respond to comments or ask for feedback. According to Sprout Social, more than 51% of consumers find brands that respond to comments on social media more memorable. Essentially, how you engage is a key factor in developing long-term growth.
Quality Over Quantity
In the end, quality is vastly more valuable for business than quantity.
Any savvy entrepreneur would take 1,000 followers in their locale who actively engage with their posts and show interest in their products and services, rather than 100,000 followers who don’t engage with their posts and could care less about their business.
To obtain quality followers on social media, you have to create engaging content that offers value to both existing and potential customers and aligns with your brand identity.
- Understand Your Target Audience: Attracting quality customers means knowing who they are. Rather than focusing your efforts on a broad audience, find an audience that resonates with what matters most to your business. This way, you’ll avoid creating generic or irrelevant content.
- Be Purposeful: Avoid posting just to fill a gap in the schedule. Your content should be genuine and reflect the authenticity of your brand. It’s much easier to convert customers with timely, relatable content.
- Provide Value: People want valuable tips and tricks from the industry experts they follow. As a fashion brand, for example, you might share insights about the “latest fashion trends for spring” or “staying stylish in the summer heat.”
- Pick the Right Platform: Focus more of your energy on a few social networks if you’re just starting out. That way, you can concentrate your content creation efforts and avoid spreading yourself too thin.
Leveraging Analytics
As your follower count grows, make it a point to track your engagement metrics. These measurable data points, which include clicks, likes, comments, and shares, offer insight into how well your posts are connecting or resonating with your audience.
Your engagement rate is the main metric at play. It is the total number of interactions with your content divided by the total number of followers and multiplied by 100%.
Most social media platforms offer built-in analytics, though some, such as TikTok and Instagram, only offer access to analytics with a business or creator account.
Beyond stock analytics tools, there are numerous third-party tools you can use for a more in-depth look at your engagement, regardless of the type of content you’re making:
- Pirsonal (Video Analytics): With Pirsonal, you can track video engagement analytics to create better data-driven video content at scale.
- Google Analytics (Website Analytics): Google Analytics is easily one of the most powerful and comprehensive web analytics tools on the market today, keeping track of everything from user behavior to conversion rates.
- minter.io (Social Media Analytics): For robust social media analytics, Minter.io is one of our favorites. It offers robust metrics and content performance analytics across numerous social media platforms.
Case Studies and Success Stories
With effective ad targeting and carefully curated visual content, it’s hard to think of another B2C industry that has thrived as much on social media as the beauty and apparel industry.
If you’re just getting your feet wet, you can learn from these brands below:
After the Girlfriend’s free leggings promotion back in 2017, the brand experienced a boom in its social media growth. Since then, the team has been able to maintain that loyal following with a mixture of gorgeous photography, funny, relatable memes, and, of course, consistent customer engagement.
Portland-based clothing brand Wildfang focuses on inclusive fashion and self-expression. Over the years, it has enjoyed consistent growth and engagement by sharing content solely related to the brand’s core values.
From posting behind-the-scenes content for their 48-hour DRAG-A-THON event to raising money for nonprofits like The Trevor Project, they’ve built a deep and conscious connection with their audience.
The LA-based, made-to-order vintage clothing boutique is known for its impressive blend of vintage styles and current tastes. The brand’s owner, Alia Meagan, noticed a missing link in the vintage market, and so she began crafting her own in-house line that she now sells via Instagram and her Los Angeles storefront. She was able to build a substantial fanbase from her unique idea, turning her custom, single-piece business into a mass-market strategy, simply by showing off the things she loved and believed the market was missing.
The Role of a Digital Marketing Agency
As you start developing a strategy to boost your engagement and grow your follower count on social media, you have three main options:
- Take the DIY approach
- Hire a social media person
- Hire an experienced digital marketing agency
There are definite benefits to each approach.
Experience
Digital marketing requires years of experience and covers a wide range of solutions, from SEO to PPC to social media management and beyond.
While you could take a three-month social media crash course and start building your followers on your own, your strategies will likely lack the level of consistency and expertise a digital marketing agency can offer.
On the other hand, hiring a social media manager internally can provide you with expertise similar to an agency, though you won’t reap the same benefits of having access to a team of experienced professionals with diverse skill sets
Time
Beyond experience, building your followers on social media requires careful planning. You need to consider how much time you actually have to invest in your efforts. By outsourcing this work to a digital marketing agency, you can focus on your existing customers and your business.
While an internal social media manager may take some of the pressure off, there can be similar time constraints if they’re focusing on other tasks.
Cost
Every entrepreneur wants the best results for the lowest investment. Initially, DIY marketing can provide you with that. However, in the long run, it can slow down the process and negatively impact your productivity and revenue as you invest time into other areas of the business.
While hiring a professional may mean higher initial costs, you get access to their valuable skills and resources. It’s an investment for long-term success.
Quality
Quality digital marketing agencies rely on careful planning and optimal resource use. With a DIY marketing approach, knowing how to use certain tools optimally or getting your timing right can be a struggle. As a result, it can lower the quality of your approach.
When you hire an agency, you get access to the best tools and the expertise to use them.
Overall, an affordable, quality agency can help new entrepreneurs like you focus on more meaningful metrics and achieve their marketing goals, from building the ideal customer profile to creating clear, actionable, and measurable goals.
Key Takeaways
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
That quote comes from Goodhart’s Law, which outlines the futility of optimizing for the objective of a hyper-specific goal, no matter the consequences. As a result, we neglect other aspects of the same situation, which are equally important.
In the case of social media, we miss the true point of growth when we focus too much on the number of followers we have.
A large follower count might look impressive from the outside, but it doesn’t guarantee the quality engagement or relevant conversion signals that a brand needs to grow.
Rather than focusing on your follower count, create engaging, meaningful content that aligns with your existing or potential followers.
Our NYC digital fashion marketing agency has helped dozens of innovative brands avoid common marketing mistakes and build loyal followings from the ground up.
When you’re ready to invest in your brand and build a stronger, more engaged online presence, get in touch with our team here at Ombre Digital for a free consultation.
