Why is the engagement of social media followers more important than the number of followers?

In this age of followers and influencers In this day and age of influencers and followers, it is easy to focus only on gaining a considerable number of followers on social media as a business. But it is essential to recognize that engagement with buy facebook likes uk is more crucial than following. This is true for both B2B as well as B2C. However, getting the right kind of engagement isn’t easy. To assist you, we’ve created this guide on the importance of attention and how to achieve it.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUSINESS

If you’re a business owner, you’d be living in a cave to be aware of the significance of social media in business. Social media is essential for companies to increase their customer base and brand. It is an integral part of your content marketing strategy. An organization that doesn’t have a presence on social media in the present day is outdated. It gives customers a wrong impression–something you want to avoid at all costs. Social media and your website serve as your 24-hour online ambassador for your business.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT?

Social media engagement is an online dialogue between individuals. You initiate conversations with your audience or followers when you share content via social media. If they share, like, or make a comment, they are engaging with your posts. Social media is often the initial step toward a lasting business relationship. Engaging with your network could result in inquiries from businesses, sign-ups for emails, websites, emails, and much more. Social media for businesses is about connecting with those who could be customers shortly. The more active you are with them, the more likely they will conduct business with you.

ENGAGEMENT OVER FOLLOWERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Consider social media engagement as a form of quality over quantity. You have a loyal following (can be as few as a handful) who are engaged on your page and purchasing from you. They’re dedicated to you. With the number of followers, it is possible to have thousands of followers. However, none of them are paying attention or purchase from you. This means you’ll have a lower return on investment for your business.

Additionally, having a large following can result in “vanity metrics” (feed your self-esteem); however, it doesn’t provide a high return on investment. You need to have a certain number of followers to be considered a serious one, but it doesn’t have to be huge. Always choose quality over quantity!

TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

Based on your goals for your business and the strategies for content marketing, There are a variety of kinds of engagement (how your followers interact with your brand) that you can track on your social media platforms to provide you with metrics, such as:

• Likes on posts
• Posts that are shared
• Comments on posts
• Replies to posts
• Tags of your readers in your posts
• The mention of you in posts from other people by using the hashtag you
• How many clicked through the link you posted
• How many people watched a video you posted

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT IS A TWO-WAY STREET

As with any relationship, like any other relationship, social media engagement is a two-way process where your followers interact with them, and you connect with them. It’s not always feasible to respond to every post. But, if you’re unable to put in the effort, or you’re not able to find enough time to do it, think about hiring a team who will. People are thrilled when they get a response from someone. It builds trust and builds loyalty. It is also a good idea to consider collaborating with companies that share the same beliefs and values that you do. It could result in followerspro:

• Partnerships
• Referrals
• Shoutouts
• Endorsements
• Sponsorships
• And who knows what else?

If someone were to ask you, “How do you know when you’re doing well on social media?”, what would your answer be?

When people first think of social media success, chances are they think of getting as many followers as they can. In the past, a high follower count was the ultimate element of social proof online. It’s an easy way to compare brands against their competitors, choose influencers to work with, and measure supposed social media success. After all, the more followers, the better, right? It only makes sense that the higher a brand’s follower count, the more credible they are.

But in more recent times, the opportunities made readily available to buy followers and likes have grown exponentially and for a relatively cheap price too. With this in mind, the number of followers that you have on social media isn’t always the best indication of how well your posts are actually performing.

So, what is?

Engagement. This element of social media analytics refers to the behaviour and actions of users towards content – the likes, comments, shares, video views.

Now, why should you place more importance on your social media engagement, rather than how high your follower count is?

Engagement has an effect on the visibility of your posts

We’re sure that, by now, you’ve heard the terms ‘Instagram Algorithm’, ‘Facebook Algorithm’ and ‘YouTube Algorithm’. Every social media platform has an algorithm; a specific way of showing your posts to other people, whether they’re your followers or not.

More recently, the algorithms have been designed to show posts that the platform thinks you and your audience will most likely engage with. Gone are the days of chronological order on social media. These days, the more engagement your post has within the first hour, the better your chances are at having your content reach more people. Why? Because the platform wants people to stay for as long as possible. If it believes that your content is what people want to see, then the platform will show your content more often and to a wider range of people.

You can build relationships and earn trust

If you’re engaged with your audience as they are with you, you can truly build a community on social media. Having an active community means that your posts will gain constant engagement over time. It’s also a great opportunity for you to encourage User Generated Content, which can often perform quite well as people enjoy knowing that their favourite brands see their content too.

Establishing a sense of trust and community between you and your customers is a way to not only keep them engaged with you as a company, but can ultimately convert them from audience members to paying customers.

You know your audience consists of real people

What feels better than seeing your follower count skyrocket? Knowing that your posts are being engaged with by real people, not bots!

Having real people following you means that your quality of followers is actually much higher than accounts that rely on bots to boost their numbers.

Additionally, remember that your audience has an audience of their own. When your posts are being engaged with by your audience, their audience will see it too – especially if your audience regularly shares your content on their own accounts.

It’s no secret that a large follower count is something many brands and businesses have aimed for in the past, but now, think about this: What would you rather have? 10,000 followers, only 100 of whom engage with your posts, or 5,000 followers, 2,000 of whom regularly like, comment and click on your posts?

Carmela is a Social Media Coordinator at Milkbar Digital. With a love of design and writing, she enjoys bringing creative and copy together to create a meaningful connection between clients and their customers.
In her spare time, you’ll likely find her with her nose in a book, getting lost on Pinterest, or trying her hand at creating her own YouTube videos.

Looking for a way to up your social media, but not sure what needs doing? Milkbar Digital is a Melbourne social media and digital marketing agency here to help business small and large. If you need help with your social media or don’t know where to begin, get in touch!

That being the case, if you’re posting from your business page and all the people who follow that page are friends and family - and not people who are actively engaging with your content – then your engagement rate will be lower.

Lower engagement rate means fewer people see your posts, and Facebook’s algorithm will determine that your posts are not highly relevant and reduce your reach.

So while you might have 1,000 followers, if only a few of them are actively engaging with each and every one of your posts, you actually could be hurting your Facebook performance in the long run. 

And while Facebook is the example here, the same applies to Instagram, which now also uses an algorithm, and Twitter too, to a lesser extent.

Non-engaged followers also skew your audience data. If 90% of your audience aren’t actually going to buy from you, then researching them and their interests in your Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics will be pointless, as any data you gather will likely not actually help you create more resonant material.

So that being the case, how do you build an effective social media audience?

Why you don’t need more followers

The counter to this is that you actually don’t need more followers, but you need more engaged followers. But that, of course, is hard to work with, because building engagement takes time – and as noted, if you don’t have any followers initially, it’s harder to build an audience because people won’t take your seriously.

The trick is to use friends and family to start out, but to remove those who are not engaging with your posts from your audience over time.

This needs to be handled with sensitivity – no one likes being excluded or cut off – but you need your social media audience to be comprised of people actually interested in purchasing your products and services. The only way to truly maximize your social efforts is to have an engaged, active audience on each platform.

You do need audience numbers to start off with, but you need to also be mindful of who those people are and whether they’re following you because you’re friends or because your business is genuinely of interest to them.

And if it’s not, eventually you might need to cut them off.

One of the false tricks of social media is that people often mistake audience size for importance. That’s not how it is. Having 10,000 followers is meaningless if none of them are buying from you – whereas on the other side, having just one paying customer may be all you ever need (if that customer is the exact right one).

The main point is to ensure you’re aware of what your audience growth stats mean and how they relate to your overall goals. Eventually, you’ll want to analyse your audience data to get a better understanding of what they’re interested in so you can cater to those needs. If they’re all your friends, that might be extremely hard to do.

You need audience, no doubt, but you need engagement more. Maintaining awareness of the two is key to maximising your social efforts.