Welcome to The Social Smarty Show, your weekly podcast for social media marketing tips, tactics and practical digital marketing advice. Let's get you taking real action to grow your online audience, build connections and your business. I'm your host, Jody McIntyre. Think of me as your digital marketing coach, cheerleader and wingwoman all rolled into one. Grab some of my social media marketing knowhow for [email protected], freebies now before we dive in, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
Welcome to The Social Smarty Show. This is episode number three. In this episode, I'm going to be reminding you why you need to stop obsessing over your follow count.
I'm guilty of it too. We feel good when the numbers are going up. We feel a little bit down when the numbers are going down. But overall, we need to stop focusing on the number of followers.
And the first reason why is that people don't always follow the businesses that they do business with. That might sound a bit strange, but let me give you an example. Say you have a broken window and you're looking for a glazier, a window repairer to come and fix that window. You might use Facebook like a search engine. So you jump onto Facebook. You search in your local area for a glazier. You might look at their reviews on their Facebook page and then you give them a call or send them a private message to book them in. They do a fantastic job. You tell all your friends and family you hold onto their card so that the next time you have the same or another broken window, unlucky. But you're going to call them first, aren't you?
You're not necessarily going to follow their Facebook page. So even though their Facebook page is the reason you found them, and it's a marketing tactic or a marketing channel that's worked for them, you're not necessarily going to convert to a follower because you might not be interested in their updates on their business. So just remember that you might have a particular business, often it's service based businesses or even some product based businesses that people just aren't going to necessarily follow unless they are diehard fans or your family or friends.
Another reason why you should stop obsessing over your follower count is that people's life stages change. So if you think about all of the stages you've been through in your life, you've moved through different things. You might have had a baby, you might have got married. You might have moved house, all of these different things. It doesn't mean that you might follow accounts and then unfollow them later.
So another example, you are planning the wedding of your dreams and you find the most beautiful venue. You follow their page on Facebook or their Instagram account. You keep up to date with their updates. You get really excited for your big day. You have the wedding of your dreams, and then afterwards you move on you're into another life stage. So then you unfollow that account. So that account might seem like it's follower count is just staying still. But what's happening is that account is losing followers who are no longer going to do business with them and gaining new ones. So there is churn there, but overall that follower count is staying the same. But it doesn't mean that we're not introducing new people to your business.
Another reason is that fewer followers means fewer trolls. I know this is a bit of a silly one but as you grow more people become aware of your business and that brings some crazy people, unkind people as well. So generally if you have smaller followers or a smaller number of followers you don't have those trolls that are being unkind online. It's not nice. I wish we could get rid of them, but it's the reality of having a big audience online.
The last reason I want you to think about when you're worried about your follower count is that followers don't pay your bills. Some of them might, of course, some of them may be paying customers, but the number of followers you have doesn't directly correlate with the amount of money you have in the bank. You can have a massive following and have real cash flow issues.
So the next time you find yourself stressing about how few followers you have or how small your audience is, just remember this episode. If you want to increase your reach, maybe go back to episode number two, if you haven't listened to that one there, find out what's working in social media at the moment.
And if you haven't already, I would love you to follow along this podcast so that you can make sure that you hear all of our future episodes. Thanks so much, I'll see you in episode number four.
