Why followers are irrelevant, and loyalty is key

Since their existence, Twitter and other social networks, people have been fantasised by the number of followers or ‘likes’ that they have on the platforms. The thought process behind it was that the more followers that you had, the better your social media would convert for you.

Maybe this was the case in previous years, but it most definitely is not now, as users have now grown blinkers to cut out the noise on their social platforms.

In recent years, Facebook have noticed that pages with large followings started putting out content that users were not engaging. The system that Facebook now have in place stops this from happening. In essence, you can have a page with 5,000,000 likes but with next to zero reaches. This is due to Facebook only showing content that it sees as valuable to the end user. This means that in the end a page with one thousand likes can have more people view their content than a page with hundreds of thousands.

Twitter is full of noise, and therefore it has led to a drop of engagement across the board for the standard user. What we have also seen is that users with larger following are getting next to no engagement on their Twitter feeds. This can be down to a few things, but most of the time it stems back to irrelevant followers. Which, in essence, comes from users who “follow 4 follow”, a method many business use to grow their Twitter followers quickly. However, all that happens is you get lots of followers who do not care about your company and in most cases they also follow lots of people to help build their following. In the end, it is just one huge mess of noise and lack of engagement.

What am I trying to say here? Well in essence businesses and even “experts” in social media need to start to understand that the numbers do not matter. The way to win on social media has nothing to do with how many followers you have and everything to do with how loyal your audience is. Loyalty can be taken from offline to online, through networking and meetings, but it can also be carried across from online to offline turning real relationships through your social media strategy.

In short, focus on caring, concentrate on adding value. Give something to your followers and in return you will get loyalty and customers for life. I could go on, but I guess this is for another article.

Peter Watson | Managing Director

Peter Watson is the Managing Director and co-founder of Distract as well as Featured Group, which seeks to found and develop innovative brands and businesses.

Date Posted

19 August 2015

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Why followers are irrelevant, and loyalty is key

Since their existence, Twitter and other social networks, people have been fantasised by the number of followers or ‘likes’ that they have on the platforms. The thought process behind it was that the more followers that you had, the better your social media would convert for you.