Do You Need A LOT of Social Media Followers to succeed on Social Media?
Do you need a lot of social media followers to succeed on social media?
Before we can answer that question, we need to define what “social media success” is.
Social media success, in my opinion is when you can use social media to achieve commercial objectives. Commercial objectives are those objectives that explain why your company exists and what customers can expect from your organization. In many ways, the objective is a compass that helps you make business decisions that align with your brand, goals, and consumer interests. -omniaretail.com
From this definition we can deduce that if social media is used successfully it can reward an organisation in the form of customer relationship building, customer acqusiition, sales, marketing to name a few.
Most people think that vanity metrics (things such as number of followers, likes, and impressions) are the best indicators of social media success and while these can help, what really matters is the quality of your followers, not the quantity of followers.
If you want to know what makes followers, valuable you need to ask yourself this question:
Can I convert them into paying customers?
After all, at its most basic level a business exists to make money. If your business does not make money its either a hobby or a very expensive dream. (Nightmare)
A social media account that has, 500 followers, 90% of which are prepared to purchase a good or service from that business, is a more successful social media account than a social media account that has 1 million followers, 0% of which are prepared to purchase your goods or services. If we are to compound on this dynamic we can make the following assumption. A successful social media account has followers who:
- Have the purchasing power and desire for the product or service
- Followers who are relevant for the content that is shared.
- Followers who consistently and meaningfully engage with the content
- Followers who eventually become self proclaimed ambassadors of your brand/business from having a successful experience when using your product or service
When you have an audience that you can convert into potential buyers, it means that you can harness their attention and add value to their online experience without having to buy ads.
If you ask me that’s a HUGE win and cost saving in your marketing budget.
So the focus should be on growing an audience that could potentially buy from you, and convert into a paying customer. When you get the quality right, you can focus on growing a large quantity of quality followers.