Your Best Social Media Audience is Not the Biggest

As we’re building out the trenderTag app, we’ve been having interesting conversations around how much is “good” or “great” for engagement and followers. Especially when you are beginning on your social media marketing journey, there seems to be a general bias towards “big is always better”. We should use hashtags with the highest number of posts to reach the biggest audience. We should have 100,000 followers, not 1,000. It’s led to some deep conversation about what is the “just right” social media audience. 

A quick search on LinkedIn or Medium yields numerous articles with titles like “How I Got 1 Million Followers on Instagram” or “How to Get 100,000 Views on Your Video”. The common wisdom being the bigger the numbers, the bigger the downstream leads, sales, ad revenue, etc. But why? What’s our goal with big numbers? 

In many of these discussions when we dig deeper on the “why?” there aren’t clear answers. For some, it’s a comparison with other companies in their market; they should have at least the same amount or more followers as their competition. For others, big numbers means they’re doing something right on social media. Getting more specific on the actual goal for the social media strategy, the answers tend to be open to interpretation for success - “we have to be on social media” or “we want to get our name out there” or “we want customers to be aware of us”. 

We can all agree that 10 followers isn’t going to get you anywhere but neither is that 1 million+ audience that doesn’t engage with your content, never mind going to your site or buying anything. There is a happy medium that should work for your business. At trenderTag we’re calling this a “resonant audience”. Your following should be the right number for getting the results you wanted for your social media strategy. Your content should be attracting and engaging the right type of person for your business. That number of followers ranges widely depending on industry, company, and your specific goal for being on social media in the first place. Ultimately, the quality of the engagement and the actions of your followers is more important than the sheer number of followers. 

For instance, if your goal is to connect with other thought leaders in your space, you don’t need thousands of followers. One hundred or a few hundred of the type of thought leaders you want to engage with might be more than enough. The goal here is connecting person to person and having a robust online conversation. 

On the other hand, if you’re looking to drive customers to your e-commerce site for a seasonal retail item, going after a larger audience makes sense. In this case, the law of numbers works - if we want 1% conversion of say, 10,000 customers, we’ll need to reach at least a million people to make that work. The goal in this case is generating a big enough audience to get that target 10,000 customers given reasonable expectations on conversion. 

Some tips as you are building your own “resonant” audience on social media. Many of these are circulating in various articles and posts but here's a summary of what we think works best (and we’re working to automate and help marketers be more effective with trenderTag): 

• Have clarity about why you’re using social media. Your "why" drives how you approach social media and helps set the end goal for your strategy. A desire to connect with tech investors in a specific space will be a different approach and have different metrics than someone who is looking to generate sales for their retail beauty brand. If your why is “Be more visible to our customers”, take the time and answer the question “and what do we want customers to do when we’re visible to them?”. Share your posts? Click through to your site? Buy something? Have a similar share of voice as your competition? 
• Be super specific about the metric that works best for your success. Rather than determining success by generic number of followers or number of views & likes on posts, what is that set of metrics that define your success? For some, a following of 1,000 highly engaged customers who promote and share your brand content consistently could be tremendous. For the person looking to be a top paid influencer in the beauty industry, 1 million followers who view and like their content but don’t comment or share as much may be more appropriate. 
• Embrace the smaller, less popular hashtag that targets your audience and experiment. Social media platform algorithms reward views and engagement. Only using hashtags with millions of posts seem like a great idea but your post will be hard to spot in the flood of content. Play around with a mix of popular and smaller, targeted hashtags so your ideal audience can see and engage with your content. 
• Engage with who you are following and who follows you. This can take some time and effort. However, that engagement is what is ultimately going to build that resonant audience. Pay attention to what others in your market or domain are posting and interact with them. A smaller audience of people who want to be in a conversation with you is easier to manage than a very big one. 
• Learn and focus on the one or two social platforms where your audience lives. Learn how to best leverage these platforms and work them until your audience moves somewhere else. It’s easier to build a resonant audience on one (or maybe two) than five platforms. 

You want to attract the right follower who actually cares about your content enough to engage with it. You want to engage your followers so they in turn, become curious about you and your offerings. You want to have followers turn into customers and fans who recommend you to their network both on and off social media. We call this a “resonant following” at trenderTag. That’s not always the biggest number of followers, but we like to believe it is the “best following”.