Ask Yourself, “Why Do You Care About Follower Growth?”

As we at Socialike start to wrap up our 2022 planning, even though times are changing, one thing we still hear from brands when we determine KPI’s for 2022 is a desire to focus on Instagram follower growth.

First, ask yourself, “Why do you care about growing your Instagram followers?” One of the main reasons we hear is, “Our competition has way more followers than we do.” Looking at the competition is critical to a business’s success, and follower count is an easy metric to look at, but don’t get too caught up in a metric that has no bearing on your actual business objectives. You have to dig deeper.

When you focus on a vanity metric like follower growth, you divert resources away from other key business elements, like building your brand. There are many different metrics you can look at to determine the viability of your social media presence. Organic posts can also be seen far beyond your existing followers if you know how to optimize them.

When you are looking to optimize a post, some items we at Socialike strive for are:

• How many times the post was saved
• How many times the post was forwarded to a friend
• How many people saw the post

These metrics go deeper than just how many likes your post gets.

Often, we will get asked by clients to run ads with the key KPI to be follower growth. Again you should ask yourself, “Why?” Imagine reallocating that follower growth budget to building meaningful connections with your consumers via elevated content or influencer marketing.

A couple of other thoughts:

• If you still just want more followers, google “buy Instagram followers.” I think the going rate is $250 for 10,000 followers. But I would strongly not suggest this, and let me explain why:
  • The negative impacts of having the wrong followers outweigh the positive effects of having a lot of followers.
    • Social media is all about building the right community. The way the Instagram algorithm works is Instagram will show your posts to a small percentage of your followers. If those people do not engage with your content, Instagram will suppress your content. The more followers are not engaging with your content, the less chance your content will be seen by consumers genuinely interested in your brand. So, the more unengaged followers you have, the more likely your content will get suppressed.
  • Instagram may also end up removing follower count from being front and center on your profile, just like they have already done with Facebook. Once this happens, even the businesses that stress the importance of follower growth will be forced to refocus on their deeper metrics listed above. Get a head start on this before it happens.