Why The Quality of Followers Is More Important Than Quantity

Social media is a great way for small, local businesses to get exposure, but the bottom line is....the bottom line.  The goal of any marketing campaign is to generate revenue for the business.  Way too often I see, "like us so we can get to ______ likes!" or "we really want to get _____ followers so please please help us out".  No one really cares about helping us get to a certain number of likes, fans, or followers.  We are human and we have a "what's in it for us?" mentally.  The problem with going after numbers is that is all you will get.  Just empty numbers.  If I could pay my vendors in "likes" I would! Unfortunately, they request actual dollars.  So how do you make money on social media? By attracting people that would actually buy your product or service or refer someone to do the same.  Don't get me wrong, we still need a healthy number of fans to make a difference, but here are a few reasons why it's all about the quality of followers rather than the quantity when it comes to building a social media campaign.



1. Quality fans can actually use your service:  When I say quality, I mean qualified or targeted.  For example a roofing company that services McKinney would benefit from having home owners in the McKinney area liking their Facebook page.  It would not mean much if they had people that did not own homes that lived in another state to like their page.  So basically, for them, 20 local likes from homeowners would be better than 1,000 likes from renters in New York.  Sure the "1,000" looks cool, but the "20" could actually write them a check.



2. Quality fans will engage your posts:  In this example, let's use a med spa in Frisco,TX.  A targeted user would be a women in her late 20's to 40's or 50's that lives in the Frisco area that has interests in spas and beauty (and yes Facebook knows these things) . There could be 2 strategies to obtain followers: Target everyone in Frisco or target the women previously mentioned.  The number of people in Frisco is obviously larger, but the med spa would benefit monetarily from the smaller number of women that have interests in spa services. Social media is all about engagement and if your posts "speak' to a very specific audience, your audience is more likely to comment on, like, and share your statuses.  The more they share and engage and the more exposure you get.



3. Quality fans will stick around: When fans follow us because they actually like us or like our product/service then they will be there long term (assuming we provide great content and do not hard sell them). When fans follow our page due to a contest or "like" us just to get to a certain number of likes then there is no genuine vested interest to for them to hang around (especially if they aren't really into the brand or niche anyway).


Think about this analogy: We have TONS of names and numbers in our phones.  Hundreds! But if you really think about it, we only engage and communicate with a small fraction of those contacts.  Think of our social media platforms in that same fashion.  Are we just piling up contacts or are we attracting people that we can actually communicate with on a daily/weekly basis?

It truly doesn't matter how many followers or fans we have as long as they are the right ones.  If you need help finding more qualified followers, please do not hesitate to let me know.  Good luck in your social media efforts and please share this with anyone that it might help. Thanks!