Followers are important – engagement is better

Lower engagement rate means fewer people see your posts, and Facebook’s algorithm will determine that your posts are not highly relevant and reduce your reach.

So while you might have 1,000 followers, if only a few of them are actively engaging with each and every one of your posts, you actually could be hurting your Facebook performance in the long run. 

And while Facebook is the example here, the same applies to Instagram, which now also uses an algorithm, and Twitter too, to a lesser extent.

Non-engaged followers also skew your audience data. If 90% of your audience aren’t actually going to buy from you, then researching them and their interests in your Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics will be pointless, as any data you gather will likely not actually help you create more resonant material.

So that being the case, how do you build an effective social media audience?

The counter to this is that you actually don’t need more followers, but you need more engaged followers. But that, of course, is hard to work with, because building engagement takes time – and as noted, if you don’t have any followers initially, it’s harder to build an audience because people won’t take your seriously.

The trick is to use friends and family to start out, but to remove those who are not engaging with your posts from your audience over time.

This needs to be handled with sensitivity – no one likes being excluded or cut off – but you need your social media audience to be comprised of people actually interested in purchasing your products and services. The only way to truly maximize your social efforts is to have an engaged, active audience on each platform.

You do need audience numbers to start off with, but you need to also be mindful of who those people are and whether they’re following you because you’re friends or because your business is genuinely of interest to them.

And if it’s not, eventually you might need to cut them off.

One of the false tricks of social media is that people often mistake audience size for importance. That’s not how it is. Having 10,000 followers is meaningless if none of them are buying from you – whereas on the other side, having just one paying customer may be all you ever need (if that customer is the exact right one).

The main point is to ensure you’re aware of what your audience growth stats mean and how they relate to your overall goals. Eventually, you’ll want to analyse your audience data to get a better understanding of what they’re interested in so you can cater to those needs. If they’re all your friends, that might be extremely hard to do.

You need audience, no doubt, but you need engagement more. Maintaining awareness of the two is key to maximising your social efforts. 

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