Do followers really matter? By Ani García

We know exactly why you think Social Media is the best way to sell: you associate Followers to Sales, but actually this is so far from reality. Clients tend to ask always for being well known on Social Media and have thousands of followers, but is that really what matters the most about a digital marketing strategy?

First, we need to understand what is a follower and how does he/she behaves online. A follower is an online user that decides to follow a social media account, it could be a personal or a business one, with the goal of being informed of what they are doing, thinking and expressing because they are interested on them. By knowing this now, we perceive a follower as a fan of the content that someone publishes online. 

It actually seems that a follower is really important for a brand because it means that a user could be so committed to your company that he/she wants to know everything about you on your daily basis, and it obviously is true! BUT the thing is that many people have damage the real concept of gaining followers. 

Nowadays, there are people that dedicate their time to generate different user accounts, but they are actually fake ones, and they sell them as followers to company business profiles so they can have thousands and thousands of followers. I’m sure that you have seen before these company accounts were they have millions and millions of followers but you perceive that something looks weird because no one is liking their pics or videos, right? They have 2.5 mill. followers and 14 likes on a wonderful picture without hashtags nor anything special. 

And in that moment is where we start going crazy. WHY IS THAT? Their content is not even good! Why does people follow them? So we decide to look at their followers. People from Asia, from India…oh…they don’t have a profile picture…uhmmm, that’s odd. They don’t have a single image published! Why is that?

Well, yes, they have bought followers. 

So at this moment is when I want to ask you: if this is happening on Social Media platforms, do you really think that followers is the most important metric there exists? Exactly, it isn’t. This is why we believe that it could be more important to have engagement with your users rather than just having them as followers. I’ll put it like this: it’s better to have a constant user seeing your content and interacting with it than just having it as a number on your followers total amount but not knowing about him/her for the rest of your life. With this knowledge, while you do a constant strategy for engagement, little by little your followers will increase but they will be solid ones.

It’s really important to remember this, and get it tattooed in your head if you want to really be successful: FOLLOWERS ARE VANITY, SALES ARE SANITY.