Why Engagement is More Important than Followers
At WeBlogNorth, we are huge advocates of the microblogger. In such a followers-lead age - where it can feel like your content will never be successful unless you have 100,000+ followers, it’s hard to ignore that your own number count, rising painfully slowly.
But here’s the catch - follow numbers don’t always mean everything - in fact, sometimes they’ve proven to mean nothing.
When a brand invests in a content creator - whether that be gifting them a product, paying for a sponsored post or paying them an ambassador fee on an ongoing basis - they are investing in that individual’s content because they believe it will give them a return on investment.
What that return is, looks different in every scenario. They might want to...
- Sell out of their new range
- Get more signups for their email newsletter
- Grow their Instagram followers
- Or simply raise awareness of their brand within a certain demographic.
Whatever return that brand is hoping to get, that decision drives such a business transaction and is often tracked in some way.
So it seems obvious that the more followers you have, the higher that return on investment will be right? Wrong!!
The return you get on such a campaign has less to do with total followers, and more to do with how much those followers actually give a sh*t about the person they’re following. Or, in industry terms - how much those followers engage with that content.
Engagement is gold dust in this industry - because in such a fast-paced world where attention is low, to create something that someone else engages with - stops to look at, likes, comments, privately messages you, goes on to buy said product/service because you talked about it - that’s where the word ‘influencer’ comes from.
And the thing with engagement is - it doesn’t discriminate against numbers.
There are people I follow on Instagram with less than 1000 followers. Yet, if they post a beautiful picture of a new restaurant in Manchester - guess where I wanna eat on my next night out? Or there are other bloggers I follow with varying sizes, from 1000 to 100,000 - and I want whatever they’re wearing, whatever they share, wherever they’re visiting. Because I value their opinion, and trust their recommendations, regardless of the number on their profile.
So I hope this gives you hope and makes you feel excited if you’re starting out in your content creation journey. The industry is slowly but surely wising up to the power and necessity of engagement in any campaign, and slowly but surely letting go of the need for vanity numbers.
Don’t get too caught up in your follower count - just keep creating awesome sh*t that matters to you, because it matters to the people who follow you too! That relationship and community are more powerful than a million unengaged app users that can’t distinguish your account from the next.
