How many followers do you have on LinkedIn? What about Instagram, TikTok or even X?

If you know those numbers off by heart, then you’re probably focusing on the wrong thing and you REALLY need to listen to this episode.

We are now living in a world where your social media followers are currency. You can use them to demand entry into the hottest events, get free stuff (including fancy holidays), or even use it as an excuse to act like a d*ck cos you have blackmail power to ruin people’s reputations to your vast audience.

With the way that social media works now, it’s no longer very accomplished people who have huge followings, but absolutely ANYONE can build up this crazy following.

Look at what’s been trending this month – suddenly everything is very mindful and very demure. This is completely the opposite of the brat summer we were supposed to be having.

So the brat summer was created by Charlie XCX, which is fairly “normal”, I’d say, as she’s a celebrity. So, we’d expect people to be following what celebrities do.

But the very mindful and very demure thing is because of Jools LeBron, a random TikToker from Chicago who posts GRWM videos and wasn’t that big of a deal until this month.

Now EVERY brand is talking about being demure. There’s even a legal battle over the copyright of the word – crazy times!

So it’s quite random who goes viral now and what trends pick up. And then suddenly you find yourself with millions of followers and your life… and your POWER changes.

Therefore, it’s no wonder why people want to increase their following.

Let’s talk about entrepreneurship for a second, because that’s actually relevant to us. I’m not sure what I’d even do with millions of followers who care about me being mindful and demure!

But why do entrepreneurs care about building their social media following? Well, the main reason SHOULD be to grow their business. More followers should mean that you reach your message to more of your target audience and you can sell your services/products to those people and grow your business.

But it also means that you’re more likely to get invited to talk at conferences or be asked to be on podcasts etc. The organisers of events are also selfish and want people with a big audience so they can promote their own event to them.

Even book publishers care about social followings these days!! Many publishers actually expect authors to do their own marketing to help sell the book. So, if someone has built a following, then a big publisher will be more likely to sign you.

That’s why you’ve probably seen people with no prior qualifications getting their book published with Penguin – because they have a 6-figure following on TikTok.

It’s a really bloody strange time.

It’s no wonder people are DESPERATE to grow their follower count. And I mean desperate. They’re using any tactic to do so.

Remember when it was a thing to buy followers on Instagram? Well, it’s baaaaackkkkkk! Except now the services are dressed up as “AI-driven social media agencies”.

They try to sound technical and that they find you the right audience for your profile, but all they’re doing is adding bots to your account. Yes, the follower count goes up, but this actually HURTS your profile.

Anyone who buys followers actually DAMAGES their account. Your social media posts only goes out to a small number of your audience. That number is actually pretty teeny too. There are tons of different bits of research into it and different sources have different figures, but it’s in the single digits!!

So, if you have a bunch of fake followers, you’re reducing the number of real people who are seeing your posts because your content is being delivered to a bunch of fake people instead!

Plus, it’s still against all the T&Cs of the social media platforms. So, if you get caught, you can get thrown off. It’s just not worth it.

Influencer Marketing Hub did some research on this last year and saw that engagement rates on IG have dropped nearly 30% between 2019 and 2022, showing that high follower counts don’t actually translate into meaningful interaction.

So why do people still do this if it doesn’t mean more money or more sales, or even more engagement?

Well, it all comes down to social proof. This is not a new concept – it’s been around for years, and people talk about it all the time, but it’s gotten even more powerful these days, thanks to the reasons I mention above.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, but even some of the “influencers” talk about reading it. He talks a lot about how humans are easily influenced by others.

When we’re not sure about something, we look to the herd.

Think about it – if we’re at a food market and you’re not sure which stall has good food, you look at one with a big queue and assume it’s good. Why would everyone be waiting in it?

What about when there’s a big crowd around something, we go over to look, right?! MUST be interesting!!

We are influenced by other people’s actions!

When you’re scrolling through social media any you see a post that’s liked by thousands of people, do you not stop and think wow, this must be insightful?

We’re all guilty of it.

While this has been going on for years on other social platforms, LinkedIn is now rife with this kind of manipulation, since it can translate into real business.

If they make one of their posts go viral (or all of them as some people do!), then people see how “popular” that post is and assume that person has something of value to say!

If they have multiple posts that go viral, then they’re a MUST FOLLOW!!! Plus, they’ve already purchased 100k followers to look popular anyway, and if 100k people think this person is smart, then they must be!!!

This is how the herd mentality works.

But the problem is, how do you turn those followers into cash?

There’s a huge problem in the world of influencer marketing – brands look to influencers to promote their products and only look at their following. There’s been plenty of cases where influencers have millions of followers but can’t even sell a handful of cheap products.

I was helping advise an agency who hired an influencer once with 2 million followers for a t-shirt brand. I advised against it because her style was NOTHING like the t-shirt and her followers were a lot of men following her because she was hot and teenage girls who wanted to be her.

None of them were the brand’s target audience.

Of her 2 million followers, guess how many bought t-shirts. NONE.

It’s disgusting.

We need to STOP looking at follower count as the most important metric when it comes to marketing!!!

I know that you’re going to say that actually you care about engagement more than follower count, but that can be faked too!!

People now buy likes, shares and comments on social media… to make themselves look popular and insightful!!

And now engagement pods are taking over! These groups of people who all just share their social links and like and comment on each other’s posts.

It looks as though their posts are popular, but it’s just their mates. But this tricks the algorithm into thinking they have loyal followers and shows it to more people.

This method absolutely does work to improve your reach, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have a good product/service and you don’t have the experience, credentials and testimonials to back it up, you’re still not going to make a sale.

So, what metrics SHOULD you be looking at? Well, this is the important part.

And if you ever decide to take on any “personal branding” expert or lead generation specialist, these are the numbers you need to know.

REVENUE-GENERATING METRICS.

At the end of the day, you’re in business to make money. You don’t care about the follower count or how many comments you’re getting – they’re a means to get more clients and money. Unless you do actually care about the attention and how that makes you feel, because if so, you’re in the wrong industry.

So, at the end of the day, everything in business comes down to your ROI – your return on investment.

Whether that’s monetary or time. How much time are you spending on social media? Is that worth the money you’re making directly from your posts? Could you spend that time more wisely elsewhere that would make a bigger impact on your business?

If you don’t even know how much money you’re making from your posts, then that’s another thing you should be checking.

The beauty of digital marketing is that you have such easy access to analytics, so you can get the data for anything!

So, the things you should be looking at are:
– Conversion rates – the percentage of your audience becoming paying customers
– Customer Acquisition cost – how much money and time you’re spending to acquire each new customer
– Customer lifetime value – total revenue you can expect from a customer over their lifetime.

My bet is that most people don’t know any of these numbers.

And that includes the people selling these services. All they focus on is reach, followers and engagement. But none of that equates to money.

Stop focusing on the vanity metrics and start focusing on revenue-generating metrics!!

OK so there are engagement metrics that are useful to know and very important if you are actually in the content creation game.

Your Active Engagement Rate is the percentage of your audience that actively engages with your content in meaningful ways. You can’t measure this properly if you pay for comments! So stop doing it.

The bigger the rate, the better. So, even if you only have 100 followers, but 25 of them are always liking and sharing your posts, your AER is 25% which is huge!!

Do you know what a normal AER is?? 1-3.5%. That’s it. Crazy, right?!

This is what people don’t realise about micro-influencers. Those with smaller followings are actually more influential to their followers because each person who’s following them genuinely likes their content and listens to what they have to say.

Those with large followings attract more passive followers for the reasons I mentioned earlier. So, you actually get less of a meaningful interaction from them.

This applies to other forms of digital marketing too – for example, when building an email list, many people concentrate on the size of their list. “I have a mailing list of 200,000 people!” and they use that to win brand sponsorship deals.

But how many of these emails even get delivered? Then how many people open them and actually click through to the content?

The open rate and click-through rate metrics are the ones you should be looking at when it comes to email marketing.

Email marketing ROI is still one of the highest, averaging 4200%, which is $42 for every $1 spend, so I have no idea why people are still not using it as much. This stat comes from the DMA – the Data & Marketing Association, where I was co-chair of the social media council.

They do great research into the state of marketing. So, please do check out their resources.

I think the thing is, email marketing isn’t as “sexy”. You don’t get that dopamine buzz when someone likes or comments on your post. Most people read the emails and it doesn’t require a response. So that’s why people get addicted to social media, even though it’s not as effective.

Other useful metrics include your NPS – your net promoter score, because that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty.

I know many clients who are scared to do this because they don’t want to receive negative feedback. But this data is so insightful and it helps you improve your service so quickly and address any issues you may have.

Plus, you may not even realise what you’re doing well and can use all the positive feedback as testimonials! It works so well as it’s minimal effort for customers to fill in!

So I think we all need a bit of a mindset shift when it comes to vanity metrics and focus on what really matters.

It’s always quality over quantity. Let’s say you did have millions of people coming to you and checking out your products/services. Are they attractive to your target audience? Do you feel confident with the work you do and are happy to answer questions about it?

There are so many things that you can be improving on rather than trying to build your following.

Also, just like how customer acquisition is more attractive than nurturing current customers – (that shiny object syndrome problem!), people forget that they have current followers who would be easier to turn into paying customers!

Sometimes you need to think about building on the relationships you already have. It’s actually way easier! And trust me, it’s way more meaningful to have a handful of incredible people who believe in you and want to support you rather than thousands of people who follow you because they actually just want to take and learn from you.

Your challenge this week is to post on social media, but not with the intention of going viral or even caring about those metrics, but to create value for your current followers.

Plus, if you don’t already know those metrics that matter – conversion rate, customer acquisition cost and customer LTV, then please go research this and plan a strategy to improve each of these.

It’s a much better use of your time than trying to work out how to get the best of all the algorithms and get more meaningless followers.

I hope this has inspired you to go out there and make more money and spend less time on social media!
Until next week – keep sniffing out the bullsh*t!