New followers in Instagram sounds promising. After paying your new social media manager, you expected them to deliver new followers, as many as possible. Reaching 5K, or even 10K followers in a month seems like amazing target to choose. But is it?
One of my new client (we are in the mid of negotiation) asked me this question “Do you provide guarantee that once we hire you, we’ll get certain amount of new followers on our Instagram account? Let’s say, 1K per month? That’s not much, right?” I had to stop for a while and contemplating, should I just simply yes so the negotiation is over and I got paid? He’s correct, 1K per month is not much. Especially if you can just buy those new followers in an instant with a very cheap price!
After a few seconds of consideration, I decided to take the hard way and started explain to him about why I don’t offer guarantee for new followers. Here are the reasons :
- Gain lots of followers is not supposed to be our goal for managing our social media, gain new leads is! Why having 10K followers and 5 new leads, while you can get 20 new leads with only 1K followers? We need to focus on how to create loyalty and brand awareness so that our recent followers remember our name and decided to contact us when they need our product/service!
- Like I said earlier, we can easily buy followers. The ugly truth of Instagram world. Ew. But those fake followers won’t do anything, not gonna comment on your post, or like them, let alone share your products to their friends or buy one for themselves! And even worst, you might get shadow-banned by Instagram just for having those fake followers!
- New legit followers will come automatically if you put enough money for Instagram Ads and have decent contents on your account. So why need to make them a goal?
Instead, you should ask your social media agency to guarantee a certain number for engagement rate! 6% would be good for a start, and aim for at least 10% engagement rate after at least 1 year of managing your social media.
What is engagement rate and why is it important?
When we post something, Instagram will show our post to all our followers. Is that true? Nope! That weird Instagram algorithm will only show that post to approximately 10% of our followers. Say, we have 100 people following us, if we post something, only 10 people get to see our post. That is so sad!
But, if those 10 people enjoy our content, and react to it by liking it, or consider it important and then save it, write a comment such as “Wow, this is awesome” or take it to the next level by sharing it to their story, Instagram algorithm then will show that post to another 10% of our followers! And so it goes until all our followers get to see it.
What happen if we post something and it is sooo boring no body interested in commenting or liking it? Instagram would think this way “They can’t even attract their own follower, why bother showing it to other people? Forget it.” Then no one will saw our post, even if we are post something about 50% discount and freebies for our product, no one will get the message.
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Get the idea, now?
Forget about getting as many as new followers as you can, and focus on getting new prospective customers as your followers!
