How Many Social Media Followers Do You Need in 2021?
If you catch a digital marketer in a vulnerable moment, you may discover that there’s a persistent, droning voice that’s always whispering in the back of their minds: You don’t have enough social media followers. It’s a voice that’s continually tugging at them and nipping at their heels until they’ve amassed enough followers. And it sounds a lot like Tom Waits.
Marketing gurus aren’t much help. Literally millions of articles are written every year telling you how to get more followers on social media — and most of them start by saying how hard it is to increase your followers. Yeesh.
The thing is, there’s never enough social media followers, and Tom Waits’ voice stops droning. Unless…
Unless you realize how many followers your business actually needs. When you know that magic number, you can tune out all the hype and the persistent push, and find some peace of mind. The good news is, that number might surprise you. It’s zero.
Yep, that’s right. Your business doesn’t need more social media followers to win at digital marketing. You need relationships.
If you’re chasing followers, you’re playing the wrong game — a game you’ll never win. But you can win big if you change games and start nurturing your relationships online.
Relationships > Followers
Social media connections, as Mark Schaefer puts it, are weak relational links. If you’re looking for people to like a tweet, reshare a post, or make a comment — no problem! But if you want people to make a bigger investment — to change their patterns or financially support a worthy cause — your returns are going to be next to nil. Even A-list celebs with hundreds of thousands of followers can’t inspire that kind of action.
Why not? Because followers aren’t committed. They’re just here for the comments.
If you want to get your audience to change their behavior, it’s only going to happen through strong relational links. That means developing relationships, not amassing followers.
🥱 Followers are passive. They consume content, and stop there.
💑 Relationships are active. They foster connections that have meaning and lead to more engagement.
🥱 Followers are vanity metrics.
💑 Relationships have real value and meaning.
🥱 Followers ask, “What’s in it for me?”
💑 Relationships are mutually beneficial — there’s give and take on both ends.
🥱 Followers are commodities.
💑 Relationships are people.
🥱 And here’s the rub: followers don’t actually follow. They sit and watch and click the “Like” button.
How to Nurture Customer Relationships Online
On the one hand, it seems a little silly to write about how to foster online relationships. I mean, it’s just building relationships. You’ve done it all your life, and I’m sure you’re really good at it. Most marketers and entrepreneurs are all-stars at relationships.
At the same time, I get it. Online marketing relationships aren’t the same thing as your softball league or water cooler conversations. You want something specific out of the relationship, and it involves the exchange of money. Still, building relationships is pretty much the same no matter what the context. Here’s a few thoughts to get you started.
Listen
Okay, everybody knows this one, right? But nobody really follows it very well! Let’s be honest — we all love to talk about ourselves, and the same goes for brands.
Listening — real, authentic, listening — is really hard. It means paying attention to the small details that easily get ignored, simply because they aren’t the main point. But those tiny details can make a huge difference.
When you listen relationally, you aren’t gathering information to flesh out your buyer personas. You’re getting to know this single individual, or that particular company. You’re actually interested in knowing who you’re talking to.
When you know that you’re really being heard, you stick around. Same goes for your target customers.
Be human
Being human is trending these days. (Yecch! What a nauseating thing to say. Still, it’s true.) Especially since the pandemic. Maybe you remember all those TV ads in March and April that reassured us how we’re in this together, even when we’re apart. We saw DIY-style commercials that were filmed on Zoom or mobile phones. They hit all the right notes and felt personal. Big companies felt small and intimate.
But they also felt…off. Those ads were just a bit too pitch-perfect. They were scripted to project a certain brand image, and if you looked closely enough, you could see the cracks in the veneer.
Worse yet, all those brands had exactly the same approach and messaging, so they all felt exactly the same. They weren’t human brands, they were life model decoys.
Why didn’t it work? Because the human touch was scripted. Ad agencies decided what being human would look like for their clients. Being human isn’t something you fabricate. You don’t put on your human suit before you step out in public, you put on clothes that cover you up.
Being human is about stripping down. Taking off the pretense, setting aside your concern about the public image. It’s what you do because of who you are, not because of what you want to be seen as.
Being human is really hard. Most brands struggle with it, because it’s risky. It means letting your rough edges show, being flawed, and having a personality that might not be sexy or mysterious or powerful. It might even be a little off-putting to some people.
Whoever you are as a company, be that. Let your personality show, and quit trying so hard to impress your customers with some manufactured image.
Celebrate your customers — be a superfan
Okay, so we need to clear up something before I get into this one. Celebrating your customers isn’t sending them a gift basket at Christmas, or making a donation in their honor, or even offering them a loyalty reward. There’s nothing wrong with those things, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Instead, think about the dad who cheers for his daughter so enthusiastically that she asks him to stay home next time.
That’s what we’re talking about. Being a superfan of your customers is all about finding something praiseworthy about them and telling the world. It’s word-of-mouth marketing in reverse — the kind of fandom you want for your brand? Give that to your customers!
There’s nothing more powerful than loving someone before they love you. When you show buyers that you love them before they’ve done anything for you, it creates a strong relational connection that has real meaning.
Pursue 1-on-1 interactions
Your sales team has one-on-one email and phone conversations all the time — why can’t the marketing team do it too? Once you know who your followers and leads are, reach out to them with a personalized message.
Maybe you slide into their DMs, or maybe you just respond to one of their social posts that’s related to your industry in some way. Whatever you do, don’t promote your business! Simply start a conversation and show interest in them as a person. Also, don’t be creepy about it.
Bonjoro is a fantastic way to do this. The app lets you capture a quick video message that gets emailed to a single person. It’s interactive, thoughtful, and inherently one-on-one. Your receiver knows that you’ve created a completely custom greeting that’s just for them and no one else. That’s really big.
Pro tip: Go beyond personalization tokens. The {FNAME} tag is pretty much expected these days. It doesn’t stand out anymore, and it won’t impress anyone.
Do something unexpected that’s authentic
If you listen to your followers long enough, you’ll discover something about them that goes beyond the buyer persona you’ve created for them. You’ll learn about their family, or their values, or the causes they care about. You might discover that their mother has breast cancer or their son has an undiagnosed learning disability. Maybe they’re preparing a talk they have to give next week.
Probably none of that information is directly relevant to your company. But if you’re creating an authentic relationship, you’re looking out for ways to help that don’t directly benefit your bottom line. So be helpful!
- Send a friendly good-luck message.
- Shoot them some helpful resources you know of.
- Share a funny video when you notice they’re having a bad day.
- Order a pizza to be delivered to their location (if you can get that information) to help them get through a major task.
- Thank customers for a recent purchase by giving them a complimentary upgrade, just because.
The stronger your relationship with your followers, the more surprising you can get. But doing something unexpected doesn’t necessarily mean doing something extraordinary. It doesn’t need to be epic, and you don’t need a budget for it. It just needs to be thoughtful and unsolicited.
And most importantly, it doesn’t need to be public. There’s nothing worse than a kind act that you use to promote yourself. People will see through it in an instant, and it’ll backfire on you.
Besties for Life!
This is what it comes down to: relationships are stronger than social followers. Instead of obsessing over the number of followers your brand is attracting, be obsessive about the quality of your relationships with those who are following you. People go to great lengths for those who love them — loving your followers is a lot more powerful than building vanity numbers.
Michael Corlione was wrong: business is personal. And B2B companies that understand this will win the social media marketing game — because they’ll be playing by different rules than other brands.
You can spend your energy chasing followers or you can create relational moments with your audience. And by the way, who chases followers? I mean, think about it. If you’re chasing after followers, what does that make you?