Engagement: Followers Aren’t Everything

Your follower count is not the end all be all in social media. Having tons of followers does not benefit you if they’re not interacting with your brand.

Having a high follower count is great and acts almost like an endorsement from the internet at large. “Wow, so many people follow this brand. They must post cool, useful things. I’ll follow them too.” But you come across looking inauthentic if you have 100 thousand followers but your posts rarely get a like, share, or comment. People are going to assume most, or all, of your followers are bots.

PAY ATTENTION TO PERCENTAGES

Oftentimes percentages tell us a lot more than totals. (“30,000 voters supported this legislation,” vs. “25% of voters supported this legislation.”) You should be paying attention to ratios, not just your total number of followers.

The rule of thumb I have heard is that 2.5% engagement is good and above 5% is great. This means that you’d have a great engagement rate if you had 1,000 followers and averaged 50 likes/comments/shares per post.

While you should always be striving to expand your reach and gain followers, this metric levels the playing field a bit when comparing big and small brands/well known and lesser known individuals. Even if you only have 100 followers, you can still have great engagement by getting 5 likes per post.

"THE RATIO"

It's generally understood in the Twitterverse that a very large replies to retweets/likes ratio is bad. This pattern is generally reflected in people saying inflammatory/incorrect/easily disprovable things, and being subsequently corrected en masse.

If you're already familiar with the term "getting ratioed" you're probably laughing/cringing at the dispassionate way I've just described it. But it just serves to illustrate the point that not all engagement is good engagement. You can make a bad splash. Not all press is good press.

Experiment with different kinds of posts and content to see what people respond to most. If you're posting interesting and useful things on a regular basis, you should have good engagement and an upward trend in followers.

❤ Bayley