I’m Not Adding Many New Facebook Followers, What Am I Doing Wrong?

/

This morning I had a client ask, “Why aren’t we seeing bigger gains in followers on Facebook?” For context: this particular client is in the home improvement sector, offering a product that most homeowners consider to be a major purchase. It’s available at large box stores and at independent dealers around the country. Impressions and engagements have been phenomenal, with steady monthly gains. But increasing followers has been an ongoing challenge. Sound familiar? Well, it’s pretty common. Here’s why:

  1. This is pretty standard for products that are considered a major purchase because it’s usually a one time decision. So every month we have a deficit, though we do tend to even out with how many we lost and how many we gained. Most people will stay, especially if our content is fresh, but we'll always lose a few each month because the product is no longer relevant to them.

  2. People have saturated the number of businesses they are willing to follow, particularly on Facebook which they've been using the longest, so in general, we don't see followers numbers moving up the way we used to. At the same time, social media managers are able to reach a much more targeted, and much larger audience through advertising, so priorities have shifted away from adding followers though gimmicks like contests, etc. For this reason, social media pros often refer to followers as a "vanity metric" as clients still want to see the number reported to them, however, it is far less representative of the reality of who is seeing the posts than impressions and engagements.

  3. It’s harder to get followers, because the social media platforms no longer want you to. It took them years to figure out how to monetize these free platforms, but what they eventually landed on, is that businesses are willing to pay to get more eyes on their posts, so why give it up for free?

Can you/should you try to work around a follower deficit?

It is absolutely possible to work around a deficit in followers and the solution is one you’ve likely heard me harp on many times before, because most social media questions have the same answer: NEW CONTENT, NEW CONTENT, NEW CONTENT. 

When asked the question this morning, I was grateful for another opportunity to repeat myself because content truly is king. If you aren’t updating your blog, taking new photos, making new video, creating case studies, etc., and incorporating this fresh content into social media strategy, you’re going to be stuck. Just like Google, the social media algorithms have an insatiable appetite for new content and they will reward you for it. Fresh content, 100% of the time, will generate followers, engagement, and impressions. 


It does pay to keep followers around because naturally, it increases your organic (free) reach. Additionally, it validates you. For this client, their happy customers are very engaged and LOVE to comment on posts about how happy they are with the product. I don’t need to explain why these unsolicited testimonials speak VOLUMES to potential new customers. 

Have social media questions you’d love answered? Send your questions our way and we may answer them in our next blog!