Tell me if this sounds familiar:

It’s been a long day running the business. You’ve answered a dozen calls, responded to twice as many emails…and that’s not even the real work. You’re dreading opening up Instagram because you know there’s going to be a bunch of unread messages and comments that you don’t have the time or energy to address. Despite all this, business is kind of slow from a financial perspective. You feel like you’re putting yourself out there, and you’ve got interest, but your bottom line isn’t reflecting the effort you’re putting in. Still, it’s nice to see that you’ve got a decent amount of followers on Insta….

Until you open it to find that you’ve lost 40 followers since noon.

It’s so frustrating to put your heart and soul (and your precious time) into growing a page just to have it yanked away from you when Meta decides to do an account clean-up, or maybe a bunch of people unfollowed after a less-than-successful post. Whatever the reason, seeing a lower follower count than you had yesterday can be a real kick in the teeth…but it doesn’t have to be.

Followers Aren’t The End-All Be-All

You might see the profile of one of your competitors, or a favorite brand, and see that it has tens of thousands of people following it. Impressive, right? Sure, it is absolutely a testament to how successful they are…at marketing themselves on social media. And if you’re looking to hire them to run your social media, maybe that metric is valid. But it’s not valid for every business. 

You see, follower counts and likes are what are known as vanity metrics; i.e., they don’t actually matter when it comes to the success of your brand. What does matter depends entirely on how you’ve got your business set up. Are you wanting to book more people for appointments? Consider setting up your appointment buttons and encourage users to schedule time with you through those. Want to drive traffic to your website? Then you’re going to want to pay attention to clicks on your links in your bio. Are you trying to build trust with prospective clients? Having your posts consistently shared and saved is probably a better metric to pay attention to.

What Is Actually Important

Your social media profiles can be leveraged in lots of different ways, and it’s important to have a strategy in place that helps maintain consistency and aligns well with your overall brand messaging (check this article out for more information on that). You’re going to be frustrated if you are using your profiles for general brand awareness but paying attention to metrics that would be better suited to a profile that is trying to drive traffic elsewhere, like a website or booking platform. Even further, a large follower account doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if those followers aren’t engaging with your business in ways that actually matter: either converting to dollar signs themselves or sharing your stuff so other people will spend their money with you. 

At the end of the day, your follower count on social doesn’t mean anything about the success of your business…or about the value of you as a person. When you stop chasing metrics and instead start to focus on building a community, you’ll see a difference in your business that means more than a follower count ever will.