Lately, I’ve seen an uptick in posts saying “share your social media links so I/we can follow you” both in my personal Facebook news feed and in Facebook groups I’m a part of. It’s the latest iteration of “follower pods” that made the rounds over the last couple of years. While I don’t think anyone means anything malicious in putting up these posts, here’s why you should just say no to follower pods, no matter what they look like.
- Followers are a vanity metric. All things considered, a high number of followers (with nothing else in the mix) only strokes your ego.
- Followers that don’t also engage with your content actually hurt you. The way the algorithms work, your posts show to a VERY small percentage of your followers organically when they go up. (For example, Instagram’s percentage is reportedly 4%.) As your posts get engagement, the algo shows your posts to more people. If your posts repeatedly get low engagement rates, though, the algo automatically lowers that percentage. So let’s say you have 100 followers. Your post will show to 4 people. Now you share your handles, and you grow to 200 followers. Great, right? Not necessarily. If these folks don’t also like or comment on your posts, that 8 people will lower to 6, then to 4, then 2, and so on.
- It’s likely that many of these new followers are not in your target audience. So not only are they taking away from the people who actually WANT to see your posts seeing them, they probably won’t spend a dime on your goods or services.
At SBN Marketing, we get it. These posts and pods seem like a fabulous and easy way to get your message out to more and more people. But you should proceed with caution and know the potential consequences you’ll face.
As we often say: It’s better to have one follower who engages with everything than a gajillion followers who do nothing.
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay