One of the biggest mistakes people make when building
their Instagram account is that they only ever see their followers as numbers.
Followers aren’t the only metric that matters when it
comes to Instagram, but you can get caught up and become so obsessed in growing your follower count that you forget that each person who chooses to follow you is actually a living, breathing human being. It doesn’t matter what kind of account you’re running, whether it’s personal or business, the same is true everywhere.
You must always respect your audience.
I really can’t stress that enough, and it’s become even clearer to us as we’ve gained experience with the platform. If you’re not paying attention and listening to your audience, then you’re no longer building something that has any sort of meaningful impact. All you’re doing is stroking your ego.
So how do you know if you’re connecting with your
audience? While your follower count may be the most important metric, our journey to 1 million followers taught us that you must also pay attention to your engagement levels. This means how many likes you’re getting, how many people are bothering to actually comment on your posts, how many people actually go through your Instagram sales funnel.
According to the famed Pareto principle, 80% of your
results only come from 20% of your audience, or 80% of your revenue only comes from 20% of your customers. While more of a rule of thumb than a hard scientific fact, the Pareto principle should make you realize that it’s not about having a large follower count as much as it is about having a large core of engaged followers. A true follower is someone who absolutely loves your content and what you do. They’re the one that, if asked, will put down money because you asked them to, or purely because it’s something that you made. Think about any time you’ve been loyal to a brand and chose them over something else.
If you ever want to develop any sort of influence or
exposure, this should be your primary goal in growing a huge follower count. Ten thousand followers isn’t impressive unless you have at least 1,000 true followers.
That’s why we treat our
community like gold.
For example, we are very
strict on making sure we reply to every comment possible. ->