You Can Fake A Following On Social Media But Not A Community.
Debunking one of the biggest problems on social media.
I’ve been answering questions on Quora for a while now on my personal account and one I manage for the agency I work for and the questions I get the most of are “is buying followers the best way to grow my social media account?”
To which my basic response tends to be something like this:
If you want to boast about having thousands of followers to your friends then yes.
Buying thousands of bot accounts and having them as ‘followers’ is not the way to go if you want to use your social media account to sell something or become an ‘influencer’ (I’m not a fan of that word)
Even if you have zero followers and want to have some credibility in your niche, you should never buy followers unless you want to boast about how many followers you have, and even so, people can see when you have fake followers on your account solely based on likes and interaction in general.
Yet a LOT of people still think that buying followers is the best way to reach their social media stardom.
I’m not even kidding when I say a LOT of people since I have seen accounts who are “popular” and have hundreds of thousands of followers yet their post’s interactions are of an account of 1k followers.
There are no shortcuts when growing an account and nor should there be, you want your followers to love your content and what you post about, meaning there is no way you’re going to do it with bots.
Another way people fake their ‘following’ is by using the follow for follow trick. The main reason why this doesn’t work is that the people that are following you back don’t give a f*ck about the content you put out, they are simply being nice and following you back because you followed them first or they are doing the same as you.
Neither of the two ‘methods’ mentioned before are a good way to successfully grow a social media account (in any platform) yet you can see that most people still think that it is.
So how the hell do you grow a following, scratch that, how the hell do you build a community behind your account then?
Easy, you create content that is high quality and offers some sort of value to the audience you are trying to reach.
But What Does It Mean To “Bring Value” In A Digital World?
There are different ways to bring value to someone, this can be by making them laugh, by teaching them something or even showcasing your skills in the craft you are good in.
Giving away free knowledge is my preferred way of doing it, mainly because I’m not THAT funny nor do I have a skill I would like to show on social media, (at least not right now) so I try to help people with social media and with their writing in general.
Is that what YOU should be doing?
It solely depends on what you want to do on a consistent basis.
Maybe you find it annoying and frustrating to write long captions in order to teach a lesson to someone but you might love to make funny videos with your friends.
That’s the beauty of social media, you can focus an account on something you REALLY love and have fun with it.
But if you want to grow then you need to be able to bring value on a consistent basis.
This is where most people get caught up in (It happens to everyone) since making content can become hard to juggle with all of the other things that can be happening in your life.
What’s the best way you can solve this?
By creating long pieces of content you can cut into smaller pieces.
This means that the quality of the posts will be high while still being able to post on a daily basis.
Posting every day ensures you that the people who have seen your content won’t forget about you with all of the other content they are consuming.
Leave a clear call to action at the end of the video asking them to share your content if it brought any value to them or ask a question about the video in order to get some feedback about it.
The idea is to be as human as possible in a world full of people using automation services to make everything “easier”
Respond to every single comment and message you get and be as helpful as you can. You want people to see you as someone that can help them and or hear them out.
These are the basic steps you can use to build a community rather than a “following” (which should have been your goal from day one)
This process will NOT be fast unless you create a piece of content that goes viral, so embrace the journey and have patience!
I promise you it will be worth the hassle.
If you have any specific question or want to say hi then hit me up on my Instagram and I will respond to you ASAP :)
Thanks for reading The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication
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