Followers Don’t Make You An Influencer
Influence makes you an influencer.
I wrote this article last week on “What the **** is a MICRO influencer?”. I thought I would elaborate on a key point.
“The key metric is influence; not reach.”
Since I launched Influenc(r) last week, I’ve had a few people reach out to me asking for help on monetizing their audience. They have worked to build a following over x period of time and are ready to cash in. Unfortunately, their follower base often matches one of the following (if it was easy, everyone would be an influencer):
The follow/unfollow game
This is when people search relevant hashtags or scour follower lists of adjacent brands, follow as many as the Instagram daily limit will allow, wait until the next day, and do it all again. Their stats usually look a little something like this:
More often than not, they then go back through and unfollow everybody that they just followed; or sometimes just the people who didn’t follow back.
It’s a hack; a rouse; a hoodwink. These followers don’t give a shit about you.
Purchased followers
I think most are aware of this one. There are services who create fake accounts that they then sell follows to, in exchange for your hard-earned cash in order to pump up their numbers.
Note: low number of posts, high followers, and next-to-nothing engagement. These posts didn’t even have a single comment.
Stats certainly aren’t everything, but they’re a pretty good indicator.
Engagement is from bots
If these are the only comments you get, you don’t have engagement. You’re just showing up in automated search terms that bots scour, then programmatically like/comment on:
Engaged followers who won’t buy
In my last article, I wrote about the difference between a celebrity and an influencer. Most would know this rapper:
Impressive following, right? His followers could care less. Years ago, I help promote one of his shows. His followers wouldn’t buy hardly any tickets. We kept dropping the price last minute in an effort to get cheeks in the seats.
His followers were engaged, commented often, talked about how excited they were for his new music, but when it came time to pull out their credit card, they wouldn’t swipe.
Not. Even. For. $5/ticket.
We gave tickets away for free on the last day. They came for that.
It took me a little while to derive meaning from this flop.
Of course people like free stuff. But influencers are able to influence buying habits in ways never before seen. Celebrities get people who think it would be “so cool” to see them, but won’t take the final step.
At the end of the day, the purpose of influencer marketing is to sell more stuff.
If an “influencer” doesn’t help that happen, they’re not an influencer. They’re probably one of the above.
Hope you enjoyed it! Please clap for it if you did. It helps out more than you could know.
Influenc(r) is running a 7 day free trial right now for unlimited access to discover trending micro influencers by keywords and locations. Email me at tristan@influencr.me if you want to chat!
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