You Ask, I Answer: Follower Campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn?

In today's episode, Jess asks, what's your best advice for running follower campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn? Don't. That would be my advice. Okay, you're probably looking for a little bit more than that. Here's why.

Follower campaigns. And by follower campaigns, we mean uh running any kind of paid or unpaid campaign to get people to follow your page or your business account on any given social network. For the most part, these are self-defeating. And here's why. The way social networks compute engagement rate is typically standard across many of these services.

It's the number of people who see your content versus the number of people who engage with it. And the way social network algorithms work is the more people who engage with your content, the more they help show your your stuff because they presume that if uh X percentage of the audience is engaging with your stuff, it must be good. So let's show it to a little bit more and see if the engagement rate keeps going up. When you run uh a campaign to build followers, uh, what typically happens is you get people who frankly are not that engaged, right? They haven't actively sought you out, they haven't found you, and when you attract them, particularly, particularly by things like contests, um, you get a bunch of low-quality followers.

You get a bunch of low-quality people who are probably not going to engage with you. Well, you see the problem here. As that audience of non-engaging people increases, and the social networks typically uh the algorithms are time-based, so they will show your stuff a lot to new people in the first twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours, and suddenly your engagement rate goes right into the toilet, they stop showing your stuff, and they don't stop just showing your stuff to the new people, they should stop showing your stuff to everybody. And so what happens is you end up with uh a lower engagement rate. That lower engagement rate means your stuff gets shown less, and it becomes this vicious downward spiral, uh, to the point where you end up with a a Facebook page or a LinkedIn page where you know three people see your posts.

And that's not a good place to be. Um, because it then means that organic social media is effectively dead to you. Uh, at that point, you must spend money uh in order to even just get people seeing your stuff. That's counterproductive on so many fronts. So the question you probably have then is well if building followers isn't the right way to go, well, what is?

Well, here's the thing if you're gonna run a campaign, but especially if you're going to spend money, run into something that you own that you benefit from directly in some way, and that uh you can use over and over again. I am, of course, speaking about your email list, or if you're more tech savvy, your text messaging list, whatever the whatever it is, your account, your email account, your text list, whatever, is an asset that you own that you grow and that you can reliably reach out to on a regular basis. So instead of running a campaign to say, hey, follow us on Facebook. No, no, no. Sub subscribe to our email newsletter.

I presume you have one and that it doesn't suck if those two conditions are not met, fix those first. Um but run that campaign instead. Why? Because you can always highlight and feature a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post or something in your newsletter and get people to engage with it. And that actually looks better because now an algorithm perspective, people are engaging who may not even follow you.

LinkedIn in particular is really good about trying to highlight content to audiences that might not otherwise check your stuff out, right? If it's contextually relevant. And a lot of these people don't necessarily follow this page on LinkedIn. Let's try showing it to other people and see what happens. That benefits you, right?

That benefits you because you essentially you're taking engagement from an outside source and and boosting it on content rather than trying to run a follower campaign to get people to follow you. None of these social networks let you download your followers, right? None of them. At any point they can pull the rug out from under you. Right?

And you've spent all that time and money and effort uh on growing something you don't own. So grow the thing you own, grow the thing you own, spend time, spend money, spend effort growing your email list, growing a text messaging list, growing any kind of house list where you have control, you have the audience's attention, and then like a spotlight, you direct that attention where it needs to go. Sometimes, if you want to give your social media program a shot in the arm, yeah, you direct people to a piece of content or a YouTube channel or a video on YouTube uh or a blog post. With that very very scarce, very precious resource of people's attention from the list you own. You can point the spotlight where it needs to go, and that is where you're gonna get real value.

So do not run follower campaigns. Instead, run acquisition campaigns to email or text messaging lists and redirect the attention from there. That's the best way to to tackle uh social media audiences in in late or mid to late 2020. If you have follow-up questions about this, leave them in the comments box below. It's it's an important question because a lot of people are still operating like it's Facebook 2015.

Follower campaigns in Facebook 2015 was a fine idea, right? Um Facebook worked really well back then for brands. It doesn't anymore. Uh so uh again, leave those questions in the comments box below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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