Is Follower Count a Scam? (Yep!)
Can we stop saying we want more followers when we don't even engage the community we have now?
Can I be real for a second? Let down my guard and tell you how I feel for a second? There are times I wonder at my motives; if the reason I tell people they shouldn't care about followers is because I don't have ‘a lot’ of followers myself.
But a while back, I was listening to a podcast and one of the guests asked something that expresses what I've been trying to say all along: “Can we stop saying we want more followers when we don't even engage the ones we have now?”
You see, while I agree that having 10k+ followers would be pretty fuckin' cool, often the people who are saying that they want that many followers are the same people who aren't putting a lick of effort into maintaining the community they already have.
They aren't responding to the comments they get on their page and they are barely responding to their DMs; in short, they are completely forgetting the golden rule (treat others as you would want to be treated).
I talked a lot about this in my post “The Golden Rule of Social Media,” but in the words of Taylor Swift, I cannot leave well enough alone.
Because just when I think I’ve said all there is to say, something happens that pulls me right back in.
For example, let me tell you about the time a former client told me they wanted to buy followers. After picking my jaw up off the floor, I (rather calmly, given the circumstances) replied, “Before we get into why that’s a fucking terrible idea, please tell me why you want to do that?” Because I wanted to hear them out and give them the benefit of the doubt.
They said that they believed having a ton of followers on Instagram would give them “clout” with wine reviewers.
That philosophical difference is one of the many reasons I no longer work with them, because even though I can understand where they were coming from, the suggestion revealed something about them that wasn’t cohesive with my own thoughts on building community. It showed that they were focused on quantity rather than quality and on shortcuts versus integrity.
That’s not what I’m about, and it’s certainly not what I want for the brands I work with.
Because if you're trying to build something real, lasting, and rooted in good values, you simply cannot fake it.
Okay, okay… I can hear you screaming at me, “But WHY is buying followers such a bad thing, Heather?!”
Well, for one, it destroys your engagement rate, which completely fucks with your visibility in the algorithm. Additionally, when you buy followers, you’re populating your account with bots and randoms who will never buy from you, which defeats the purpose entirely. And importantly, it’s against Instagram’s terms of service, so you can literally get your account permanently shut down, which you definitely don’t want.
But beyond all of those reasons, buying followers misses the point of social media (and wine) entirely. Here you have this great way of being in direct contact with people who, like you, love wine, and you instead want to fill your account up with robots? That’s completely bogus, and you know it.
And again, I get it. It’s insanely frustrating how slow it can be to build up that kind of active community on social media. But if you’re using social media as a means of selling your wine, buying followers isn’t going to help you do that. It can, in fact, do the opposite.
Because at the end of the day, what’s the point of a bigger audience if it’s not real?
If your goal is to move wine, build loyalty, and create something meaningful, then what matters isn’t how many people follow you; it’s how many of them care.
Care enough to comment.
Care enough to DM you back.
Care enough to open your emails, show up to your events, join your club, and buy your wine.
So, while I don’t think follower count is irrelevant, per se, I do think how you treat the followers you already have (and what you’re willing to do to grow your community) tells me more about your business than any vanity metric ever could.
If you want better results from social media, you need to stop viewing the people who are showing up for you as numbers or even as “followers,” and instead start viewing them as a community.
And yes, I know that might sound like semantics, blah blah blah. However, the language we use shapes how we think and behave.
“Followers” implies a kind of cult-like deference, like they’re just there to nod along with whatever you say, which is borrrring (unless you’re a cult-leader, in which case it’s exactly what you want?). Even the term “audience” isn’t great. It makes it feel like you’re performing for a crowd that just sits in silence. They are both one-way conversations.
But a community is a dialogue. A community shows up for each other. They ask questions, offer support, recommend your wine to their friends, tag you in posts, and let you know when your shipping confirmation never showed up. That’s a relationship.
And you can’t buy real relationships. You build them and you nurture them.
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Stay awesome, my friend.
P.S. The title of this article is inspired by Alex Falcone and his hilarious hit series called “Is it a scam (yep!)”