You’ve probably heard it said that follower count is a “vanity metric,” an overrated number that has very little value. In some ways, that’s true.

However, just like an email list gives you ongoing access to your target market, when your ideal customers follow you on social media, they’re giving you ongoing access to their attention. They’re giving you additional opportunities to entertain and educate them, to make your company memorable, and to convert them into customers when the time is right.

Ways to gain social media followers

To grow your following, try the following:

• Entertain your audience. Humor, specifically, is an effective way to grab people’s attention and promote engagement, including follows. If you’re known for sharing entertaining content on social media, and if doing so is appropriate for your company type, you’ll almost certainly see an increase in followers.
• Educate your audience. Can you teach your ideal customer something that solves a problem or gets them closer to a goal of theirs? Yes; everyone has something they can teach! So posting informative content may be worth a try. If your audience responds well to it, you’ll gain their trust over time and, when they need a product or service like yours, you’ll be the go-to company.

There are three important aspects of this goal:

• Followers gained. And we’re not just talking about how many you gain. When did they follow you and does the answer correlate with the success of a certain social media post? If so, it can give you insights into what content types perform well. (Find out the best types of social media content to try here!)
• Quality of your followers. Additionally, what’s the quality of your following? Are they low-quality accounts doing follow for follow to try and increase their own visibility or are they your ideal followers and customers
• Followers lost. Do many people who fit your ideal customer profile tend to follow you and then unfollow a short time later? Do you notice a bunch of unfollows after posting a certain type of content? Keep an eye out for patterns like these; they can tell you a lot about how your audience and their perception of you.

Probably the most straightforward social media metric to measure, you can use the built-in tools on most social media platforms (e.g. Twitter Analytics) to track fluctuations in your follower count. Or, if you prefer to view analytics from just one tool, you could use something like Buffer or Hootsuite.