From the first day you signed up for Twitter, Facebook or Instagram the idea of having more followers than your friends or competitors has been pursued by many users and marketing professionals. It is an easy metric to show off to your company and helps show that your social media marketing campaigns have been working. But in this world of spam bots, fake accounts and more shady dealings in the field of social media that number has lost almost all of its value.
Now one of the best ways to see if your content and social media marketing is successful is to look at the actual engagement for every share and post. From the very beginning of ListHunt we pushed engagement on Twitter over following and saw great results. This is not a new concept but it seems to be forgotten in the early days of starting your social media following and campaigns. In the rush to get to a certain number of followers people forget to determine if the audience they are building even care about their product or service. With almost 72% of all Tweets not being seen or ignored, the fight for engagement is a tough one.
As we built ListHunt into what it is today we learned a few lessons that we know go against the traditional ideas but still produced results. Also unlike most brands we decided to focus only on Twitter and give it all we had instead of spreading our content across multiple networks. With these great insights, we will avoid the terrible cliches like “use a hashtag” or “post an image” that plague every Twitter advice list.
Before we get into the stats and figures it is probably best to share some of our engagement data compared to our overall following. For brands like ListHunt using Twitter to share their articles and content, it is pertinent not to chase a Twitter following and instead look for engagement.