Prepare to watch the follower numbers tumble, but know that you might also be surprised by how many people also enjoy following the life not lived. Just because I don’t have children of my own doesn’t mean that I avoid all mommy bloggers. There are plenty of influencers in my feed who are into stuff that I don’t really relate to: vegans, gamers, financial specialists, political reporters ...
Every now and again someone will comment on a sport-related post I create, to point out that they have been following me since I hosted a request show on campus radio, or that they used to watch me hosting music shows and they love how far I’ve come since then.
Have the courage to regularly (perhaps annually?) diarise and then prepare your own State of the Nation address: take stock, commit to new goals, talk about this to the people who follow you, and gather and even share their feedback. We tend to think that people only want to see content creators who have it all figured out, but what if your followers find even more value in seeing you adapt, seeing you grow?
Being real and transparent about your journey might just help you reach a level of trust with your followers that keeps them there, even if the content moves away from the topic that initially attracted them to you.
3
FIND YOUR TRIBE
The ghost in the machine
When engagement is low or when accounts don’t grow the way people think they should, they often tend to lump one bogeyman with all the blame; the dark force that supposedly holds your account back from social media stardom is the algorithm.
Everyone who has battled to grow their account, from small bands to massive brands, up-and-coming influencers to world-famous athletes, has turned their attention to the algorithm and many have thrown their hands up in despair. But I have good news for you. The algorithm is not all that mysterious; it’s not devious and it certainly doesn’t want to prevent you from becoming a successful influencer.
What makes the algorithm tricky is that it’s not a clearly codified set of rules. It is not like a set of commandments or laws. It is constantly shifting, improving and adapting, and it varies from platform to platform. This is also why we’re constantly feeling our way through it, trying to understand it by playing with it. It’s like a great big puzzle and often it can feel as though you are building it in the dark.
The other big issue to consider is that if you can’t gain enough engagement organically, the chances are higher that you’ll boost, promote or pay for posts to pop up in more feeds more regularly. You will advertise and this is part of how social networks make money. I think that while this is definitely true for brands, it is less so for influencers. When you’re a digital creator, your content can certainly outperform a paid model, because you’re not only posting and sharing commercially driven content: many of the stories you tell as an influencer are also perfectly human and relatable, which means you can build a much more impressive engagement rate than most brands are able to do. As explained earlier, regardless of a marketer’s best efforts, people will always follow people.
You need to figure out ways of making sure you make the most of this advantage by developing content that builds a solid track record with your target follower. Ideally, you want your follower to “tell” (by way of their browsing habits) the algorithm to fast-forward the posts you send into the great big pool of content that is your social platform of choice straight to the top of their feed.
But let me start at the beginning so that we’re on the same page about why algorithms exist.
Initially, as a social media user you saw every post from every account you followed. Posts were presented to you in chronological order. Imagine watching a bunch of social media posts standing in line like people, in a neat little queue. No post gets to jump the queue – first come, first browsed.
This makes a lot of sense, right? Yes, but then social media went pop! According to Instagram, we started missing out on as much as 70% of the content produced by the accounts we followed. We had so much happening on our feeds that we were stuck, looking at our distant cousin Helen’s third child, drooling in high definition – while your crush had just posted a photo of himself at the beach ... Of course, as luck would have it, this swimsuit post was uploaded immediately after you logged off. Sadly, your tolerance for baby spit ran out an instant too soon. Then, by the time you logged on again, just before bed, the swimsuit post had disappeared in the noisy, crowded mess that had become your home feed.
In came the algorithm, the solution to this chronological queue in which posts had to wait. The algorithm was created to ensure that you would see those swimsuit photos pop up the very next time you logged on, regardless of whether this was that night or two days later. This was not because the algorithm could read your mind, but because you had liked every single post your crush had put up for the past few weeks. You had spent ages thinking of witty comments to leave every time someone else tagged him in something and duly followed through. He liked your comment immediately. And, of course, you also spent an inordinate amount of time scrolling back on his timeline, studying his personality through the distorted prism that is social media. We’ve all been there – this is nothing to be embarrassed about.
If you select “Most Recent” in your Facebook News Feed options, you’ll basically switch back to the algorithm-free feed we first got to know in the mid-2000s.
On Twitter you used to be able to reset
