Building An Audience On Instagram And Gaining Followers

I have been speaking about this a lot on my Instagram but there is nothing like deep diving into something on a blog post. So, where to even begin on building an audience on Instagram?

I think since I started working in social media 6 years ago, there has always been a huge emphasis on followers. It always seemed to be the metric that everyone cared about, (the second being likes on a post, of course), and I was sucked in by this too. Even when I started freelance work, managing social media accounts, I used to think about the followers and worry if they weren’t increasing enough, not taking into consideration the other benefits I was bringing business owners by managing their accounts for them alone. However, a lot has changed since 6 years ago and more importantly my perception of these metrics have changed.

I always knew this but I have started to shout about it more recently, my mission with Greene Creatives is to help business owners change their perception of these vanity metrics too. It bugs me that marketing is associated with social media alone, and then social media is associated with the words “followers'' and “likes”. There is so much more to marketing.

Marketing is a tool to tell the story of your business and social media is just one function of that tool. This is why I think we need to step back more and look at the bigger picture before we even consider starting to market our business. What are you trying to achieve here? Most people are trying to build an audience on Instagram of people who are interested in the product or service they provide and this is different than gaining followers on an app. Building an audience on Instagram isn't just about getting followers. It may be great to have this high number in the following but if they aren't buying from you then what really is the point? Think about it this way, how is having loads of people following you actually benefiting your business? 

Let’s break down the definition of each word.

Social media follower:

Someone who has subscribed to an account in order to receive all the updates. It refers to a user who consciously chooses to see all the posts of another user in their newsfeed. (Source: Social Bee)

Audience:

An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature, theater, music, video games, or academics in any medium. (Source: Wikipedia)

As we all know, it takes milliseconds to click ‘follow’ on Instagram. You really don’t need to put much thought into it, and the ‘unfollow’ option is just as quick and easy. What I mean is, following a brand on Instagram doesn’t take much investment or make that much of an impact on our life, but the content we consume does. This is where the definitions come into play, a social media follower wants to see updates about your brand, but an audience is a group of people who participate. 

Instead of celebrating followers, we should be thinking about how we nourish a relationship with these people so they stay around, authentically engage in your community, bring value to it and want to join you on other platforms.

At the end of the day, we do all want to make money with our business and that comes from not just building an audience on Instagram, it comes from building relationships and trust with people, it doesn’t come from an action that took them milliseconds on an app. This relationship building comes from content that your audience consumes, and this content needs to be well researched, have a purpose and be exactly what your audience is looking for, and this is where I think a lot of business owners slip up. They are creating content in mind that they want to gain more followers, not nourish the audience they already have. This is where the concept “Why have 100,000 followers that don’t buy, when you can have 100 followers who have invested in your business?” makes sense.

If you think about it in real life too, you wouldn’t want to go to a party with 50 people who don’t interact with you. You’d rather go for drinks with 5 friends that share similar interests with you for you to enjoy engaging conversations with. Your social media environment should be the exact same. Surround yourself with people who get the ‘why’ of your business, who believe in what you are trying to achieve and who want to be a part of it. This then makes the relationship building and then converting so much easier.

If you feel called out reading this then I would recommend taking a step back and think about what you are trying to achieve with your marketing for your business. Spend time getting clear on your why and the type of people you would like in your audience and once you have these foundations in place, everything else you do should line up with them. Forget about followers and spend time engaging with your audience, this is invaluable because the conversations you have with them will inspire you with new ideas for content, which then leads to your audience feeling heard and valued. I can’t put into words how much more valuable that is over a digit on an app.

This is a topic I can discuss all day so I would love to hear your thoughts and if reading this has helped you see things in a different light, please drop me a DM it would make my day!