Stop focusing solely on your social stats!

It’s easy to get sucked into the social stats, rat race.

I’ve been guilty of social stats chasing on numerous occasions.

It’s a filthy habit, to be sure, :)

Granted, it’s essential to have as many of your ideal clients’ eyeballs following and engaging your content as possible, but, before you start to hem and haw over how many likes your recent post received, it’s important to not lose sight on the most important aspect of this process:

Creating informative, entertaining and inspiring content that solves your tribe's pain points.

From this, all great things come - period, :)

Generating inbound leads through your social media is a long play, and it’s not going to be solved by adopting a stop-gap solution like playing the follow/unfollow game, or joining a pod and posting strategically with others.

That’s manufacturing results, not creating them organically, which means they won’t last.

I learned that through experience.

A couple of months ago, I hired a company to raise my Instagram follower count, and “engage” my followers’ posts. At first, it was working like a charm - I added about 3,000 new followers in a couple months. My social stats were booming. 

Awesome, right?

Fast forward a couple of months, Instagram adopted a new algorithm, and I started to get penalized for using this service that violated IG’s Terms of Service, and my engagement fell off a cliff immediately. I also lost a TON of followers in the process.

My social stats fell off the side of a building. Not so awesome.

I got blinded by number chasing, ignored the impact of my posts, and guess what - it bit me right in the ass.

Numbers are important, but your thought leadership is paramount.

Focus your energy on creating content around who you serve and how you can help them with their challenges.

Rather than playing the follow/unfollow game to grow a network, create content that invites and inspires others to come together as a community organically, and engage your content as a matter of need and not obligation.

Quality over quantity, folks. That’s how you create impact with your thought leadership.

Not by monitoring your social stats on a minute-by-minute basis.

How many of you learned the same lesson I did about manufacturing follower counts? How did you recover?

Please share your story in the comment section below.


PS - For those of you who aren’t in the know, I mail out these blogs 3x a week, and lemme tell you, they’re a real party, so, if you’d like to get in on this, sign up for it here and I’ll throw in a free gift for you...because I care, :)