How To Not Lose Followers
Although there is no cut and dry method to keeping your loss of followers rate down, there are some preventative measures. Losing followers can be for numerous reasons— maybe you aren’t posting enough, maybe you are posting too much, or maybe your content is undesirable.
Unless someone directly comes out and tells you why they unfollowed you, you will never know. Rather than guessing, take a step back and reevaluate what you are doing wrong. Even if you are not doing anything wrong per say, reevaluate what you can be doing better.
Pause Your Social Media
Announcing to your audience that you are going on a hiatus may be something you want to consider. Your hiatus you can now call your very much needed ‘self-care’ session. Grab a notebook or your dry erase board and start thinking!
Review Your Goals
What are your goals? Are they short or long term? Try starting small and think of a weekly goal, or even a monthly goal. If you are wanting a more advanced option, set a daily goal, or even three.
Setting a goal(s) helps with self-discipline, keeps you in line, and helps you focus on what you have to do in that moment and the next. Some small goals would be to post at least once a day, at any given time. More advanced goals would be to post 3x a day, during high engagement hours.
Everyone’s social media account has a different audience, so always remember to set realistic expectations that work for you. Avoid comparing your account to other’s. Work on bettering what you currently have.
Re-Define Your Audience
Your target audience is the follower base in which your account has. Your target audience are the ones highly likely to buy your product or service. If you are not selling anything and your brand is your persona, (i.e. youtuber) then your audience would most likely be a specific age group, or a niche-specific follower base.
If your followers are following you for a specific reason, you want to make sure you are giving them the content that they are there to see. Mixing things up will only confuse your audience and may cause them to unfollow you because you are being inconsistent.
If you are receiving specific requests that are within the nature of your brand, fulfill those requests to the best of your ability to keep your current audience happy with the possibility of attracting more loyal followers.
Redefining your audience puts your head space in the right direction. Knowing who you are creating content for and fulfilling that for them will keep them around more permintately.
Revise Your Content Strategy
The best way to revise your content strategy is to utilize your analytics tool that Instagram provides you with. From there you can see your posts with the highest engagement. Pick a few and see what they have in common.
If you are receiving high engagement on particular posts, keeping up with that specific style on content will drive your followers to stick around. Do keep in mind that trends within social media are changing everyday.
This doesn’t mean you have to change your brand, but if you can incorporate anything popular into your scheduled content strategy, that might drive more traffic than usual. Creating a long lasting impression is what you want to offer and switching things up or coming up with a strict content guideline might be the best route for you and your platform.
Rearrange Your Posting Schedule
Posting too little might be a problem to some and so can posting too much. You can’t satisfy everyone but you can change your posting schedule to what works best for you. If you find yourself losing followers when you post randomly, change that.
Best results often reflect that if you post at least two times per day during high engagement hours, you have a higher chance of being seen, therefore attracting interaction. If that does not work, try experimenting with certain times and stick with what works best for you.
Rewrite Your captions
First order of business is to do away with the long captions. Anyone with long captions is literally asking people to scroll right on by it. Short captions are better, but want to know what is best? ENGAGING captions. Ask a question, mention something trending, pertain your caption to what is happening in the photo, or use emojis. You can never go wrong with emojis.
Reassign Your Hashtags
Do not use hashtags that do not pertain to your brand. Ineffective hashtags work just like fillers— they take up space and do absolutely nothing. Creative hashtags with a range of 300k-5million uses will help increase your followers, likes, and comments.
Reach Out To Niche Influencers
If you are at the point in your social media career where you are ready to start partnering with niche influencers, you are doing great, but you are about to be doing even greater. Utilizing the power of influencers is by far one of the best ways to build your audience to new heights.
The followers of influencers are typically large followers. Micro influencers range anywhere under 100,000 followers. Whole mega influencers range higher, and are devised up of fans who believe what they say and typically support what they promote.
Although it can be costly, choosing the best influencer to work with is what’s most important. The right influencer can help strengthen your brand by promoting their trust in what you have to offer. Choose wisely and expect great results.
Recharge
Revamping your entire strategy is probably the break you needed from social media. There is nothing wrong with taking a step back to reevaluate what you have been doing. There is always room for improvement and you making the decision to recharge shows that you care about what your brand has to offer.