Followers Who Will Never Buy Anything

What a follower is worth

Entirely dependent on who they are.

A follower who lives in your service area, could plausibly need your service, and sees your posts is worth something.

A follower acquired through a giveaway, living three provinces away, who followed for a chance at a prize, is worth nothing.

Both increment the same number, which is why the number is a poor guide to anything.

How the number gets inflated

• Competitions, which attract people who want the prize.
• Follow-for-follow arrangements between businesses.
• Bought followers, which are frequently accounts rather than people.
• Engagement groups, where members interact reciprocally.
• Broad content attracting a national audience for a local service.

The first is the most common and the most defensible-sounding. A competition genuinely does increase followers, and almost none of them are customers.

The active harm

Not merely useless, and worth understanding why.

Platforms decide who sees a post partly by how the existing audience responds to it.

An audience of people with no interest in your service does not respond, which signals that the content is unengaging, which reduces how many people see it.

Which means a thousand disinterested followers can cause your posts to reach fewer of the eighty local ones than they would have reached without them.

That is the mechanism by which a competition can leave a page worse than before it ran.

A worked example

A local business that ran a giveaway and gained a substantial number of followers over a fortnight.

The follower count was celebrated internally.

Over the following months, posts reached progressively fewer people, and the number of comments from anybody local fell.

Checking the audience breakdown, a large majority of the new followers were outside the province and a proportion outside the country.

They removed what they could and stopped running competitions, and reach recovered over the following months.

Their conclusion was that the fortnight of growth had cost them roughly a year of ordinary performance.

What to look at instead

The measures that indicate whether a page is worth anything.

Where your audience is located, which most platforms report for a business page.

How many people your posts actually reach, rather than how many follow.

Comments and messages from people who could be customers.

And the only measure that connects to money: how many enquiries mention the platform when asked.

A page with eighty local followers producing two enquiries a year is doing more than one with two thousand producing none.

Bought followers specifically

Worth addressing directly, since it is still sold to small businesses.

Purchased followers are typically automated accounts or people paid to follow, and neither will ever buy anything.

They damage reach for the reason above, they can result in the page being penalised, and they are frequently identifiable to anybody who looks at the follower list.

Which means the risk includes a prospective customer noticing that a local trade has a following from another continent, and drawing the obvious conclusion about it.

There is no version of this that is worth doing, and it is the one thing in this subject with no defensible case.

Reach against followers

The relationship worth understanding, since it explains why the follower number is misleading twice over.

A post does not reach everybody who follows the page. It reaches a fraction, decided by the platform.

Which means a page with four hundred followers might reach thirty of them with a given post.

The fraction depends partly on how the audience responds, which is where a poor audience compounds the problem.

So the useful number is not how many follow but how many a typical post reaches, and that figure is reported on any business page.

Watching it over months tells you whether the page is improving; watching the follower count tells you almost nothing.

The counter-case

Where a broad audience is legitimate.

A business selling something shippable, where geography does not constrain the customer.

Anybody whose content is the product, such as training or publishing, where a national audience is the point.

A business genuinely operating across a region or country rather than a town.

And a trade with a genuine reputation-building purpose, where being known beyond the immediate area has value for recruitment or partnerships.

For an ordinary local service business, none of those apply, and local composition is the whole question.

Engagement bait

The technique that produces numbers and nothing else, and it is worth recognising.

Posts asking people to comment with an answer, tag a friend, or pick between two options.

Those generate comments reliably, which is why they are recommended, and the comments come from people responding to a prompt rather than to a business.

Which produces a page that looks active and an audience that has learned to treat it as entertainment.

Platforms have also progressively reduced the reach of posts that explicitly ask for interaction, so the technique works less well than it did.

A post that is genuinely useful gets fewer comments and better ones, and the ones it gets come from people who might phone.

Growing the right audience

Slower, and it produces something worth having.

Post about local things: jobs in named towns, local conditions, local events.

Participate in local groups as a person rather than a page.

Ask customers to follow, at the end of a job, which produces exactly the right kind of follower.

And boost occasionally to a tight local radius, which reaches people who could actually use you.

That grows slowly, and every single follower gained that way is somebody who might actually phone.

Losing followers is fine

Worth saying, since the number falling causes disproportionate concern.

Platforms periodically remove inactive and fake accounts, which reduces counts across every page at once.

And people unfollow for ordinary reasons: they moved, the job finished, they are tidying their feed.

None of that indicates a problem, and a page losing the followers who would never have phoned is improving rather than declining.

Checking yours

1. Look at where your audience is.
2. Note what proportion is local.
3. Compare reach against follower count.
4. Stop running competitions.
5. Remove obviously fake followers where possible.
6. Ask customers to follow instead.

The first is a report most page owners have never once opened, and it frequently changes the assessment of the page completely.

What that audience is actually for is covered in what a sponsored local post actually buys.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.