The Art of Follower Retention and Why it Matters

As social media continuously shifts, so do the metrics that matter to social marketers. One metric that will always hold weight is follower growth and count. Now more than ever, social media users are precious about hitting that follow button, so brands must prioritize work on retaining the strong and loyal audience they’ve already built. 

A social media follower is a social media user who ‘subscribes’ or ‘follows’ a specific creator, influencer or brand’s social media account. A social media follower is typically a fan of the content the account creates and will actively engage with new posts through likes, comments or even DM’s. 

Unfortunately, not all social media followers actively interact with the accounts they follow and instead, passively watch or look at the content without engaging. Sometimes, these followers are even bots, or worse, purchased followers, which may not interact with your brand at all and often falsely inflate engagement metrics with inauthentic interaction or no interaction at all.

Follower retention is the intentional strategy of a brand or creator that relates to keeping users following your account. Follower retention differs from simply gaining new followers because it’s all about maintaining and engaging with your current audience in a way that keeps them coming back for more, not just increasing your follower numbers. In fact, losing followers isn’t always a bad thing. Think of it as weeding out the followers that don’t offer value, don’t resonate with your content or have a low chance to convert. This way, you can focus on retaining the followers that matter most and are true brand fans. 

Follower retention is one of the most important elements of a social media strategy and if you’re already tuned into what your audience likes and crafting this content accordingly, you’re already doing it and doing it well.

Retaining followers and subscribers is imperative to having a healthy following and in this day and age it’s often more important than gaining social media followers. Follower retention matters because it is what helps your follower numbers stay stable and grow. If you don’t retain followers, the strides you make towards your follower goals will become null or stagnant. 

It’s important to note that brands overall have seen slower follower growth rates, with a 3.7% average monthly growth rate for brands on TikTok with 1K followers or more. This is down 0.7% from the previous quarter.

This drop is particularly relevant for larger brands, who might have reached a ‘cap’ in their target audience or simply don’t connect with individual users as much as influencers or content creators. Remember the old adage ‘quality over quantity’ when considering follower retention and potential follower loss — is engagement up? Are shares up? These metrics likely indicate a solid connection with existing followers that should be nurtured.

If you’re having a hard time retaining your followers or experiencing unexplainable follower loss on Instagram or other platforms, there could be a few main reasons for this — not all of them necessarily bad. 

Bots and Deactivated Accounts

Many social media platforms work tirelessly to deactivate and eliminate bot accounts, which could be why you’re seeing a dip in followers. These types of tools, like SMM panels, will spam follow anyone and often boost follower numbers for a short period of time. 

Bots and deactivated accounts are the types of followers that are actually good to lose, as a smaller but healthy and engaged following is better than a larger, non-engaged or spammy following. 

Content Shift or Misalignment 

Have you posted something out of the norm or that differs from your typical content type? This content could be a significant factor in the fluctuation or loss of followers, because these days, it doesn’t take much for a user to decide to unfollow after seeing something they don’t like. 

Be sure to constantly keep an eye on how your followers are responding to your content, especially if you post something different from your standard content types.

Buying Followers

If you have experimented with purchasing followers in the past or present, this could be another reason you might see a shift or decrease in your follower count. Buying followers is a short-term solution that briefly inflates numbers. 

Similar to the bots mentioned above, bought followers on TikTok or Instagram are often bots themselves or something very similar, like users who have registered to join a service that are not actually invested in your brand or its content. These followers will either eventually unfollow or become deactivated over time.

Retaining followers across social media platforms is an art. It requires a deep understanding of your audience and the ability to pivot on a moment's notice. Luckily, you’re likely already doing many things that help retain followers without realizing it. Here are some additional tactics you can implement to help keep your followers active and engaged. 

Conduct Competitive Research

A great way to keep a pulse on your followers and industry is by looking at your competitors. With the right competitive insights, brands can tune into exactly what its audience likes or not. Not to mention that by using competitor data, brands have access to tests and results without having to risk or try out different tactics themselves first. A good competitor analysis tool will cover every base, allowing you to gain insight into what you need to do to get your followers to stick around.

Create Entertaining Content

This tip may seem like a given, but it is the best way to retain followers. If the number one goal of your content is to convert, your number two goal should be to entertain. Keep a close eye on content performance and even use content performance prediction tools to know exactly what will perform best and entertain before even having to post it. 

Engage With Your Community

There is no better way to retain your social media followers than to turn them into an engaged community. While building a community isn’t easy, it’s one of the most crucial steps to follower retention that must not be overlooked. Use a community management tool to ensure you don’t miss a single notification from a loyal follower, manage your inboxes across multiple platforms and measure sentiment analysis on posts. 

Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

A sometimes overlooked aspect of follower retention is profile optimization. Your profile should never be ‘set it and forget it’ and should always be constantly refreshed. This helps followers know you’re constantly updating your profile and also assists with social media SEO, which makes your profile more searchable and easier to find for both existing and new followers.  

Collaborate With Influencers

Influencers are an amazing and effective way to keep your audience engaged, but it can’t just be any influencer. Choosing the right influencer or creator with a creator management feature to collaborate with is one of the most important steps in creator and influencer marketing and follower retention. You want to collaborate with an influencer that just makes sense and will leave followers saying this is a collab they’ve been waiting for or didn’t know they needed until now.

In order to retain followers, you must have a deep understanding of your audience's fluctuations and follower metrics. With Dash Social’s Analytics and Monitoring, brands have unlimited access to customizable follower performance across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and more, helping them keep tabs on what content is working and what isn’t.  

With AI and Automation, brands can streamline social media analysis, access content predictions, gain competitor insights and even tune into what your followers are talking about and how with Social Listening. 

With these features and more, retaining your social media followers and audience has never been easier than with Dash Social.

What does ‘net followers’ mean?

Net followers is the measure of change of followers (negative or positive) over a specific period. 

How to keep track of Instagram followers?

There are a few different ways to keep track of your Instagram followers. The first and most obvious is just manually looking at your follower count in the native app and keeping note of the fluctuations every day in some sort of spreadsheet. The easier way is with the help of a follower tracking tool or platform. These types of tools will just automatically update to reflect any changes in followers and show you increases and decreases in real time.