It strikes me that social media users place an awful lot of emphasis on gaining big numbers of followers.

And indeed being able to say "! have 100000 Twitter followers or I have 50000 Instagram followers does sound impressive.

The question is how important is it to have a big number of followers?

Well, I believe it is not as important as you might think.

Let's say you have a Twitter follower who has a 50k following.

A retweet would indeed have a lot of value as you are potentially shown to a much bigger audience.

But the flip side of this is how often does this actually happen, in my experience it is not very often because you see to gain a big following on sites like Twitter and Instagram you have to follow big numbers so that they follow back.

And when someone follows a big number of users then that means that there is just so much more content in their social feed meaning you are seen less and so the chances of retweets and regrams are in fact very low.

If however, your 50k follower is following a low number of users then you have a much better chance of being noticed on their feed.

So when you talk about social reach you are only talking about your potential reach

Of course, there are things you can do to boost your chances of being seen.

Using mentions on Twitter is a very good idea so that users get notified when you Tweet but you should only mention other users when you have a good social connection with them.

You should certainly not just mention users you have no connection with.

You can also create Twitter lists, so making niche feeds on specific topics.

With Instagram you can use lots of HashTags, they are big news on Instagram and will really boost your hits and views.

But what it really comes down to is how good is your content and how good are you at engaging and marketing your content?

Good content is the key to building followers and engagement and ultimately getting success with social media.

The whole chasing followers method to boost social reach is nothing more than a game.

And if you are playing the followers game then you are focusing on the wrong side of social media.

Here is what you should do to grow your followers and boost engagement

1/ Target niche followers, social media users who are posting similar content to yours who you know will in turn like what you are sharing

2/ Create niche Twitter lists so that you can easily see when someone has shared something of interest

3/ Use mentions, but only with members you have build a rapport with

4/ Use lots of hashtags on Instagram, don't go super crazy though. The secret is the more text you add the more tags you can add in.

The key is to not make your Instagram posts look spammy.

5/ Reply to mentions and comments adding value

6/ Be consistent with what you do.

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