🐚 The Salty Shell: What's Wrong with Your Audience

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No, seriously, what’s wrong with your current audience? Every person and brand on social (and the out-of-touch-with-reality people in the c-suite) is always so concerned about growing. Growing the number of followers on every social media account – not growing the community – growing the silly little number everyone can see.

The most followed person on:

TikTok: Khabane Lame

Instagram: Cristiano Ronaldo

X: Barack Obama (it’s really Elon Musk but we all know why we follow him)

Facebook: Cristiano Ronaldo

YouTube: Mr Beast

The most followed brands on (excluding the platform itself):

Facebook: Samsung

Instagram: National Geographic

X: YouTube

LinkedIn: Google

Pinterest: HGTV

I don’t follow most of those, and the ones I do did not have to do anything to get me to follow them, they’re something/someone I genuinely like and want to follow. Here’s the thing – those people and brands aren’t focused on growth, their goal isn’t to get more followers and their goal was never to get more followers – their storytelling and content made them brands people want to follow, and that’s how it should be. These people and brands focus on creating content that their current audience appreciates.

Say you have 2,000 followers but your goal is 10,000. It’s not wrong to have goals and want to grow (and you should be growing) but are you willing to tell those 2,000 followers that you don’t care about them? Thanks for getting me to 2k, but you personally are not good enough.

Think about it. Why aren’t they good enough for you? You wanted them, you got them.

🧂 Salty Insights: It's Just a Number

A large following doesn’t guarantee meaningful interactions, conversations or conversions, which you should want. If you have 1,000 engaged and loyal customers following you on social, isn’t that better than 10,000 where 99% of them don’t even see your content and the 1% that does may not even be relevant?

I’m working on a paid social audit for a CPG brand right now and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Their goal is follower growth and they’re running ads on Facebook and Instagram to gain followers. There’s nothing wrong with follower acquisition ads – I like them – but there is something wrong with an audience so broad it’s literally: 18+, USA, Interests: cooking. That is damn near the broadest audience you can get and they don’t care. The worst part is that 99% (Seriously) of the comments on their ads are NEGATIVE and they weren’t community managing them!

As I was going over this situation, I realized they didn’t know who their audience was made up of, so I looked. 95% are 65+ and I can tell you that’s NOT their target market – so now they want a relevant audience. So which is it, relevant or large? They don’t know (relevant is the answer). They have a large following but get zero engagement and they spend a lot of time and money on their content and I had to say “for what?” “for who?”

This is why you need to have a strategy, target audiences, and most importantly: a community manager. But what happens when someone won’t budge and always wants large follower numbers? You have to stop agreeing – seriously – you know why that’s nota. Good idea and how it will be a waste – so tell them. They don’t know what they don’t know and you’re the expert – so be the expert.

Kill them with data.

It starts as what’s wrong with your audience: why isn’t the current audience good enough? And it evolves into what’s wrong with your audience: they’re all 65+ and in another country and are not your target demographic or consumers.

⚓️ Anchor Your Success: Quality>Quantity

Brand awareness goes far beyond follower count. It’s about creating meaningful connections, creating meaningful and relevant content and celebrating your customers. Instead of obsessing over numbers, do this instead:

Get to Know Your Audience

Get to know who follows you on social media by learning as or from the community manager, sentiment reports, engagement reports with comments and shares listed, create engaging and interactive content to get to know them further. Read “How I Created a Transformational Approach to Community” for an idea you can copy.

The most interesting and important part of your report should be your advocate index, not the slide with green positive growth charts. The advocate index is where I put the highly-engaged, constant UGC taggers, the chatty ones etc on slides of their own so the brand/company knows WHO their audience is. These aren’t fake personas or estimated data – these are the real people in the comments and DMs who are your free word of mouth marketing force and they choose to spend some of their time on social with you.

Know & Post What THEY Want

I can’t count how many calendars I’ve seen and worked on where the most complex, expensive, super polished, corporate branding content is prioritized because of all of those things and I swear to you, it’s NEVER the top performing and usually has no engagement.

Pretty doesn’t work on social – relevant and relatable do.

Look at your content reports – what are people engaging with? What are they saving? Sharing? Commenting on? This is the content themes you should focus on. There’s a way to get your brand message and sales points across without standing out like a brand.

Reward Loyalty

“Surprise and delight” is my FAVORITE thing to do for communities on social. From sending free product or limited-time merch to literally setting them up on a date with another fan and creating a one-fan-ever behind-the-scenes experience.

There are so many ways to recognize them depending on what extent you can go:

• Giveaways

• Exclusive discount codes

• Early access

• Limited edition

• Virtual events

• Feature them in your content, repost their UGC, share testimonials

​Always be reporting.

So, what’s wrong with your audience? Is it the opposite of your target audience already? Is it too large and irrelevant so content isn’t being seen? Or do you have a quality following of engaged and loyal customers who you’re building relationships with?

🌊 Brain Waves: Do Your Research

Make time to focus on your audience. I don’t mean an hour or a meeting with your social team – take the time to really dig in – I can analyze an audience over a week when I’m doing an audit. It takes time, but it’s worth it – you’re getting raw feedback and insights.

How many followers do you have? What’s your reaction to that?

What are their demographics?

Does this match your target audience?

What type of content do they engage with the most?

How much are you spending on follower acquisition?

What are the demographics of the new followers?

Do new followers feel welcomed on your socials and want to join and stick around?

Who is your go-to person on the front lines who knows your followers like friends? (hint: it’s your community manager and they should be in more, but important, meetings)

Understanding who your audience is more valuable than a number at the top of a profile. You literally have your consumers at your fingertips – thank them, get to know them, and learn from them. Bonus: you’ve already won them over.

Forget follower counts.

Chelsea

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PS - Yes, I saw Mindy. Yes, we showed up wearing the same thing.

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