Followers are the first number most owners check, and the easiest one to buy. A “page like” campaign or a follower package can add thousands in a week for very little money.
The page looks bigger. The business often gets weaker.
How the algorithm reads your followers
Social platforms don’t show your post to all your followers at once. They show it to a small group first and watch what happens. If those people react, comment, share or click, the post is shown to more. If they scroll past, distribution slows down.
Now think about who those cheap followers are. Many joined because the campaign targeted whoever was cheapest to reach, not whoever might buy. Some are inactive accounts. Some live in places you don’t deliver to.
When your post reaches them first, they ignore it. The platform concludes your content is not interesting, and shows it to fewer people, including the real customers who would have cared.
In other words, the wrong followers don’t just fail to buy. They make it harder for the right ones to see you.
The vanity trap
Follower counts feel like progress because they only go up. They look good in a report and in a sales pitch. But a follower is not a customer, and growth in followers can hide a business that isn’t growing at all.
A page with 3,000 local followers who buy can be worth far more than a page with 80,000 who never will.
What to measure instead
Replace “how many followers?” with questions that connect to money:
- How many enquiries did social media bring this month? Messages, calls and form fills that mention a product or a price.
- How many of those became orders?
- What did each order cost in ad spend and staff time?
- Who is engaging? Check whether the people who comment and message are actually in your target area and customer type.
These numbers are less exciting, but they tell you whether social media is paying for itself.
If you already bought followers
You can’t easily undo it, but you can stop making it worse:
- Stop all campaigns that optimise for likes or follows.
- Run ads that optimise for messages, leads or purchases, aimed at the people who actually buy from you.
- Post content that invites real conversation from real customers: questions, behind-the-scenes, before-and-after results.
- Judge each month on enquiries and orders, not on the follower line.
Where DMG fits
At DMG, we don’t report followers as success. We set up campaigns that target the customers a business can actually serve, track enquiries and orders back to their source, and cut what doesn’t sell. A smaller audience of buyers beats a large audience of spectators every time.
Want to know how many of your followers are actually customers? Talk to DMG.
