4 Reasons People Unfollow Your Brand

Reflection #2

1. Not posting routinely.

Your followers are more likely to get excited about your brand if they can expect quality posts on a consistent basis. If your brand stops showing up in their feed, they might forget about it! In general, posting more often boosts the rate of incoming followers. In a study of 28 billion tweets, social media company Beevolve found that tweeting more frequently is correlated with an influx of followers. It makes sense - the more you post, the more others like, share, retweet, and interact with your brand, spreading the message to other interested people. Unless you’re just starting out, posting a few times a day is the way to go keep new people and loyal fans interested. Software like Hootsuite and Buffer helps many businesses stay on top of post scheduling.

2. Posting too often!

Regular updates are great, but avoid becoming the other extreme. Even if you have the most entertaining content around, nobody will read it if it’s spamming their feed. Posting too much gives the audience an easy reason to unfollow, unsubscribe, or unlike your brand’s social media presence. Let’s say you have 3 posts scheduled for a day. It will be better to distribute them a few hours apart during the day rather than releasing all of them at noon. (The best times to post really depends on the medium, outlined in the graphic above.) Customers need to remember your brand as an occasional but positive presence in their social media, not an unpredictable nuisance.

3. Boring, predictable content.

If all your company does with their social media is advertise sales and products, followers will have little reason to stick around. There is little incentive to follow a brand when the content is all headlines, all promotions, or just fills up people's newsfeed with repetitive content in general. Try experimenting with different formats that show users different sides to your company, piquing their interest. Throw in customer testimonials, polls, events, giveaways, news, and make sure there are plenty of pictures and videos to go with them. On the whole, people are more likely to engage when visual media is used. Socialbakers, another social media company, discovered that users interact with Facebook posts with a picture or video 93% to 96% more frequently than with posts only containing text.

4. Not interacting with your followers.

When the audience messages, tags, or otherwise interacts with your brand, they want to start a conversation! A company can't expect people to care about their content if the company doesn't appear to care about feedback. Even if a client comes to your brand with a complaint, they will feel more positively towards it if their problem is acknowledged. People are more likely to interact with (therefore bring more attention to) the social media presence of a business if they feel their thoughts and opinions will matter. Responding to individuals can have a domino effect where observing followers ask, "If I say something, maybe this company will respond to me, too?". Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein of the Kelley School of Business emphasize that "The first step is to listen to your customers. Find out what theywould like to hear; what they would like to talk about; what they might find interesting, enjoyable, and valuable." Customers themselves can give you valuable guidance on how to focus your social media presence.

Atkinson, Dane. "Post Smarter: The Best Times to Use Social Platforms (Infographic)." Entrepreneur. N.p., 31 Mar. 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. <https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232645>

Buffer. Buffer menu. 2014. Learninbound. Web. <https://learninbound.com/buffer-social-media-scheduling-tool-time-wednesday/>.

Beevolve. "An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Across the World." Social Media Analytics | Beevolve. N.p., 10 Oct. 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. <http://www.beevolve.com/twitter-statistics/#f3>.

Kaplan, Andreas M. "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media." Business Horizons. (2010) 53, 59-68

Ross, Phillip. "Photos Are Still King on Facebook." Socialbakers.com. N.p., 08 Apr. 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. <https://www.socialbakers.com/blog/2149-photos-are-still-king-on-facebook>.

Thou Shalt Not Bore People. 2016. Bootcamp Digital. By Krita Neher. Web. <http://bootcampdigital.com/category/social-media-marketing/>.