How Many Social Media Followers Does Your Business Actually Need?

A business owner said something to me recently that I've heard approximately 8,000 times over the last 16 years.

“I've only got 600 followers.”

Only.

As though 600 actual human beings choosing to follow a business is somehow slightly embarrassing.

So I asked the question I think matters considerably more:

Who are they?

Because if those 600 people include potential customers, previous customers, local business owners, referral partners and people genuinely interested in what you sell, I'd be far more excited about that audience than 20,000 followers accumulated from a couple of completely irrelevant viral Reels.

We have become absolutely obsessed with follower count as a measure of whether somebody is “good” at social media. Bigger account equals better marketing.

Except it doesn't.

At the same time, I'm not going to give you the standard marketing line that followers are a vanity metric and don't matter at all.

They do matter.

Just perhaps not in the way we've been taught to think about them.

Is there a good number of social media followers for a business?

This is usually what people actually want to know.

Should my business have 1,000 followers? 5,000? 10,000? At what point does an account become “successful”?

Unfortunately, there isn't a magic number.

A local service business and an international fashion brand shouldn't have the same expectations. Neither should a business that's been operating for fifteen years and one that opened six months ago.

The value of your audience also depends enormously on what you sell.

Imagine you own a kitchen company where the average customer spends £15,000.

You have 800 followers, predominantly homeowners in the geographical area you serve.

Another kitchen company has 25,000 followers, but most came from a viral video that reached people all over the world.

Who has the more valuable audience?

The answer isn't automatically the account with 25,000 followers.

For the first business, one follower becoming a customer could represent £15,000 in revenue. They don't need tens of thousands of people watching them. They need enough of the right people paying attention.

That's why follower count without context doesn't tell us very much.

But followers aren't meaningless either

Growing a relevant audience is a good thing.

If somebody discovers your content and decides they want to see more of it, that's useful information. You've given them enough of a reason to stay connected to the business.

And the larger your relevant audience becomes, the more opportunities you potentially have to build recognition, create conversations, generate recommendations and ultimately turn some of those people into customers.

So yes, I want our clients' audiences to grow.

I want The Social Brain's audience to grow.

I'm not going to pretend I'd be indifferent if another 5,000 ideal clients suddenly decided to follow us tomorrow.

I'd be delighted. 😂

The important word there, though, is ideal.

Growth for the sake of making the number look impressive isn't much of a strategy.

Your followers aren't the only people seeing your content anymore

This is one of the biggest changes in how social media works.

There was a time when posting on a social platform primarily meant communicating with the audience you'd already built.

That's increasingly not the case.

Recommendation-led feeds mean Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and other platforms can put content in front of people who don't already follow the creator or business.

A Reel might reach thousands of non-followers. A LinkedIn post can travel through somebody else's network because they've interacted with it. Someone can search a topic on a social platform and discover a business they've never encountered before.

And increasingly, social content can be discovered beyond the social platform itself.

This changes the conversation around follower count.

Your followers still matter because they're the people who've actively chosen to keep your business in their world.

But they aren't necessarily the limit of your potential reach.

Your follower count tells you how many people chose to stay. It doesn't tell you how many people can find you.

For businesses, that's a really important distinction.

Discovery is becoming just as important as audience size

If you have 500 followers but your content regularly reaches relevant people outside that audience, your account may be doing a much bigger marketing job than the follower number suggests.

That's why I'd rather look at several questions together.

Are new people discovering the business? Are the right people following once they do? Are people visiting the profile? Are they understanding what the business does when they arrive? Is the content being shared? Are people remembering the business? Are any of those people eventually turning into conversations, enquiries or customers?

Suddenly, “We've got 543 followers” feels like a fairly small part of the picture.

It's still useful information.

It's just not the entire strategy.

The wrong viral post can make your numbers look fantastic

This is something businesses need to be careful with.

Let's say you run a professional service business in Essex and you publish a funny Reel that unexpectedly goes viral.

It gets 900,000 views.

You gain 7,000 followers.

Amazing, right?

Possibly.

But what was the Reel about?

If it had absolutely nothing to do with your business and most of the new followers live thousands of miles away with no reason to ever buy from you, you've certainly grown an audience.

I'm just not sure you've grown the business.

This is where visibility needs to have some connection to positioning.

I love reach. I love seeing our clients' content take off. One of our clients had a LinkedIn post reach around 273,000 impressions, and of course that's exciting.

But the reason I care about that result isn't simply because 273,000 is a very large number.

Her expertise reached more people. Her authority grew. She received more messages and enquiries.

The visibility was connected to what she wanted to be known for.

That's the difference.

Why buying followers is particularly pointless

Since we're talking about numbers, we may as well address this too.

Please don't buy followers.

Apart from the obvious problem that you've paid for a number rather than an audience, it makes your own data considerably less useful.

If half of your followers have absolutely no interest in the business, how are you supposed to properly judge whether content resonates with the people you're trying to reach?

A smaller audience built organically around genuine relevance gives you much more useful information.

I'd take 1,000 potential customers over 10,000 accounts that couldn't tell me what The Social Brain does.

Every single time.

“My competitor has more followers than me”

Ah. There it is 😂

I think this is where a lot of the anxiety around follower count actually comes from.

You look at a competitor and they've got 14,000 followers.

You've got 1,200.

Immediately, it feels as though they're winning.

But unless you've got access to their accounts, you don't know enough to reach that conclusion.

You don't know who those followers are.

You don't know how they acquired them.

You don't know how many enquiries they're generating.

You don't know their conversion rate.

You don't know their revenue.

You don't know whether they're profitable.

You don't know whether half of those followers arrived four years ago and haven't interacted since.

You're comparing the one number you can see publicly with an entire business you can't.

By all means, pay attention to competitors. Look at what they're talking about, where they're positioning themselves and what seems to resonate with their audience.

Just don't allow their follower count to become a scoreboard for your own business.

What should businesses focus on instead of follower count?

I wouldn't actually say “instead”.

I'd say alongside.

Track your audience growth. We do.

But give the number some context.

I'd want to know whether you're becoming more discoverable to the right people. I'd want to know whether those people are choosing to stick around and whether your content is making the business more recognisable.

Then I'd want to look at what happens further down the line.

Are people clicking through to your website? Are they replying? Are they joining your email list? Are you getting DMs? Are you being recommended? Are people mentioning content on sales calls? Are enquiries increasing?

This is the journey we're interested in:

Discovery → Relevance → Recognition → Trust → Enquiry.

Follower growth can sit within that journey.

It just isn't the destination.

So, how many followers does your business actually need?

Enough of the right people.

I realise that's an annoyingly non-specific answer to a very specific question, but I'd rather give you an accurate answer than invent a magic number.

A business doesn't suddenly become successful when Instagram ticks over from 9,999 to 10,000 followers.

And a business with 700 followers isn't automatically doing badly.

The question is whether your audience - whatever its current size - contains the people your business actually needs to reach.

Then we can work on growing it.

Because I absolutely believe businesses should want more visibility.

More of the right people discovering you is a good thing.

More potential customers recognising your name is a good thing.

More people choosing to follow because they find what you say useful or interesting is a good thing.

Just don't confuse having a bigger audience with having a better marketing strategy.

They're not automatically the same thing.

Something to think about...

Open your business's social media account and look at the number of followers.

Now, instead of asking:

“How do I make that number bigger?”

Ask:

“Do I want more people like the ones already here?”

If the answer is yes, brilliant. Let's find more of them.

If the answer is no, the number probably isn't the thing you need to fix first.

And if you're posting consistently but struggling to attract the right audience - or you're simply not sure what your social media should be doing for the business anymore - that's something we can help with.

Book a discovery call and let's see what your social media could be doing differently.