Critical Mass: How Many Social Media Followers Do You Need?

How many fol­low­ers equal crit­ic­al mass?

Everyone wants more fol­low­ers on social media.
Businesses, too.

At the same time, mar­ket­ing experts are shout­ing at the top of their lungs that the num­ber of fol­low­ers does­n’t mat­ter; it’s all about hav­ing the right fol­low­ers. And this is all accom­pan­ied by anxious whis­pers in the office hall­ways about who has bought their fol­low­ers and who hasn’t.

Do your num­ber of fol­low­ers, fans, and sub­scribers matter?

Here we go:

Critical Mass in Social Media

Well, the num­ber of fol­low­ers, fans, and sub­scribers does­n’t mat­ter — to a degree. You could have 100,000 fake fol­low­ers on Twitter, and it would­n’t mat­ter if your stat­ist­ics tell you that 5,000 saw your last tweet because they were all bots anyway. 

Or, you could have 16,000 fol­low­ers as I do, but I’m not as act­ive there as I once was — which the algorithm does­n’t like. The actu­al num­ber of fol­low­ers, fans, and sub­scribers mat­ters very little.

Too many fol­low­ers, fans, and sub­scribers can be prob­lem­at­ic if your brand loses momentum. If you get 100 Facebook likes per week on aver­age, it’s bet­ter to have 50 fans (200% engage­ment) than 5,000 (2% engagement).

So, all those mar­ket­ing experts aren’t wrong per se. But some­thing must be said about simply hav­ing too few fol­low­ers as a business.

Return on Engagement vs Following Size

Suppose a busi­ness hires one per­son to run all its social chan­nels, which costs 2,000€ per week (includ­ing taxes, rent­al fees, con­tent soft­ware licens­ing, etc.). How many fol­low­ers must this employ­ee engage each week to break even?

There are many ways to attrib­ute value to social media mar­ket­ing, and the right choice depends on the business. 

The most com­mon approach is cal­cu­lat­ing the altern­at­ive cost for the brand’s organ­ic reach. How much would it cost to reach all those people with advert­ising? This is, in many ways, an out­dated (and hated) mod­el, but that’s beside the point for this blog post; the mat­ter is that there are bet­ter or worse ways to attrib­ute value to your online mar­ket­ing efforts — but it’s some­thing that most busi­nesses have to do.

If you have to reach 100,000 people to con­vert cus­tom­ers to a value of 2,000€ per week, it mat­ters how many fans you have at the begin­ning of that week.

Critical Mass (of Quality Followers)

A brand’s total aver­age organ­ic reach tends to be stable. Social net­work algorithms change, but usu­ally not that fast. 

Engagement rates fluc­tu­ate with con­tent qual­ity and com­pet­i­tion, but not that much. Most social fol­low­er volumes tend to increase, but not that much. Conversion rates vary with traffic qual­ity and UIX, but usu­ally not much.

Whether or not you start the week with a big enough bulk of social media fol­low­ers, you can (espe­cially with Facebook Zero) pay for some of your weekly reaches. Still, every cent must be earned back into your busi­ness with interest — soon­er or later.

This allows us to approx­im­ate a spe­cif­ic num­ber of fol­low­ers you need to break even fin­an­cially. This num­ber of fol­low­ers is what is referred to as crit­ic­al mass. 

Assuming that con­ver­sion rates and fol­low­er reach ratios stay stable, we can approx­im­ate how many fol­low­ers a brand needs to break even.

Conversions needed to hit break-even /​ the aver­age fol­low­er reach ratio = your brand’s crit­ic­al mass of followers.

How To Calculate Critical Mass in Social Media

Calculating crit­ic­al mass is straight­for­ward (and not an exact sci­ence). For example:

I’ve estim­ated that my freel­ance agency, Spin Factory, needs two qual­ity leads every four weeks to sus­tain the busi­ness. To get this from con­tent- and inbound mar­ket­ing via social media alone, I need to expose my mes­saging to 1,200 qual­ity fol­low­ers weekly.

My social reach is about 8%, mean­ing I need a base of 15,000 social media fol­low­ers (15,000 fol­low­ers x 8% pen­et­ra­tion = 1,200 exposures).

Hence, 15,000 high-qual­ity social media fol­low­ers rep­res­ent the crit­ic­al mass for Spin Factory. 

Approximating your brand’s crit­ic­al mass in social media is no exact sci­ence — and it’s no guar­an­tee. But we must make a much deep­er and more busi­ness-crit­ic­al point about a brand’s crit­ic­al mass in social media. ¹Not all social accounts are equally valu­able to a busi­ness. For me, blog read­ers and sub­scribers far out­weigh Facebook and Twitter fol­low­ers. Unfortunately, not all fol­low­ers are human beings, and … Continue read­ing

Your Social Media Strategy Before Critical Mass

Almost every brand that starts on social media will lose money. This is simply because their social accounts haven’t yet reached crit­ic­al mass. This leads us to the fol­low­ing key insights:

PR Resource: Avoid Ghost Followers

PR Resource: The Follower Contract