Is anyone listening?

I get emails every day rom people who have started a website, blog, or social media account asking me what my secret is for gaining followers. Everyone is looking for a “hack” or a “shortcut” to gaining listeners, followers, etc. But the truth is, there’s no secret. It takes time. LOTS of time…and consistency, value adding and genuine relationship building.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re not making traction and it often feels like nobody is listening, but they are…you have to be patient. Before you throw out the “this dude got 50K followers in 4 months” comment or something crazy like that, I’ll admit…things like that happen…all the time in fact. BUT, numbers don’t mean shit. There, I said it. The quality of your engagement is WAY more important than the number of followers you have. If you have 1,000 engaged fans, that’s 1,000X better than 100K non-engaged fans. I know people who have 500–600K followers on Facebook but can’t sell 5 copies of their book when it comes out. Why? Because they don’t have QUALITY followers.

If you’re new at the social media game or have been at it for a while and can’t grow your audience, let me give you some advice:

Concentrate on the quality of the content you put out rather than how many likes and followers you have. You have 250 followers on Instagram? That’s AWESOME! 250 people actually care what you have to say, so concentrate on delivering the highest quality content possible to those 250 people. If what you’re putting out is good and offers a ton a value, people will catch on…I promise. Rather than trying to cast a net as wide as possible to get everyone to follow you, work on going deep and getting more intimate with the audience you already have.

This is a long game and instant gratification is a myth. Stay the course, add as much value as you can and don’t worry about your numbers. They’ll take care of themselves soon enough.