In order for a creators' channel to be successful, it's vital to pay attention to how well / poorly content performs. What you measure is up to you, as only you can define success.
Follower counts matter less than view and like counts. - Adam Mosseri
Do you agree with Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram), or is it still a helpful measure of success? Are there other metrics you're more interested in? What do you look for in channel performance data?
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Navigating the PR world can be complex. There's a common notion that 'a book is judged by its cover,' and unfortunately, I've witnessed this attitude from some PR agents in my career. It often seems to stem from a lack of understanding on their part. I recall conversations going like this:
-How many followers do you have? -10k -Oh sorry, we're only interested in channels with over 1 million followers. -But this is the largest community dedicated to product X. All your target audience is here. -We're still going with a completely unrelated dancing TikToker with 2 million followers, sorry.
This kind of scenario shows that if you have a smaller audience, you need to be clear about your value and be persistent in knocking on some doors.
Followers, just like likes, comments and shares is an easy way of commodifying your presence online or your account. If you're trying to promote your account to advertisers, or marketers they want to know your engagement/ eyes on you and its easy to understand numbers i.e. followers, likes, comments etc. rather than quality of engagement such as my followers always engage with my posts but I only have 100 compared to 500 followers but hardly any comments.
I say the same thing about metacritic/ review scores, and views on whatever platform. It's a shorthand/ proxy representation. So yes it does matter to some people and its impressive if you have large numbers but it depends on what you're looking for.
While I do understand that it's an easy way to judge the reach of your channel, I don't give too much attention to it, because I know from my own example that I have subscribed to countless Youtube channels for whatever reason but in reality only watch the content of a handful.
So instead of simply checking how many followers someone has, there should be a metric of how many of those followers actually engage with your content, because that's your true reach. I think some CM tools have this, at least the one I use is showing how many of my followers have been inactive in the past months? But not sure how this could be communicated towards brands in an easy way. Seeing follower count, likes, views is easy, digging deeper into it takes time and effort.
No, I focus on… good content. From the YouTube perspective, subs was just a goal I had to reach for monetization. Now it’s all about engagement metrics/views because that puts the videos in front of new people with related interests.
If you clicked on and watched most of any of my videos before, whether you liked, commented, or subscribed, YouTube will suggest more of my stuff to you.
I’m VERY stingy with subscriptions because notification clutter stresses me out. I watch about a dozen channels I’m not subbed to because I still get notified (by way of suggested videos) anyway.
I don't have any sub notifications on. I just sub to channels to easily find the creators later and when I have time to watch Youtube or need a guide etc I check my sub list who has new stuff out.
I've worked in social media for a few years and whilst some professional bodies will tell you follower counts are the be all and end all, the consistent yard stick for each place I've been is engagement.
It's no good having 1 million followers if you're only getting 100 likes on a post. Anyone can tap like, even accidentally while scrolling. Comments were the thing we were most interested in, initiating conversations and building that sense of community by creating content people wanted to be part of.
For me I mostly just look at comments, numbers never really meant that much to me, I make/post content I want to. If people like it, great, if not, oh well. I think it would depend on what the reasons behind why you post content are.
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