The Financial Value of Growing Your Brand's Social Media Following

At Chubbies we grew our social following to 1.5 million in 5 years across multiple platforms.

And then on TikTok we hit 1.5 million in 5 months.

Before I get to how we did it, in this post I’m going to talk about why we did it and how to apply these learnings to your business.

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First, two major misconceptions about follower growth:

Misconception #1: it’s a vanity metric

Reality: it’s not - these are people who are taking an extremely positive proactive action towards your brand.

Misconception #2: the value of followers got crushed when XYZ platform limited your organic reach

Reality: the value may change over time, but there’s still enormous value in potential customers opting in to receiving content from a brand on a regular basis

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Now, 3 major reasons Why we pursued this strategy:

1. We worked hard to understand the relationship between brand actions and growth in our business. Follower growth was one of those brand actions and we quantified the $ value it drove in our business, as well as the cost to grow that number. After a lot of iteration we unlocked a cost per follower number that was extremely profitable and invested dynamically into that asset.

2. We loved the customer acquisition story that started with “I followed your brand, and love your content and your products”.

That customer acquisition story ends with a full-price purchase, a high LTV customer, and effectively no paid advertising.

We like that.

3. TikTok was an emergent platform.

We had seen other emergent platforms like Facebook and Instagram in the past, and it benefited the early actors to move quickly to establish a presence.

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So, how can you apply this to your business? 3 suggestions:

1. Build your measurement practice.

Understanding the value to your business of specific actions potential customers take toward your brand is critical to being able to invest where others aren’t.

2. Test constantly.

If a given channel doesn’t take, give it time and try again.

When we started working on TikTok, we didn’t find any traction. We tested again 2 months later and it blew up.

Companies are evolving their products all the time, give them the opportunity to help your business as much as possible.

3. When you see an opportunity, jump on it quickly.

Our ability to perform in certain channels or to drive certain behaviors can be fleeting and, especially in the world of brand and community building, you have to capitalize to the max during those moments.

Because when that moment of traction dies down, you’re left with the ability to communicate with an additional 1.5 million people in a brand new medium.

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Questions? Drop them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to respond quickly.

Hope this gets the wheels turning and drives some new, profit-driving action in your businesses 💪
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