Don’t Be Fooled. Having A Lot Of Followers Doesn’t Work Anymore

But here’s what does on social media

Alex Bentley
4 min readOct 13, 2021

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If you’ve ever looked at the number of followers someone has on social media, and thought it must be a sign that person is influential, think again.

The number of followers a person has rarely correlates to success.

And by “success,” I mean the four factors that define it:

  1. Exposure
  2. Engagement
  3. Trustworthiness
  4. Influence

Exposure is Level 1 in the Social Media Game

I jettisoned the term “influencer” two years ago because I felt it had become so watered down as to be meaningless. I’m not alone in that thinking either.

Those who think it is an accurate term today probably don’t understand the difference between influence and exposure.

Exposure means you show up where the eyeballs are looking.

Exposure may enable some people to make money by trading off their follower count or first-page search results, but exposure alone doesn’t sell products every time.

That’s influence. Which we’ll explore later in this article.

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Alex Bentley

I write about crypto, personal finance, business & tech. Also, I publish a bit of humor to make you laugh.