In praise of lurkers

We never know who is watching - in a good way

For all of the standard marketing advice to know your target audience and create content just for them, it’s worth bearing in mind that none of us really know who is seeing our content or when they are seeing it.

I’m writing this off the back of a discussion I saw on Threads the other day. I’ve largely moved away from Twitter for my ‘water cooler’ chat moments during the working day, preferring the slightly more random and slightly less bot-infested Threads platform instead. If you are a Threads user by the way please do say hi, or if you have any questions about it, like “what the heck is it?” please do pop a comment below.

I digress. The gist of the conversation was about ‘lurkers’, or to phrase it in a nicer way, people who follow you on social media but who don’t interact (like or comment) on your posts as far as you can tell.

Some people were all in favour of removing these people from their followers list. I can’t quite remember the reasons they gave for this, it might have been something to do with engagement metrics, and some people seemed to think that it was verging on the creepy. I have to confess that I was slightly baffled to be honest.

I know that sometimes I scroll through my social media feed on autopilot, almost as a form of mental chewing gum. It’s not a habit I’m particularly proud of and it’s something I’m working hard to change, but some days I’m in the mood to look but not to engage. I just want to see the images, maybe read a caption or two but I’m not in the mood to go any deeper.

For some people of course, this is how they prefer to use social media all the time. They like to observe, to read and generally see what’s going on. They don’t see it necessarily as something they want to participate in themselves. There are obviously many and varied reasons for this, that frankly are none of our business.

Chatting to a business coach a while ago about my Instagram I said that it’s great for connecting with people who I already know, but that it doesn’t drive sales. “How do you know” was her question - and it was a fair one.

Just because I post a photo of a recent shawl design and get no visible sales it doesn’t mean that Instagram is a sales dud. Who is to say that a person won’t save that post, or screenshot it and send it to a friend or pin it on Pinterest, saving it for later. Or that it might remind them to pop to my website, sign up for my newsletter or join my Facebook group.

It’s all connected, in ways that we really don’t understand and despite what the social media gurus tell us, can’t always predict. It makes me think of the old adage that we should ‘dance like no one is watching’ - because particularly on Instagram at the minute it does feel like no one is seeing it. We may as well post what we like.

You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money
Love like you’ll never get hurt
You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watchin’
It’s gotta come from the heart if you want it to work.

-Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh

In short, we never really know who is watching, or why. We could hyper focus on this and try to manage our content to fit, or we could just post what we want to talk about, what lights us up, what makes us tick.

The right people will find us, whether we know it or not.