Digital marketing: Are you doing enough to reward your superfan followers?

When your social apps have a dedicated consumer follower base that engage enthusiastically, you can class these loyal souls as 'superfans' – but are you giving them the attention and experience they deserve? Doing so could have a dramatic effect on your social reach, says Katrina Bell.

A November 2024 survey from organic marketing experts Buffer analysed over 2million posts from over 220,000 accounts across Threads, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Bluesky and discovered a marked difference in ‘engagement lift’ between when a brand replies to comments and when they don’t, which was the baseline.

Threads saw the biggest jump with a 42% improvement, then LinkedIn (+30%), followed by Instagram with +21% increase. The rest showed improvement, but only in the single figures.

These numbers directly relate to how each platform incentivises when creators/brands interact with comments. Threads' own head, Adam Mosseri, explicitly outlined the importance of replying when he said in September last year that “the sum of all your replies is about as valuable as the sum of all the value of all your posts”.

Knowing that your socials will perform better if you engage more actively is also one of the ways you can reward your superfans’ loyalty.

Rangemaster on Facebook is a great example of how highly a brand should value engagement. Sitting pretty with a supremely healthy 54k follower count the interactions are not always plain sailing.

You have the warm and fuzzy ‘I love my Rangemaster’ feedback, which the brand is very active in hitting back with a love heart. Then, due to the older skewed demographic of Facebook, commenters use posts about Christmas cheer to complain about their circuit board being on the fritz. Again, Rangemaster takes the time to write helpful and often detailed replies.

Both interactions strongly imply that customer service is paramount, but also that its use of #partofthefamily is a consistent goal that is for always, not just the holidays. Those lovehearts and thanks for positive comments is the Superfan payback.

On a sidenote, kudos to the social team as they surely must sometimes tire of the negative hijacking, however it is part of social media payoff, and as we know, being seen transparently taking an interest in both the positive and the negative has an overwhelmingly positive effect on your brand’s social score.  

First and foremost, superfan engagement via comments, likes, sharing etc has to be matched in quality and quantity by your reaction to it. A casual comment that a consumer has just upgraded after using your product or service for years deserves acknowledgement. Not least because they have just written an on-the-spot review, content you didn’t have to create but can use across all platforms.

Giving them a space in your marketing aside within the ecosystems of the social apps shows that their dedication to you is meaningful to you too. And that kind of relationship can only ever strengthen. 

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