There are two ways to grow your audience. One way is to find new people to follow you. Can you think of the second?
A much overlooked part of audience growth for content creators is retention, which refers to how good you are at keeping your audience around and engaging with your content. Adding new followers is only worthwhile if they actually keep following you, consuming your content and interacting with it. Without good retention, your business is doomed to fail. This concept is core to the growth strategies of top startups, and luckily can also be applied to the world of content businesses.
In this article I will share four reasons why you should really care about retention, how you know if you have good retention, and what you can do to improve it. As always, I’m not here to share tactics but provide a strategic framework you can use to think about your content business. If you’re still at the early stages of your journey as a content creator, make sure to first check out my article on content-market fit, or in other words ‘finding a niche’.
‘Retention’ refers to what percentage of your audience is still actively engaging with you in a given timeframe (for example a specific week). You can think of a retained follower as one who engaged with your content that week, a dormant one is still following you but didn’t engage that week and a churned follower is someone who unfollowed you.
Adapted from Reforge
Good retention indicates that you are continuing to create value for your audience — that you have found content-market fit. If you have poor retention, it suggests that people aren’t finding what they expected from you, because they keep dropping off and disengaging. You have to go back to square one and figure out what your audience wants.
Retention directly impacts monetization. If you are an Instagram creator, you know that brands price their sponsorships based on engagement level, not follower count. If you have a million followers but most of them are dormant, this will directly impact your monetization.
Another way in which retention impacts monetization is if you have a website running display ads or you monetize your YouTube videos with ads. If a higher percentage of your overall audience is retained, you have more people visiting your website/viewing your video and you earn more from the ads.
Better retention makes acquiring new audience members more efficient. In my previous article, I wrote about growth loops and how to grow your audience by acquiring new followers. Your effort finding new followers is wasted if most of them go dormant or unfollow you after a few weeks — by improving your retention, you ‘keep’ more of the people you worked hard to reach.
An example: you spend $100 (in your time, or in actual dollars) to find 50 new followers ($2 per follower). If four weeks later, 10 of them are still retained, it actually cost you $10 to acquire each new follower. If after four weeks 25 of them are still retained, it cost you $4 per person. Your time and money is spent more efficiently if you have better retention.
Retention drives your growth loops. In my last article I explained how you can harness the power of growth loops to increase the size of your audience. Growth loops and retention work hand in hand, because in a growth loop each existing follower brings on a certain number of new followers.
The more existing (or retained) followers you have, the more new followers are brought on. With good retention and good growth loops, you have a virtuous cycle that can lead to exponential growth. With ok growth loops and bad retention, you end up bringing on new people only to replace the ones you have lost — like a leaky bucket.
Retention is fickle and harder to measure and understand than adding new followers, but there are some proven mechanisms that we can learn from tech startups.
The first way to improve your retention is to shorten the time it takes for someone to find value in your content. In tech startups we call this the ‘aha’ moment, and the quicker the user experiences it, the more likely they are to stay retained. The time immediately after someone first discovers you is essential, as this is when most people drop-off and stop engaging (source).
If someone follows you, sign ups to your newsletter or subscribes, make sure they receive valuable content quickly (within a day or two) afterwards. In the context of someone following you on a platform like YouTube, Twitter or Instagram this can simply mean that you need to post daily so a new follower will be certain to receive your content right after subscribing. If you have a newsletter, you can set up an automatic email that new subscribers receive within a certain time period of subscribing.
The second element of good retention is habit. People who are retained have built a habit where they keep returning to your content again and again. If you distribute through a platform like Email, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok or Twitter, your audience has most likely already built a regular habit around using those platforms, so you need to make sure they see your content when they open those apps (for more on habit-building, check out Hooked by Nir Eyal).
You can do that by posting consistently and matching the frequency with which your audience uses the platform. People tend to check Instagram and Twitter daily, so you probably need to post about daily to stay within the habit of your audience. I’m guessing that Twitch users watch streams multiple times a week, so if you are streaming on Twitch you probably need to match that frequency in order to be part of the habit of your audience.
If you distribute through your own channels like your website, you need to put in a bit more work to get your audience to develop a habit of consuming your content. Similar to the previous examples, you need to figure out the natural frequency with which your audience wants your content. However, when its your own channel, you also need to notify your audience of new content to bring them into your website.
A simple example: you publish long-form essays about a specific niche topic that your audience is interested in. You have figured out that most of your audience members has time to read these types of essays once per week (maybe on Sunday with their morning coffee). You therefore publish once per week and notify your audience of a new essay with an email sent out automatically early on Sunday morning. This is more likely to build a habit in your audience than publishing sporadically and not notifying followers of a new post.
After capturing your audience’s attention with an ‘aha moment’ and helping them to build a habit around consuming your content, the final element to good retention is continued delivery of value. Once people have formed a habit around consuming your content, you need to keep giving them value or they will go dormant and unsubscribe/unfollow.
While you can’t expect to please everyone all the time, it is important to keep a pulse check on your audience and the types of content they enjoy, and what they don’t enjoy or want less of. You can use analytics or surveys to make sure you are on the right track so you don’t become irrelevant or uninteresting and lose your audience.
Even if you have found content-market fit in the past, it is possible to lose it over time if you start straying from the reason people came to follow you, or if your audience’s needs or preferences change over time. To have good long-term retention you need to maintain content-market fit.
The best way to measure retention is to use something called a cohort chart, which looks at the retention of groups rather than individuals. In an acquisition cohort chart, a cohort is a group of people who joined in the same week or month. You then look at what percentage of them stick around and use the product over subsequent weeks or months.
If you have your own website, you can use Google Analytics to create a cohort visualization. Here is some more information for those of you who want to go deep on retention analytics, but I don’t want to spend too much time on cohort charts because they are complicated and won’t work with the basic analytics you can get out of social platforms.
With the data you can pull from social apps like Twitter, Instagram and Youtube, you can easily measure follower retention and engagement rate. These can both be used as indicators of retention.
When measuring follower retention, you are looking at how many people unfollow you each month. One simple metric is to divide the number of new followers in a month by the number that unfollowed you. This gives you a ratio of how many people you add for every one person you lose. If you are adding 2 or fewer people for every 1 follower you lose, you’re in trouble.
Follower retention is an important metric — if someone unfollows you, it’s a pretty strong signal that they have stopped getting value from your content. However, looking just at follower retention misses part of the picture because there are many cases where your audience members might go dormant and stop engaging with you as much without actively unfollowing you. This is why it is also important to look at engagement rate.
Engagement rate tells you what percentage of your audience actively engages with your content. It can be measured either by looking at the percentage of your total audience that engaged, or the percentage of impressions (moment when somebody saw the content) that resulted in engagement.
Looking at the engagement rate based on impressions (number of users who engaged / number of users who had an impression) tells you how many people engaged with your content out of the number of people who saw the content. This metric is useful because it ignores all the people that didn’t even have the chance to engage because they never saw the content.
However, this metric also misses part of the picture because people who didn’t have an impression (didn’t get the chance to see your content) are also disengaged — their previous lack of engagement means that the algorithms have de-prioritized your content for them. Followers who don’t have an impression of your content could be considered dormant.
I would therefore recommend keeping tabs on both types of engagement rate if you can. Here are some useful benchmarks for engagement rate across popular platforms:
While it might be easier to track and improve the number of new followers you gain over time, retention is at least as important because it directly impacts monetization, indicates content-market fit and makes acquiring new followers more efficient. Focusing on retention will help you build an engaged audience and give you an edge over other content creators who are all about finding new followers. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts or insights about audience retention.