Just cut and paste articles from me with the basics as someone...

Just cut and paste articles from me with the basics as someone promoting followers these days is .................naive ?


https://blog.hootsuite.com/buy-instagram-followers-experiment/

There are more important things to track than the number of followers you have. Click-throughs and engagement (Likes and comments) are two big ones.
One way to measure engagement is by calculating your engagement rate. Take the number of Likes and comments your posts receive for a specific reporting period, your last 10 posts, for example. Then divide that by the number of followers. Multiply that number by 100 and you’ll have your engagement rate.
Here’s that formula again:

number of Likes + number of comments / number of followers x 100 = engagement rate​

That metric will serve as a legitimate health check on your Instagram strategy, letting you know if your target audience is connecting with your content.


https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-metrics/

When your boss asks you for the ROI of your latest social media campaign, how do you respond? Too many social media managers fall back on the easy answers: we gained this many new Twitter followers, this many Retweets, this many Facebook shares, and so on. Sure, these social media metrics offer surface insights into how a campaign or piece of content performed, but they don’t really show executives how your efforts are helping boost the bottom line.