Your Follower Count Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

Follower count is a little bit like the first day of summer.

It feels good. Things are warming up. Everyone’s suddenly outside. You start thinking, fuck, maybe everything is going in the right direction.

But I’m here to ruin your summer.

Your follower count kind of doesn’t mean that much.

Back in the day, follower count held serious weight. It was basically the social media equivalent of collecting trophies. The goal was to get as many people following you as humanly possible, and there were actual news articles dedicated to celebrities signing up to Instagram and gaining millions of followers overnight.

Then… people got greedy.

People started buying followers. Brands started inflating their numbers. Accounts with 200,000 followers could somehow have the engagement of your mum’s Facebook page.

So Instagram, quite reasonably, stopped giving follower count quite so much power and started paying much more attention to something that is actually useful.

Enter: engagement.

Your follower count is still useful for one thing we in the business call social proof.

Social proof is essentially the psychological tendency to trust something because other people seem to trust it too.

If you see a business with 50,000 followers, your brain might go:

Ooooh. They must know what they’re doing.

But then you click on their posts and see 14 likes, one comment from their mum and absolutely nothing else. Suddenly, the 50,000 followers don’t look quite so impressive. Because these days, people are pretty savvy. We know follower counts can be bought. We know they can be inflated. We know someone having 100,000 followers doesn’t necessarily mean 100,000 people give a shit about what they post.

Engagement is much harder to fake convincingly.

Likes. Comments. Shares. Saves. Replies. All those little signs that say:Yes. Actual humans are here. And that is arguably much stronger social proof than a big fat follower number sitting underneath your username.

But what if someone hides their engagement?

You can, of course, hide your like count, turn off comments and hide your share count. Which is totally fine.

Some people hide their metrics because they don’t want to obsess over the numbers themselves. Some don’t want everyone else judging their numbers. And some simply prefer the aesthetic of pretending numbers don’t exist. We respect the mystery.

But importantly, hiding your engagement doesn’t make engagement less valuable. Instagram can still see it. Your audience can still interact with your content. And the people who do see those interactions still get a sense that other humans are paying attention.

So, if you’re currently staring at your follower count wondering why it isn’t growing as quickly as you’d like, we’d suggest looking somewhere else for a minute.

Try improving your engagement instead.

A few little things you can do:

1. Make the first comment yourself.

Sometimes people just need someone to break the awkward silence.Instead of posting your Reel and disappearing into the wilderness, leave the first comment yourself. And make it something that actually gives people something to respond to.

Things like:

“Do you feel the same way?”

“Oh my god, I was nervous to talk about this.”

“Okay, controversial, but what’s your favourite?”

You’re not begging for engagement. You’re opening the door for a conversation.

2. Reply to comments. Quickly.

When someone comments, talk to them. Not just “thank you!” and then moving on with your life. Ask them something. Give them another reason to reply. Keep the conversation going.

It gives Instagram more signals that people are interested in your content, and it also makes your comment section look like somewhere people actually hang out.

Which, conveniently, encourages more people to hang out there.

3. Put your Reel on your Story.

Some people basically use Instagram as a Story-viewing app with a little bit of feed scrolling on the side.

So yes, sharing your Reel to your Story might not magically send your engagement through the roof, but it gives the people who missed it another chance to see it.

More eyeballs = more opportunities for someone to actually give a shit.

4. Collaborate.

Collab posts are one of our favourite little Instagram tools.

If it makes sense for your business, collaborate with another business, creator, person or even your personal account.

The post then lives across both audiences, rather than you screaming into your own little corner of Instagram and hoping someone hears you.

And if you’re collaborating with an account with a larger audience, we’d generally recommend the larger account creates the post and invites the smaller account as a collaborator.

Follower count is nice. We like a nice big number as much as the next person. But we’d much rather have 500 people who actually give a shit about what we’re doing than 50,000 people who don’t. So stop treating your follower count like a report card. Look at who’s engaging. Look at what they’re engaging with. Look at which posts they’re sharing and saving.

And if your follower count drops because a bunch of fake accounts got removed, someone decided they don’t like your content anymore, or three people spitefully unfollowed you because you were sitting at 999 followers…

You’ll survive.

The goal isn’t to collect people. The goal is to build an audience. And there’s a pretty fucking big difference.