AArdvark wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2023 2:12 pm
What does following / follower do for a person on Instagram?
Well, like any social media site, when people follow you they see what you post, and when you follow someone else, you see what they post. On Facebook, that's a 1:1 ratio -- when you "friend" someone, you are friends with them and they are friends with you. On other sites like Twitter and Instagram, that's not the case. You can follow someone without them following you, and vice-versa.
But with most celebrity and major brand accounts, they are really only interested in sharing content. They are not reading your content. Wendy's, the burger chain, has 3.8 million followers on Twitter. Wendy's does not care what 3.8 million people's weekend plans are. They are just posting funny things and advertising their brand. Those accounts are not like real life relationships. In real life, you and I might meet up for coffee, you would tell me about your life and I would tell you about my life. These accounts are more like one-sided like radio and television, where a famous person or brand broadcasts content and other people receive it. I just checked and Kim Kardashian has 364 million followers but is only following 288 people. The 288 accounts she follows are her family, other celebrities, and brands she owns shares in. People follow her account and mistake it for that real life relationship at the coffee shop.
Now, some people have decided that because those "big" social media accounts always have more followers than people they themselves follow, they play this stupid game and try to keep their own ratio the same way. For example, you can buy followers. According to Google, you can buy followers "for as low as $2 for 100 followers to $950 for 100,000 followers." Now, those aren't real people reading your content or anything -- they're just some botnet farm somebody set up, but just think how important you would look if you were only following a few people and had 100,000 followers! Why, you would look as important as Kim Kardashian!
But the other way people do this is by following people's, getting those people to follow them back, and then immediately unfollowing them. Instagram, Twitter, and most sites don't inform you when someone unfollows you -- it defeats the whole "dopamine" angle -- and so most people are none the wiser. There are enough scripts and automation tools that people do this all the time and it's not always a manual thing. In this weird little rabbit hole I've gone down, I've found scripts that promise to grow your follower count by randomly liking and/or commenting on other people's posts, and also by following random accounts, waiting for those people to follow you back, and then unfollowing them.
I didn't realize I was on the receiving end of this for so long until it was too late. I'm following 7,500 accounts, and being followed by 2,500. Now that I'm actively trying to get paid and/or sponsored for some of this stuff, when a person or company looks at my account, they see an account that looks like 5,000 people have unfollowed me due to bad or boring content. Nobody wants to sponsor a loser. If the numbers were flopped, those companies might say, wow! So many people want to follow this guy's content! And then to the vast majority of the planet, it has absolutely no bearing on anything at all. It's kind of like those snooty women who go around reminding people they aren't supposed to wear white after Labor Day. To people in the know this is a terrible fashion offense, and the rest of the world is completely oblivious to the fact such a fashion faux pas has been committed.
So in a nutshell, what I'm attempting to do is "right-size" my follower ratio on Instagram by removing all those people who playing that stupid friend/unfriend game. This is important to a handful of people on the planet and not to the majority of the 8 billion others.
