Do Social Media Followers Still Matter?

A few years ago, follower count was one of the main ways people measured social media success. The more followers you had, the more people you could potentially reach, and your audience size was often judged by that number at the top of your profile. But social media doesn’t work like that anymore. 

Almost every platform has gone the TikTok way. Most of what lands in your feed now comes from accounts you’ve never followed, picked because the platform reckons you’ll be interested. Back in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that more than half of what people see on Instagram is recommended by AI rather than coming from accounts they follow. So if you’re still judging your social media marketing by how many followers you’ve got, you’re looking at the wrong number. 

Do Social Media Followers Still Matter? 

Followers still count for something 

I’d be lying if I said follower numbers were worthless. If you find a business with a handful of followers, it can make you a bit wary of them. A decent following helps your reputation and makes you look established. 

That’s about where its usefulness stops, though. Your follower count doesn’t decide who sees your next post, and it certainly doesn’t decide how much you sell. We’ve made content for brand new accounts that’s reached more people than accounts with tens of thousands of followers, purely because the content was better. A huge following doesn’t guarantee awareness and sales, and a tiny one doesn’t rule them out. 

Your followers don’t see most of your posts 

Go and look at your analytics. If you’ve got 600 followers, it’s very unlikely all 600 of them see every post. And when you look at who did see your post, a large chunk of them probably don’t follow you at all. 

That’s because the platforms are constantly testing content. They show a new post to a small group of people first and watch what they do with it. Do they watch it? Save it? Send it to a mate? Or scroll straight past? A good reaction gets the post shown to more people. No reaction from users and it quietly dies. Instagram has even built a tool around this: trial reels go to people who don’t follow you first, so you can see whether something lands before your followers ever see it. 

That means you have to earn your reach every single time you post. You don’t need to go viral, and you don’t need each post to reach 20 times your follower count. But every post does need to be good, because your reputation is only as good as your last post. Share a few weak posts in a row and you’ll watch your reach shrink. Keep putting out good stuff that people like, and it climbs. 

Ghost followers and silent buyers 

Then there are the followers who aren’t really following anymore. Some mute you. Others simply stop engaging. If someone scrolls past your posts enough times, the algorithm takes the hint and stops showing them your stuff. They still count towards your number, but they’ll probably never see another thing you post. Bore your audience for long enough, and your follower count turns into a nice-looking number with nobody behind it. 

The flip side is the people who are paying attention but never show up in your stats. A marketer told a story that’s stuck with me. A high-end jewellery brand looked into one of its best customers. She bought from them all the time, but she didn’t follow them and had never liked or commented on a single post. It turned out she was screenshotting their posts and dropping them into her family WhatsApp group to ask whether the pieces would suit her. Then she’d buy. 

If you looked at that brand’s analytics without the extra context, you’d say social media wasn’t reaching her at all. Meanwhile, it was making them money! There’s a name for this: dark social. It’s all the sharing that happens in WhatsApp chats, DMs, and texts, where your analytics can’t follow. And there’s a lot more of it going on than your dashboard suggests. 

What to measure instead 

Start with views from the right people. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, has said the three signals that matter most for ranking are watch time, likes, and sends (people sharing your post by DM). Sends count slightly more when you’re reaching people who don’t follow you. That tells you something: a post people forward to a friend travels further than one they double-tap. 

Next, look at the quieter signals: saves, shares, DMs, and clicks. You’ll get fewer of these, but each one means someone cared enough to do something. And bear in mind that most enjoyment on social media is silent. Think about how often you’ve laughed out loud at a video and carried on scrolling without liking it or typing “lol”. It still worked on you. 

The measure that matters most is the one no dashboard shows you: people telling you they’ve seen your stuff when they get in touch. 

Ask people how they found you 

The best way to find out is properly old-fashioned. Ask! Put “How did you hear about us?” on your enquiry form, and ask on the phone, on Zoom, in meetings, and at exhibitions. We hear it all the time. People tell us they’ve seen clips of our podcast, and we’d no idea they existed, let alone that they’d been watching. No likes, no comments, no follow. They were just quietly paying attention. They weren’t sitting down and purposefully making notes on everything we said, but some of it was being absorbed. If you’d like a hand working out what’s bringing you work, that’s exactly what our marketing consultancy is for. 

Why the platforms want it this way 

Platforms make their money from your time. The longer you keep scrolling, the more ads they can show you. If TikTok can nudge you from half an hour a day to 40 minutes, multiply that across every user and you can see why they care. The easiest way to keep you there is to show you stuff you’re interested in, whoever made it. For a business, that’s good news. You don’t need a huge following before you can reach people. You need content the right people want to watch. 

What we do at Spaghetti 

We practise what we preach. We’ve never really tried to grow our following. Our Facebook group has around 4000 members, we haven’t chased LinkedIn connections (although Jo has a lot), and we’re not pushing to grow our Facebook page or Instagram. We want views from the right people, and a lot of the time that means 400 to 600 views on a post. We’re happy with that, because they’re the right 400 to 600 people. 

I was chatting to the owner of a hair salon recently that’s desperate to hit 10,000 followers because it feels like a nice milestone. I get it. And if you make good content, your followers will grow anyway, especially if you ask people to follow you at the end of your reels. Just don’t mistake the milestone for the goal. Don’t buy followers, don’t chase them, and don’t lose sleep over the number. Build trust, start conversations, and close sales. The followers will turn up on their own. 

TL;DR

Follower counts don’t decide who sees your posts anymore. Platforms show content based on what people are interested in, and more than half of what people see on Instagram is recommended rather than followed. Your followers miss most of what you post, lots of buyers never follow you at all, and plenty of sharing happens in WhatsApp chats you’ll never see. Measure views from the right people, then saves, shares, and DMs, and ask new customers how they found you.

Not sure whether your social media is bringing in business? Book a chat with us and we’ll look at what you’re posting, who’s seeing it, and what’s worth measuring. And if you’d rather your team learnt to do this themselves, have a look at our training sessions. 

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