Posting on social media means its users are at the mercy of an algorithm. If you are confused about losing followers consistently eve though your content that is receiving more engagement – listen up.
Why do I lose followers on posts that get more engagement?
The reason you are losing followers is because you are getting closer to your true client market and getting rid of the people that are only holding your page back. I actually lose the most amount of followers on a day where my post does the best! The day I received 2,300 likes on a post, I lost about 50 followers.
“Well that doesn’t make sense. You put out good content that people really like, shouldn’t you be gaining followers?”
That’s what I would think and would like to happen! But unfortunately it’s not. The reason I am losing more followers is because my posts are FINALLY getting pushed to more of my followers. Those people that are unfollowing me probably haven’t organically come across one of my posts in a really long time. So either they:
- don’t recognize me, or
- are just no longer fans of my content.
Either way you slice it, they aren’t about my page anymore.
Even on normal days I still lose followers – what gives?
Another big reason you could be losing followers is that Instagram is getting very good at shutting down bot and spam accounts. Followers that you have lost could be Instagram helping you to do some housekeeping! You don’t want more followers if those followers are ghost or spam accounts. They won’t interact with your content and that will hurt your page so much more than having a lower following count.
When you post, Instagram only shows your post to a small percentage of your total following. If that group of people engages with your post, then your post will go to the next tier group of your followers. And so on and so forth. So the better the post does, the more it goes to your followers. But if you have all these fake or spam accounts in your following then it’s possible that your post will be pushed to those accounts. If that happens, then your post won’t do as well. Those accounts won’t engage with your content and then your post won’t get pushed to the next tier level of followers.
But what if I am losing followers that aren’t spam or bot accounts?
So circling back on that post that did really well for me but I lost 50 followers, my post probably got pushed farther then it has in a really long time to some of my followers who hadn’t seen me in a while, thus resulting in a massive flux to my page of people to unfollow me. But hey, no skin off my nose because they did me a favor my leaving!
What I am getting at here is that you do want to lose followers if it will help you get closer to your target audience. For me, I did a rebranding about a year and a half ago and changed my Instagram handle as well as the content I provided. I can’t expect that all of my followers got the news alerts when I was talking about it before I made the change. So it can then be expected that by the time my content actually turns up on their page, they might want to unfollow because the content I provide now is not what the originally signed up for anymore and that’s ok!
Why don’t loop giveaways work?
I used to do those huge loop giveaways and granted I gained a lot of followers but it severely hurt my engagement because what I found was that my content was then being pushed to those dead-weight followers who were literally only following me out of obligation to get something for free. Those are not the type of people you want on your page – you want fans, not fakes! So I made the very tough decision to delete about 10,000 followers from my page as a way to help get my content back onto the feeds of people who actually wanted to follow me.
Since that hard decision, my content has THRIVED! My content is being pushed back on to the page’s of people who actually want to see my content. Don’t be afraid to drop the dead-weight followers, and don’t be scared that you are losing followers even when you are putting good content out. It is all for the better that you get closer to your target audience and that you cater to their needs and not to the needs of people who don’t like your content and wouldn’t have engaged with your page anyway. They did you a favor by unfollowing – trust me!
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