| A lot of these social media promotions work by having people with high follower counts blast you out and try to get their followers to follow you. The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion. Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good. It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested. It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle. While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results. Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic. Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business / brand. |
As a Las Vegas photographer that works primarily with models, I often have random profiles blasting out my work. These profiles mostly find sexy content and blast it out in hopes of growing their own profiles. This mostly resulted in my followers being 95% men from outside the US. This does absolutely nothing for increasing my engagement with my actual target audience (female models or would be models in the Las Vegas metro area wanting to book photoshoots).
Unfortunately Instagram penalizes you and has actually removed the search functionality from my follower list because I was using it to delete bots and junk followers. They won't say this officially but their support ignores my requests for why this functionality no longer works.