Should We Even Bother About Follower Counts?

By Elizabeth Chan (she/her)

I once set a goal to hit 120 followers by my first year in uni. Now, I’m in my final year with fewer than 120 followers. Looking back, that was one weird New Year resolution, probably the strangest one by far. First of all, why specifically 120 followers? Secondly, seriously, increasing your follower count for the sake of embracing the “new year, new me”? Do follower counts really define a new self? Even though I did not accomplish my goal, I’m more satisfied than ever with my follower count (while being massively bogged down by tonnes of assignments in real life). Why? I asked myself this question while battling my deadlines. What do follower counts really prove?

The Pressure to Keep Up the Stats

Because that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it? Keeping up our like and follower counts is like building up your character in a video game, except that it’s in real life and those stats may actually say something about who you are online.

Although, currently, I’m at that stage of life where I see there’s more to life than achieving a high follower count. There are bigger goals to accomplish with mountains of tasks to conquer than those digits displaying my follower count. There are moments to live and appreciate outside of the world of my assignments that are better spent simply by relaxing, instead of clicking on my profile and checking my number of followers.

As much as people don’t want to admit, having a huge follower count doesn’t make you a better person. Though it may make you appear ‘popular’ on the gram, most “popular” people I know on Instagram are not that popular in real life. In fact, they are mostly the type of people who lurk in the shadows of the lecture halls. They sit alone, never really speaking to anyone around them and are the first to leave once class is over.

I wish I knew about this fact sooner. In fact, there are a number of things about follower counts that I wish I knew sooner.

The peer pressure I faced to gain a higher follower count all started from middle school where I also faced the pressure to obtain more likes for my Instagram posts all at the same time. I was told the secret to get more likes and followers was to ‘like’ and ‘comment’ more on other users’ posts.

Apparently, another thing that people leave unsaid is that you need to do so, all while not allowing your number of posts and amount of people you follow to be higher than your follower count. Basically, it’s a secret bigger than the last secret.

I never knew why there was a need to gain all these stats like I would in video games, but I didn’t question it because I was a tween who was trying to fit in.

Because of all the pressure to get loads of ‘likes’ and ‘followers’, way back during the dark ages when Instagram did not have the feature to hide the number of ‘likes’ in users’ posts, I unconsciously compared myself to my friends who had more ‘likes’.

Uncoincidentally, it was also the dark ages when I didn’t know that followers could be bought and tried to gain a big enough follower count all by myself. Really dark times.

“I followed the rules, why do I still have fewer likes than her?” I asked myself as I stared at the picture of some Percy Jackson fanart (a masterpiece, by the way) without crediting the artist because we were tweens and didn’t know we had to credit artists whenever we posted art.

I remember this obsession to become more popular on social media got to the extent I accepted anyone’s follow requests, as in, total strangers who could have been paedophilic Nazis for all I knew. Just kidding, they were probably the average creeps… or so I hope.

Flash forward to my first year in uni and I still aimed to increase my number of followers because I thought that gaining more followers equals to gaining more friends in real life. Naïvety at its best, but I was surrounded by former high school classmates who had huge follower counts and most of their followers were friends.

Discovering that greatly affected my mental health because I thought that the reason why I had so few followers was because I didn’t have many real friends.

And the cutesy pics my friends posted featuring their hangouts with their other friends was not helping.

Even though all of this happened up to just two years ago, looking back, it was painfully ironic that I even thought that follower counts were a measure of how many friends you have in real life. This was because I discovered that most people do not go through the trouble of curating their follower list by deleting people they don’t like in real life, which is why they amassed a great number of followers.

I, on the other hand, usually delete anyone I don’t like or trust enough in real life off my follower list simply because I don’t want them to see snippets of my life online. Call me meticulous, bitter, or both, but I had an experience where my classmate (and former friend) snapped a photo of me and posted it on her Instagram feed without my permission. I’m definitely not taking chances now. Besides, curating my follower list has made me realise that it doesn’t matter how few followers I have because most of them consist of my true friends I have outside of social media.

We may not take pictures or hang out as often as my exclassmates from high school, but I personally find that we get to live in the moment more than ever when we do not film every minute together and post it all on the ‘gram. And honestly, that’s the only thing that matters.

Times Have Changed

Currently, Instagram has added several features across the last few years to appear that they’re prioritising mental health, such as features to hide like counts, delete followers, restrict followers and most importantly, the ‘Close Friends’ feature where you can pick who you want to view your Instagram stories.

With these features in place, are keeping follower and like counts falling out of trend?

Of course, they are important for small businesses and users who hold professional blog/blog-like accounts. But for casual social media users, should we really even bother keeping up the game stats named ‘likes’ and ‘followers’?