The Purge: Instagram

This morning, tens of thousands of Instagram influencers have awoke to find that the worst has happened. Nope, Starbucks wasn’t out of cold brew, they’d just lost a load of followers.

Instagram has been vocal about tackling the bot issue in a bid to improve the user experience and restore authenticity, so the cull can’t exactly come as much of a surprise. Statistically the more followers you have, the more you stand to lose — and boy have some Instagrammers been vocal about their upset.

Makeup artist James Charles lost over half a million overnight — amounting to a 3.4% decrease, and rapper Don Benjamin lost 200k — 9% of his total following.

So what does this mean in practical terms for influencers and who’ve experienced a cull? Absolutely nothing, these fake and inactive accounts aren’t engaging with your content and they’re definitely not buying your albums or your new foundation.

It only becomes a problem if you’ve been using follower numbers alone to leverage your position as an influencer. And if you are, there’s your problem.

For the most part, follower numbers are just a vanity metric, high numbers are obviously nice to have, but not a necessity. And when it comes to investing in brand ambassadors, it’s important not to rely on someone with high followers alone to get the job done — last week James Charles posted a selfie tagging different makeup brands, would they be happy that half a million of his followers never actually existed?

Would Calvin Klein be happy that 65k of Marcus Butler’s followers never existed?

And we’re not saying that these guys have bought followers or engaged in any kind of shady practices to inflate their following, but over time these kinds of accounts do tend to accumulate.

It’s time to place greater emphasis on other metrics for measuring social media success, if Facebook and Instagram are taking steps to increase authentic engagement, isn’t it time that marketers should be taking this into account? Sure, Kim Kardashian has 127m followers on Instagram, but when the end result is a shot that we can only assume was captured in our Nan’s caravan with the product poorly photoshopped in, is this really better than someone with genuine creative flair that will deliver authentic content? Absolutely not, quantity does not equal quality. We’re not even kidding, have a look at this bonkers post.

If we’ve piqued your interest and you want to have a chat about content marketing or social media, feel free to get in touch; sam@wearecommit.com.

UPDATE 14th February 2019 — Instagram have publicly made comments about a potential bug causing follower drops on some accounts. However all above comments still stand regarding the disproportionate emphasis placed upon follower counts and the distorted view this creates on social media success.