58 93 226 | Social networks have trained us to think in follower counts, May 1, 2018

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17302508/instagram-twitter-follow-ratio-why-unfollow

On this week’s episode of Why’d You Push That Button the “politics of unfollowing," Ashley and Kaitlyn talk to two of their Verge colleagues: Managing Editor T.C. Sottek and Senior Features Editor Michael Zelenko about why they unfollow people. T.C. only follows six people on Twitter! And he only started following me and Kaitlyn after we produced this episode. We appreciate that kind gesture. Michael, on the other hand, used to care about his follower versus following ratio and has now reached a point of zen. Who cares!

I do get a lot of people that reach out to me and they’re like, “How do I get more followers?” A lot of people are really focused on the number that is following them. Most of the time I usually tell them to calm down and relax and not stress out about it, it will happen naturally. It is one of those things where I think people put too much of an onus on it and I think we are seeing a shift where even Facebook now is minimizing where you can see how many people follow a page. They’re trying to make it less of a popularity contest. I think that there may be a shift in that direction to not put such a big emphasis on your following count. But of course, things like Instagram when it comes to influencer marketing, people want to see how big is your audience, are you talking to 1,000 people, 100,000 people, a million people and that does play a factor for a lot of people as influencers and that sort of thing.