How to lose fans and deinfluence people
1
Instagram is a social experiment I’m fascinated by. Recently, I’ve noticed people talking about losing followers. There’s a trend for Instagrammers to purposefully delete ghost fans – people who are not interacting. While other content creators are shedding followers as an offshoot of becoming more authentic; aiming less to please.
You only have to look at this feed (once 145K and now 112K), or someone like @FatherofDaughters (once 1M and now 859K) to see that people tend to press ‘unfollow’ when they tire of you or your output. When they
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2
get bored of your face or when they find you slightly irreverent. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all do it!
Having started this feed to promote my SelfishMother tops for charity, which grew into an amazing Winging It community, I feel like I came to the party, got the T-shirt and made some friends on the dance-floor. Now, I’m loitering in the smoking area wondering if I should call a taxi or dip back in for another song.
A year or two ago I put up a post asking people to unfollow me as I felt I had too many followers, and I had decided that
SelfishMother.com
3
100K was a good number to reduce to. A few people DM’d me and said, “I didn’t know I was following you anyway.” This made me laugh, because we as a society put so much importance on follower counts, but after 50K, I’d venture that a large following is a large following, full stop. Extra Ks don’t mean much difference to your life.
This is because there is usually a small core audience who will always comment and support you. These are the important people. High numbers are just vanity, on one hand, but of course it does open doors
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offline.
My large 100K+ follower count for this feed has opened many doors for me. I helped me collaborate, and raise money for charity. It’s got me nice stays in hotels, paid influencer posts and general kudos. It has helped pay my bills for sure.
But does a large following always have to get bigger? For me, what’s lost me followers is inconsistent posting, talking about Gaza repeatedly in my stories, and also being 100% myself – eg slightly ad hoc – writing about being skint one day or posting cooking Reels about noodles the next. That’s
SelfishMother.com
5
what I like about social media, we are all our own publishers. As a journalist who previously could only write at the whim of an Editor, the dawn of social media was a self-publishing dream.
Talking of noodles, while I’m simultaneously happily losing followers on this feed, I’m wooing them for my side-hustle gig, as insta editor at Kabuto Noodles – my friends’ Bristol based brand. I’m actively courting followers in a different social age to the one I entered into. In 2014 we all followed more gamely and we unfollowed rarely. It was all so new,
SelfishMother.com
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and there were so many fewer of us: 200 million compared with 2.4 billion this year.
On one hand I’m re-learning how to grow an audience (a foodie audience for Kabuto), while on this feed I’m posting what I want, when I want and seeing followers drop away. Then on my Selfishmother feed, I’m experimenting by posting solely about travel – if you want to share a travel post invite me as a collaborator!
Posting things on these different feeds, and seeing what makes people come, and what makes people go, is actually pretty fun. It’s a nice
SelfishMother.com
7
distraction from real life, but it’s also a habit. If I got paid an hourly rate for time spent on this platform I’d be extremely well off. We put so much importance on our followers and virtual profiles, but people come, people go, as do entire platforms. Remember, MySpace….? It seemed so important at the time.
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Molly Gunn, Editor - 12 Apr 24
Instagram is a social experiment I’m fascinated by. Recently, I’ve noticed people talking about losing followers. There’s a trend for Instagrammers to purposefully delete ghost fans – people who are not interacting. While other content creators are shedding followers as an offshoot of becoming more authentic; aiming less to please.
You only have to look at this feed (once 145K and now 112K), or someone like @FatherofDaughters (once 1M and now 859K) to see that people tend to press ‘unfollow’ when they tire of you or your output. When they get bored of your face or when they find you slightly irreverent. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all do it!
Having started this feed to promote my SelfishMother tops for charity, which grew into an amazing Winging It community, I feel like I came to the party, got the T-shirt and made some friends on the dance-floor. Now, I’m loitering in the smoking area wondering if I should call a taxi or dip back in for another song.
A year or two ago I put up a post asking people to unfollow me as I felt I had too many followers, and I had decided that 100K was a good number to reduce to. A few people DM’d me and said, “I didn’t know I was following you anyway.” This made me laugh, because we as a society put so much importance on follower counts, but after 50K, I’d venture that a large following is a large following, full stop. Extra Ks don’t mean much difference to your life.
This is because there is usually a small core audience who will always comment and support you. These are the important people. High numbers are just vanity, on one hand, but of course it does open doors offline.
My large 100K+ follower count for this feed has opened many doors for me. I helped me collaborate, and raise money for charity. It’s got me nice stays in hotels, paid influencer posts and general kudos. It has helped pay my bills for sure.
But does a large following always have to get bigger? For me, what’s lost me followers is inconsistent posting, talking about Gaza repeatedly in my stories, and also being 100% myself – eg slightly ad hoc – writing about being skint one day or posting cooking Reels about noodles the next. That’s what I like about social media, we are all our own publishers. As a journalist who previously could only write at the whim of an Editor, the dawn of social media was a self-publishing dream.
Talking of noodles, while I’m simultaneously happily losing followers on this feed, I’m wooing them for my side-hustle gig, as insta editor at Kabuto Noodles – my friends’ Bristol based brand. I’m actively courting followers in a different social age to the one I entered into. In 2014 we all followed more gamely and we unfollowed rarely. It was all so new, and there were so many fewer of us: 200 million compared with 2.4 billion this year.
On one hand I’m re-learning how to grow an audience (a foodie audience for Kabuto), while on this feed I’m posting what I want, when I want and seeing followers drop away. Then on my Selfishmother feed, I’m experimenting by posting solely about travel – if you want to share a travel post invite me as a collaborator!
Posting things on these different feeds, and seeing what makes people come, and what makes people go, is actually pretty fun. It’s a nice distraction from real life, but it’s also a habit. If I got paid an hourly rate for time spent on this platform I’d be extremely well off. We put so much importance on our followers and virtual profiles, but people come, people go, as do entire platforms. Remember, MySpace….? It seemed so important at the time.
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Molly Gunn is the founder and editor of Selfish Mother, a site she created for like-minded women in 2013. Molly has been a journalist for over 15 years, starting out working on fashion desks at The Guardian, The Telegraph & ES Magazine before going freelance in 2006 to write for quality publications. She now edits Selfish Mother, sells #GoodTees to raise funds for charity, & writes freelance for Red Magazine and The Sunday Telegraph's Stella. Molly is mother to Rafferty, 6, Fox, 4, and baby Liberty. She is married to Tom aka music producer Tee Mango and founder of Millionhands. They live in Bruton, Somerset.
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