Yesterday I sat down to plan a social restart for a client — a small woman-owned self-care brand that had let its account go quiet since February. Ninety-three followers. Twenty-two posts. Nothing since winter.
The obvious instinct is to go find bigger accounts in the same space and copy what they do. So I did the first half of that. I read sixteen real places live — nine accounts and six hashtags — and wrote down what was actually happening on each one. What I found changed the plan completely, and it's the reason I now distrust follower count as a signal of anything.
The 25,000-follower account nobody was talking to
One of the accounts I looked at had 25,200 followers. Another had 17,300. A third, a big national brand in the same category, had 614,000.
Then I looked at what those posts were getting.
The 25,200-follower shop was taking two to nine likes per post. Not two thousand. Two. A follower list built over years, and on a normal day almost nobody was responding.
That is not a failing business and it's not a scandal. It's just what a follower number actually is: a list of people who once tapped a button. It is not a room full of people waiting to hear from you. If I had told my client "get to 25,000 followers and you'll be fine," I would have pointed her at a destination that doesn't pay.
So what did work?
One post in that whole scan broke out. Not by a little — by about forty times the account's normal engagement. Four hundred and thirty likes against a baseline of single digits.
It wasn't clever. It wasn't a trend. It was a plain product photo announcing a launch, with the words "limited stock."
That's it. A real thing, photographed, and a reason to act now.
The reason that matters for my client specifically is that she has exactly those ingredients sitting unused. She has products that have never been posted. She has one item that sold out and will come back. Every one of those is the same shape as the post that worked — a real object, newly available, in limited quantity.
I did not need a bigger audience to copy the winning move. I needed the move.
The three things I check now instead of follower count
When I look at an account to learn from it, I no longer start at the top of the profile. I start here:
- Likes and comments per post, not followers. Divide roughly. An account with 25,000 followers and five likes a post is telling you the list is dead. An account with 900 followers and forty comments is telling you something far more useful.
- The outliers, not the average. Scroll until you find the post that did ten or forty times the others. That single post is the lesson. The other fifty are noise.
- Whether you can actually make that post. The breakout I found was a product launch photo. My client sells physical products, so she can make that. If the breakout had been a viral dance or a 400-person event, it would have been useless to her no matter how well it performed.
What about the accounts you can't measure?
One honest limit: I couldn't read everything. One platform I wanted to check wouldn't load at all, so it simply isn't in the report. I left it out rather than guessing at numbers.
That's a rule worth keeping when someone hands you a market summary. If a source couldn't be reached, it should say so. A gap recorded as a gap is fine. A gap quietly filled with an estimate is how you end up building a plan on a number nobody ever saw.
The plan this produced
We ended up with something much smaller and much more doable than "grow the audience."
Ninety-three followers is not a brand to grow. It's a brand to restart — so the first posts are about showing the products clearly, saying plainly what they are and who makes them, and telling people when something is back in stock. Three posts are built and waiting, using real photographs of the actual products rather than anything generated.
Whether they beat a 25,000-follower shop's two likes is not really in question.
Before you chase a bigger audience, go and check what the big accounts in your space are actually getting — you may find the number you're chasing isn't buying anything.