Some People Think Your Content is Garbage - And That's Okay.
and other reasons why people unfollow you.
Let me start off by saying that this post is not intended to address those people who follow you and then immediately unfollow when they get a follow back. Everyone agrees those people are assholes. This post is about the people out there complaining anytime anyone unfollows them ever, for any reason.
“Don’t Follow to Unfollow - Waahhh”
My biggest pet peeve, and the fastest way to get me to unfollow you on Instagram is to generate an entire post, lecturing others not to “unfollow” you. I will quite literally go to the page every single time, just to make sure they aren’t having a one-off crisis of identity, but then without a doubt, I will see it. Maybe two or three original posts mixed in with never-ending, “Don’t unfollow me,” and “follow train” and “follow for follow/ like for like/ comment for comment” posts (and for some reason there is usually a plethora smut cover reveals1 but that’s beside the point.)
What do people expect to happen when they devote all their time and energy to gathering as many forced followers as they can?
What Are Forced Followers and Where Do They Come From?
When I say, “forced followers,” I am not referring to bots, but essentially people required to follow you for one reason or another that does not apply to your general content.
Follow Trains
Follow for Follow Events
Buddy Reads or Groups
Giveaways/ROAKs/Raffles
Wishlist Wednesday (or any variation of this ridiculous trend - future blog post to follow)
In all of these cases, we are forced to follow people in order to participate, regardless of whether or not we actually enjoy their content. You might make a few great friends, you might find accounts you love, but a majority of these connections are going to be accounts that you have zero in common with, and to top it off, they have (in your opinion) really shitty content that you don’t want to see clogging up your newsfeed.
Forced Followers Will Break Your Heart Every Single Time
If you are in the bookstagram community, you will know that you can’t scroll your feed without seeing endless “follow train” posts.
To humor those who don’t know - these posts contain a list of hosts who are all tagged. The idea is that the viewer follows all of the hosts, comments “done” and then the hosts will follow them back. It seems like a great plan in theory, you follow 20 people and then you gain 20 followers.
WRONG.
This is only good if your only goal is to play a numbers game by trying to gain as many followers as possible. You will end up following people whose content you aren’t interested in, and who aren’t interested in your content. It isn’t 2015 anymore, and people see right through this.
What do you think eventually and inevitably happens when someone isn’t interested in the same content as you? They will likely unfollow you. Worse than unfollowing you, they may stick around as a follower, but never engage with your posts.
Why Is This A Problem?
There are a couple of issues. We are here in the bookstagram community to make friends, and chat with people of similar (or different) interests, but interests to us all the same. No one wants to have to scroll through their feed of garbage for half an hour just to see the one post of content they enjoy.
Personally, I like seeing book reviews and nice pictures of books. I don’t care for “follow for follow” posts, or memes, or weird sexual pictures coupled with a “choke me harder daddy” quote from whatever generic dark romance you’re reading, or endless close-ups of smut cover reveals. This isn’t to say that I am going to unfollow anyone who posts these things. However, if I notice my feed is being flooded with them, I am going to take a look at the account. I am going to decide if I have ever engaged with any of their content, and/or if they have ever engaged with mine. If not, then sorry not sorry, it’s not you, it’s me, some relationships aren’t meant to last.
Aside from mucking up your feed with things that aren’t your taste, having a plethora of followers who don’t engage with your content messes with your engagement ratio. Do you ever see those “big” bookstagram accounts that have 20-30k followers, but then you go to their page and aside from the 3-6 follow trains they have posted all day every day, none of their other posts have any likes, comments or engagement? (cue eyes rolling so hard they might not bounce back).
In speaking with a publishing company, this is bad news bears for anyone looking to receive ARCs (Future post to follow on this topic).
Followers are a Privilege, NOT a Right
You want the right kind of people following you on your bookstagram journey. You want people who will appreciate your content and engage with you. If someone is following your account, you should consider it a privilege because they like what they see. You don’t own them, you aren’t entitled to them, and they don’t need to follow you until the end of all time just because they participated in your giveaway 6 months ago. If someone unfollows your account, you should be questioning how you can make your content better, not complaining to the world and attempting to shame them for not liking what you have to offer. You should even thank them because if your account is not for them, they are not messing with your engagement ratio by following and never engaging.
Below is a message that I received the other day.
The timing was exquisite because I had already been working on this blog entry. I can’t tell you how I started following this person or how long I had been following them for. But all I know is that I was seeing too many “Engagement Post!!!” posts coming from them and it was adding to clogging up my feed. I went to the account and realized that they had posted several of these types of posts, no actual pictures of books, no real reviews of books, and I had never once engaged with a single post.
This is exactly the type of mindset of a person that I don’t need following my account. We don’t need to keep stats. If someone is going to tell me that they love my content, but in the same breath be petty then Bye Felicia. Maybe if we all followed accounts we love, regardless of whether they follow us back, we would have a better time.
My account features mainly thriller books. If someone followed me because of a giveaway I was hosting or for some other reason, and then rolled their eyes every time my posts came up because they only like romances, I am perfectly happy to have that person unfollow me, especially if they don’t ever engage.
In Conclusion
Follow who you want. Unfollow who you want. Let’s look at the real reason why people unfollow us instead of victim blaming (because let’s be honest, they are probably a victim of whatever we are subjecting them to in order to make them unfollow us). You don’t need to keep track, and map the stats, and be petty about it. You CERTAINLY do not need to be calling people out for unfollowing you. And having a huge number of forced followers who don’t engage with any of your content does more harm than good in the long run.
Thank you all for sticking with me! New posts drop on Wednesdays to get you through the hump. Join me in the upcoming weeks where I discuss topics such as - Nope Tropes, the results of The WiShLiSt WeDnEsDaY Experiment, and They Say, “Free ARC in Exchange for an HONEST Review” For a Reason.
I am truly and deeply sorry to all of my smut cover reveal artists because I use the “smut cover reveal” in this post as something I personally hate. Love you all, there is a special niche for you. Just not for me. Kisses!