Follower counts are basically soul crushing. No matter how important they are to your business or online success, it’s nearly impossible not to check your stats. Plus if you run an online business or are trying to get into the blogging world, they basically become an obsession.
And it drove me nuts. I constantly kept updating Instagram just to see my count not get any higher but actually lose followers. It left me uninspired, let down, and like no one liked me. It started to affect my content too. I didn’t want to post anymore because I got it in my head that no one even cared in the first place. That’s a seriously self-destructing attitude. So I took a step back, just like you should, and approached follower counts differently.
My first tip seems easy enough, but is definitely the hardest of the lot. Just stop looking. What you don’t know won’t hurt you and nothing can be more true than ever changing follower counts. There are plenty of other ways to track platform growth beyond followers. Look at whether your content is getting more engagement. Have you gotten comments this week on your blog posts? See if your videos are getting more views than past ones. Just avoid looking at that one silly number that seems to determine success on the internet.
Better yet don’t look at others’ follower counts either. This became my ultimate downfall. It felt like I needed to keep up with people creating the same content as me. Like if I didn’t match follower for follower they were better than I was. That just isn’t true. There is no way of truly knowing what or how brought about their success. There isn’t a formula to follow. Each person’s online journey is different. So just don’t look at the “competition” because there will always be someone with slightly more followers than you anyway.
Focus on your content and you won’t have time to worry about followers. When it became my obsession to refresh pages, I basically would stop creating new content. It’s a vicious cycle of refreshing, feeling bad, not posting, not getting followers, repeat. So I started to focus on my content more and found that I am too busy making new things to really think about if my followers are growing or not. I’m throwing myself into my work more so now than ever. And it’s producing quality content that will naturally increase followers.
Remember why you started. If it was to become rich and famous from the internet then you approached things all wrong. But most people start blogging or making YouTube videos because they want to share their interests with other people. If you’re doing that, then you’ve won. Sure it would be nice to sit back as ad money comes in from your latest post, but as long as you’re getting what you had hoped to receive when you started the whole thing, then you’re a success.
Now I know follower counts are still important no matter how hard I lie to myself and say they aren’t. But they’re also a disease that can crush your creativity and destroy the quality of content you produce. So take a step back, focus on the content, and the follower stuff will figure itself out on its own.
