3 Reasons Why Your Instagram Ratio Doesn’t Matter

Since the dawn of Instagram (a whopping eight years ago…), there has been one vanity metric that’s had an outsized influence on our feelings of social media self-worth: the follower-to-following ratio.

As one’s profile achieves a moderate following, a peculiar desire emerges: to show that you’re followed by more people than who follow you. This could also be called a nonchalance or influencer score. The extreme of this metric can be observed on certain celebrity profiles. Millions follow them, they follow no one.

But for a few reasons I list below, there is very little reason to maintain such a lopsided follower-to-following ratio.

1. It’s not helping your post engagement

The first reason why the ratio doesn’t matter is that it has no effect on the engagement success of your posts. What I mean by that is this ratio is not incorporated into the engagement algorithms for the top social media platforms. So if you think by following fewer people will help your engagement, I got bad news for ya: it doesn’t.

2. It’s limiting your creative influences

The second, and arguably most important, reason why your ratio doesn’t matter is that it’s forcing you to forgo any creative influence from the platform on which you share your content. By following fewer people, you’re naturally exposed to much less creative content that (1) could not only inspire your future work but (2) also weakens your knowledge of what kind of content that very platform’s audience is creating.

3. It’s antithetical to the purpose of the platforms

The third reason the ratio doesn’t matter is that it goes against why you joined these platforms in the first place. Social media, at its best, is a facilitation of digital community and inspiration. By worrying so much about how many people you’re following, you’re missing out on connection with more and more creatives that you could build and create incredible things with.

In short, don’t give your ratio second thought.

See you tomorrow.