Instagram and TikTok have long stopped being platforms where you mainly see content from accounts you deliberately follow. Thanks to the algorithm, you increasingly see posts and videos from brands, creators and organisations you don’t know yet. Social media have become discovery platforms, where a large part of your reach comes from outside your own followers.

This means a smaller account can still reach a huge number of people outside its own community. Conversely, a big account can have lots of followers while its content only travels so far.

That is exactly why it’s becoming more interesting to look at what content actually does. Is a post shared or saved? Do people watch a video to the end? Are you reaching new people outside your existing audience? Metrics like these often give a better picture of how content really performs than the number of followers alone. Of course, that doesn’t mean followers suddenly don’t matter. An engaged community remains valuable. It’s just that a large following isn’t automatically the same as a lot of impact.

On top of that, reach in itself isn’t always the best measure. For some brands, social is mainly about visibility, while for other organisations it matters far more that the right people get involved. We see this in our work for Spaarne Gasthuis, for example. There, a post isn’t automatically successful because it gets a lot of views. Responses from patients, their loved ones and people from the region can be much more valuable. When someone shares their own experience, forwards or saves a post, or really starts a conversation, that often says more about the impact of the content than reach alone.

That is why social KPIs should always be linked to the goal of an account. For one brand, follower growth may be important, while for another, engagement, shares or reach among non-followers say much more.

As platforms increasingly recommend content to people who don’t yet follow a brand, the way we look at social content is changing too. A post is more and more often someone’s first introduction to a brand. That doesn’t necessarily mean every video has to go viral or that all content suddenly has to be entirely focused on reach. But it is becoming more important for a post to be interesting and clear enough, even outside your existing community, to draw someone in. So when we create content, we don’t just think about people who already follow or know you, but also about people who happen to come across your brand for the first time. With video content, for example, it’s smart to use a hook or text to make it immediately clear what the video is about.

All in all, it’s becoming more and more important to look beyond the numbers you can see straight away on a profile. The number of followers is still relevant, but on its own it says less and less about how big or valuable an account really is. It’s in social analyses that you see much more clearly what content sets in motion. How many new people are you reaching, how much interaction is there, and is your content landing with the audience that matters to the brand? Perhaps that is the most important conclusion. Social success is harder and harder to read from the surface. A big account doesn’t automatically have a lot of impact, and a smaller account can perform much better than you might think at first glance.

So followers are certainly not unimportant, but they no longer tell the whole story. If you really want to know whether your social content works, you have to look beyond the number at the top of the profile.