A lot of these social media promotions work by having people with high follower counts blast you out and try to get their followers to follow you.
The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion.
Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good.
It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested.
It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.
While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results.
Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic.
Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business / brand.
Also, I really wish social media platforms provided better tools and didn't have policies that penalized you for deleting followers that are bots or junk followers.
As a Las Vegas photographer that works primarily with models, I often have random profiles blasting out my work. These profiles mostly find sexy content and blast it out in hopes of growing their own profiles. This mostly resulted in my followers being 95% men from outside the US. This does absolutely nothing for increasing my engagement with my actual target audience (female models or would be models in the Las Vegas metro area wanting to book photoshoots).
Unfortunately Instagram penalizes you and has actually removed the search functionality from my follower list because I was using it to delete bots and junk followers. They won't say this officially but their support ignores my requests for why this functionality no longer works.
Bot accounts prop up their KPIs and they directly provide revenue. They have clear incentives to allow such bots and junk accounts to thrive on their platform.
It sucks how everything became a trick. Everything is a game and almost everyone is trying to find a way to cheat legally. Result is that all these influencers end up being liars and cheaters because no honest person can compete in such environment.
So then the next generation ends up being essentially raised by cheaters and liars. This is who their heroes are. Worse, they get used to the aesthetics of the cheaters and lose appreciation for honesty. They might perceive plain honesty as cringeworthy or awkward. Literally, they will grow up to feel uncomfortable with the truth. I've met many people like that but it's going to get worse.
I say this a lot in the context of reliability engineering, but it's moreso something I've learned from life. Any sufficiently complex system has rules which means they have incentives (and disincentives!), any system with sufficiently complex rules is a game. You can either craft the game in such a way that the 99% do what you want and the outliers are intentionally marginalized or you can let the 1% run the show according to the meta rules your incentives taught them and make everyone else observers. Social media is the story of the latter.
Great observation. That's why I think rules and structures should be kept simple and minimal. The economy isn't supposed to be a game because people's lives are at stake. Social media algorithms are now an integral part of the economy so their complexity and obscurity poses a significant problem.
I'm not sure a simple system is better. Distributed systems, even people systems, are necessarily complex. Making them simpler does not correlate to better.
The harder work is teaching people who craft systems to think deeply about the relationships and possibilities among the weights of incentives and disincentives. Think, balancing scales rather than questioning the quantity of what's on the scales as a first principle.
We can't simply act like social platforms and apps aren't the primary enablers and profiteers in this ecosystem. Instead of hiring honest tech visionaries, they hire social psychologists to design features that waste time and work like slot machines, while giving little value to users just trying to earn a living or make a name for themselves. These platforms also have no incentive to help anyone to succeed naturally/organically because they also conflictingly sell ad space.
Everything about most modern social media is phony, they even ratio criticism and brigade against truth about their schemes and negative news both on and off their own platforms.
Even Elon spent 44 Billion to dominate the attention game and it didn't work out well for him. There simply can't be a monopoly on attention, but tech is always trying to make it happen in the most underhanded ways, and then turning to profiting from deception when they can't keep it together.
Universal Studios gave me the keys to a Facebook page for a hugely famous movie that had 2,000,000 followers (this was 2012). I had a fan page for the same movie with 30,000 followers.
Whatever I posted to both pages, my fan page would get 10X the engagement and 10X the sales of merch than the bigger page.
It taught me a big lesson on numbers v. engagement.
The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion.
Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good.
It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested.
It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.
While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results.
Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic.
Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business / brand.