Reach does not come from your followers

The most common question at the start of a project is how to get followers first. It is an understandable question and still the wrong order.

In the insights of a profile I have been running for four months, the split looks like this: 7.6 percent of views came from followers, 92.4 percent from people who do not follow the profile. On TikTok the picture is even clearer, 98.3 percent of traffic came from the feed and only 1.5 percent through the profile.

That does not mean followers are worthless. It means they are the result, not the requirement.

What follows from that

If nearly all views come from strangers, every video has to work on its own. It cannot assume anything. No prior knowledge, no running series, no context from the last post. Whoever sees the video is seeing you for the first time.

In practice that means three things:

• Every video needs its own opening. An “as you know” costs you half the audience immediately.
• The channel name and the face have to stay recognisable, because recognition is built out of many separate first contacts.
• One good video is worth more than three mediocre ones. The algorithm tests every video from scratch, it gives you no credit for the last one.

The example that convinced me

One reel on that profile now sits at 459,088 views. When it was published the profile had under a thousand followers. The video brought the followers, not the other way around. And it keeps collecting views today, months after the upload.

That is exactly the difference from advertising. An ad stops working when the budget runs out. A video the algorithm likes keeps going.

What this means for you

If you are starting out for your company, do not plan the first hundred followers. Plan the first ten videos that work without you being known. With every edit, ask whether someone with no context understands what they are looking at.

And after four weeks, do not look at the follower count. Look at the share of non-followers in your views. That number tells you whether you are growing or just showing the same people something again.