Simple percentage growth unfairly favors small accounts, while absolute numbers favor large ones. A logarithmic scale normalizes follower growth, creating a more equitable way to measure and compare performance in challenges, regardless of an account's starting size.
Related Insights
Don't compare your niche content's views to mass-market entertainment. A video for business owners getting 100,000 views might represent a huge portion of its total addressable market (TAM), making it far more successful than a viral video with millions of untargeted views. Contextualize your metrics against your market size.
Platforms like TikTok have shifted the paradigm where success is tied to each post's individual merit, not the creator's follower base. A single viral video can generate massive reach and sales, even if other posts have low engagement, a trend now adopted by LinkedIn, YouTube, and others.
Instead of focusing on post quantity, measure content success by the North Star metric of "views achieved," both in aggregate and per post. A single high-performing video that generates millions of views is far more valuable than numerous low-engagement posts, clarifying the quality versus quantity debate.
The value of a large, pre-existing audience is decreasing. Powerful platform algorithms are becoming so effective at identifying and distributing high-quality content that a new creator with great material can get significant reach without an established following. This levels the playing field and reduces the incumbent advantage.
Instagram's professional accounts now have a built-in competitive insights feature. It allows marketers to select 10 similar accounts and compare key metrics like follower growth and posting frequency, providing a quick, native alternative to third-party benchmarking tools.
Users can now manually add or remove interest categories to customize their feed algorithm. This allows creators with a well-defined niche to be directly recommended to users who have explicitly expressed interest in that topic, leveling the playing field for smaller accounts to get discovered.
Platforms like TikTok now prioritize content based on user interest, not just who you follow. This means a new account with zero followers can achieve viral reach on its first post if the content is compelling, a fundamental shift from the old follower-based 'social graph' model.
The era of building a follower list like an email list is over. Platforms now use an "interest graph," meaning a post from an account with few followers can go viral if the content is compelling. This shift democratizes reach and prioritizes content quality above all else.
Contrary to popular belief, a creator's income doesn't scale linearly with their follower count. Higher earnings are driven by a lucrative niche (e.g., FinTech), brand safety, and treating content creation like a business. A creator with 30k followers can out-earn one with a million.
While social media challenges are framed around metrics, their most significant outcomes are often intangible. The real wins include forming business partnerships, raising capital, and building genuine relationships with peers—benefits that far outweigh simply gaining new followers.