Why do people unfollow me after I post?

Researchers who tracked 700,956 Twitter accounts over ten months found that when the hashtags two accounts used overlapped 10 percent less, the odds that one unfollowed the other went up about 1.7 times. People drifted away when what an account posted about drifted away from what they cared about.

I've always been the one hitting the follow button, and what got me into studying how people behave on social media was realizing that the accounts I followed were run by people, and so was mine, and the people following me were people too. People follow for something they want: to know something, to belong to something, to be heard. When a post stops giving them that, some of them leave. The rest of this page is what the research found about when that happens.

After a viral post

Here's how I see the struggle after a viral post. It usually isn't because you got boring. A viral post reaches a lot of people who followed you for that one topic, and when your next posts are about something else, it doesn't resonate with the people that post just brought in. Strategy here is understanding what those people wanted, and that keeps changing, so it's something you keep doing rather than something you learn once from a course.

The Twitter study above is the closest research to that idea. Topic overlap between two accounts predicted whether the follow lasted, and the people who arrive from a viral post have the least history with everything else you post.

What the unfollow studies found

Haewoon Kwak, Sue Moon and Wonjae Lee took two snapshots of the follow network among Korean Twitter users, in June 2010 and April 2011, and sampled one million follow relationships to see which ones had ended. Besides the topic finding:

• Replies kept people. People who had received replies from an account were much less likely to unfollow it. Replies and retweets the person sent to the account made no difference. The authors' summary is that people are "more of a receiver than a giver."
• One-way follows broke more often. When the account didn't follow the person back, the odds of an unfollow were about 1.9 times higher than in a mutual follow.

A 2018 study compared 8,000 Twitter accounts that lost at least 30 percent of their followers between 2014 and 2016 with 8,000 whose follower count barely moved. The accounts that lost followers more often tagged the same small group of accounts over and over and put more links in their tweets. Accounts with a profile description lost fewer. The study reports which patterns separated the two groups, not how much each one mattered.

On Instagram, a 2022 set of experiments showed people aged 18 to 24 made-up influencer posts. When a post looked controlled by the brand paying for it, people said they were more likely to avoid or unfollow the influencer, and the reaction ran through anger. The effect was bigger for an account with 188,000 followers than one with 18,000.

Why an unfollow stings

If losing followers bothers you, that reaction has research behind it too. In a 2024 experiment, students who got one like on a mock social network instead of six scored much lower on belonging, self-esteem and the feeling that they mattered, after about three minutes. That's the person posting, which is you. It's also the person commenting on your post when no one answers, which is why replying matters.

Where the research stops

• The two studies with real unfollow data are both Twitter, from 2010 to 2016, and one is Korean users only. Neither covers Instagram, TikTok or Threads.
• The Instagram study measured what young adults said they'd do after one made-up post, not what they did.
• I couldn't find a peer-reviewed study of why people unfollow a small business.

What to do after a post takes off

• Find out what the new followers came for. Look at which post brought them in and what it was about. Your next few posts are for those people too.
• Make the next post a continuation, not a repeat. The same topic, one step further: the follow-up question, the mistake people make next, the part the first post didn't have room for.
• Reply to the people commenting. In the Twitter data, being replied to was what kept people following.
• Write a profile description that says what you post about, so a new follower knows what they signed up for. Instagram's search also matches the words in your name and username.
• Keep sponsored or sales posts sounding like you. The posts people reacted against were the ones that looked scripted by someone else.

Sources: Kwak, Moon & Lee (2012); Maity, Gajula & Mukherjee (2018); Pradhan et al. (2022); Sacino et al. (2024). Every study was read in full before it was cited here.