If one more fucking person follows me and unfollows me every week, I am going to pull my hair out. It is 100% not a way to grow. It is completely-- It's like fucking pouring Rogaine on your legs and expecting them to get longer. It does not work. It might've worked. Five years ago, worked. You might have tricked people into hitting follow and then you went and unfollow them. It is not a sustainable real way to build a following.

If you were thinking about doing a follow/unfollow thing, just stepped back, delete Instagram for a week, take a fucking breath, realize this is not the end all be all of life, and you don't need to be doing these silly hacks to try and get this arbitrary number up because even if those people follow you, they're not going to engage, they're not going to care about you. An unengaged followers are the same as having no followers because eventually if they aren't engaging, the algorithm is going to kick them out, kick them out.

The algorithm will be such that like those people are probably not going to see your content and so they might as well not be followers. Anyway, and while that number is going to be higher, it isn't going to provide any more value for brands. You are going to end up with high followers, low engagement which is a much bigger to tractor for us than low followers and high engagement. If I'm deciding between someone with 75,000 followers who gets a thousand likes a photo and 25,000 followers who gets a thousand likes a photo, I'm picking the 25,000 person every fucking time.

Do not stress that much about that number. Yes, it is important. Also, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this before. It is going to become increasingly less important as the thing that matters is how many people are you actually reaching, not what is that number. These hacks, these giveaways, these comments, and engagement pods, these things are all born out of desire for the wrong thing which is short term growth. Instead of thinking about the long-term, what am I doing in three, five, 10 years? How am I going to build an audience that actually cares about what I'm talking about?

Focus on that. Good things will happen. Worry about follow/unfollow and all these other things, you'll drive yourself crazy. Please, don't do it. It doesn't work and it's just a huge waste of your time.

Male Speaker: What do you think people are so fixated on the number?

James: I think people are fixated on the number because there aren't many things in life that you're-- How successful you are at that thing is the first thing that people interact with. When you meet someone in a bar or on a train or in a restaurant or whatever, you don't also have to tell them what your salary is, all of your accomplishments, what you look like naked, how big your house is, and what kind of car you have. All of those things are not out in the open.

I think that the way Instagram is set up, at least that it is and that number is a stand-in for how interesting, successful, ambitious, and talented you are. I don't think that the number actually represents any of those things, but it's a stand-in for those things for most people. It is a big signal to the general public where if you have followers, they go, "Oh, you must be someone important." People are following you.

Just like, again, if you walked around and had your salary on your head and you worked at a hedge fund, God forbid and it said, "You make two million dollars a year." I think you'd probably find the people who'll treat you different. Why do you think people buy Ferraris? They want the first thing that people know about them is to be that, "I'm fucking rich than you. I make more money than you. I'm more successful than you."

I am trying to tip the power balance of this relationship immediately because pulling up in a Ferrari is a very clear indication that this person has more money than you. This is why the entire luxury industry exists in general. Conspicuous consumption is probably one of the bigger drivers of luxury purchases in the world. People want other people to know they're rich, and ideally, richer than the people who are looking at them. They buy expensive handbags, they buy expensive watches, they buy expensive watches, they buy expensive shoes and expensive cars.

Look, you can kid yourself and say, "No, I like the craftsmanship of a Chanel bag. I don't buy it," so people know it's a Chanel bag. It's a fucking lie. Everyone buys a Chanel quilted bag because everyone knows it's a Chanel quilted bag and everyone knows a Chanel bag costs $6,000. Somehow you had to afford it, so it says something about you. I totally get it. Again, the reason people care so much about followers is the same reason that Chanel sells a shitload of those handbags every year is because it's an indicator of how successful you are, but it is all fake.

None of it really matters. For us, forms increasingly that follower count matters less and less. We focus on how many people are you actually reaching, how much influence do you actually have, who are those people, do they care about what you say, what do you talk about, how often are you taking sponsored posts, what's your engagement, is your engagement real or is it from other influencers, do I think it came from a comment pod or do I think it came from actual consumers or the consumers asking you questions in the comments about the product or are they saying, "Oh my god, goals. You're such a babe. I love you."

All of these things matter more and more now than what that number is. If you can let it go a little bit, I encourage it.