The truth about social media engagement: It is getting easier for one's content to go viral, but harder to get followers

Over the last couple of weeks, a seemingly comforting narrative has taken over the creator economy discourse: your follower count doesn’t matter anymore. The algorithm has democratised reach and a good piece of content can come from anywhere and go places.

It’s largely true, but unfortunately, it also tells us where we are in the creator economy’s evolution—more crowded, more competitive, more monetised than ever—and how that dictates who chooses to amplify whom, an essential ingredient for growth, if not the most critical.

Content creator Raunak Ramteke from Nagpur confirms a particular behaviour within creator circles: “Big creators are often more comfortable reposting smaller creators because it feels safer from a competitive point of view.” Besides creating trivia-led content on Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra for his 159,000 Instagram followers, Ramteke, 32, tracks the creator economy for his day job at a consumer internet company. “Most creators ultimately want to monetise, so sharing (content of) someone much smaller in the same niche can feel generous without materially threatening your own position or your access to brand budgets. It also earns goodwill because the smaller creator is more likely to publicly acknowledge that support, which reflects well on the bigger creator.”

Contrast this with how creators engage with their peers. A “like” here, a comment there. Public alignment without meaningful amplification. In a maturing creator economy, peers are also competitors. And that’s the part we don’t talk about.

Bhavya Raj, 23, a comedy content creator from Mumbai, with close to 96,000 followers on Instagram, offers a counter. “If a smaller creator’s content comes on a bigger creator’s feed that means it is already gaining organic traction and the Instagram algorithm is actively pushing it.”

In a world where anything can go viral, though, the real challenge isn’t just being seen. It’s being remembered. You can see how that pressure is shaping the content. Creators now feel the need to announce who they are and what they do within the first 5 seconds of a reel as if every video is an introduction, not a continuation. It leaves little room to build familiarity over time; every post is treated like the first one you’re putting out.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. Around August 2022, I wrote about how creators were seeing strong engagement on individual posts, but it wouldn’t lead to follower growth. The signals were there early on: content was starting to travel much further than the creator behind it.

That brings me to the second missing link from the “follower count” narrative: A viral post might travel far, but it doesn’t always travel back to the creator with the same force.

For marketers, this shift has upended old comfort: A large following once offered a minimum guarantee of eyeballs. Today, that certainty has eroded. Which raises a larger question: will influencer marketing start to resemble performance marketing soon? Will brands align themselves more with content than with creators like they do on YouTube as well as the rest of the web? If that happens, it could fundamentally reshape the creator egosystem.

Content is no longer just expression, it is inventory. And with shelf life being finite, there is a tacit understanding among creators who’ve been around for a while. That you cash in when you’re on a good wicket, because the cycle moves quickly. It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s line, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Only here, many don’t quite know how long they’ll be looking at the shiny stuff before they’re pulled back down.