The most common reason a business gives us for not posting yet is that nobody is following them. It is the wrong thing to worry about, and we have the screenshots to explain why.
The number that makes the point
Here is a single thirty day window on a client account:
- 1.4 million views
- 97 percent of reach from non-followers
- 796 percent reach growth over the previous period
Ninety-seven percent. Out of every hundred people who saw that content, ninety-seven had never chosen to follow the account. They were shown it.
On a different client account in one month: 10.2 million accounts reached, with impressions up 453 percent. Again, not a large following at the start of the month.
These are screenshots out of the clients' own Instagram insights, not modelled estimates. Several of them are on the portfolio page if you want to see the dashboards.
Subscription feeds versus recommendation feeds
The mental model most business owners carry is from the old internet, and it is a subscription model. You publish, your subscribers see it, so the number of subscribers sets the ceiling. Under that model, building the list first is genuinely the right move.
Reels, TikTok and Shorts do not work that way. They are recommendation feeds. The system's job is to keep the viewer watching, and it does not particularly care whose video does that. It will happily show a stranger's video to a stranger if the signals are good.
Roughly, distribution works in rounds:
- The video is shown to a small seed group. Your followers are part of this, which is the one place follower count genuinely helps.
- The platform watches what that group does. Did they stay past the first seconds? Watch to the end? Rewatch, share, save?
- If those signals are strong, it shows the video to a larger group, mostly people who do not follow you.
- Repeat, with the audience getting broader each round, until the signals fall off.
Follower count is an input to round one. It has very little to do with rounds three through eight, which is where the views actually come from. That is why an account with a few thousand followers can produce a video that reaches millions, and why an account with a large following can post something that goes nowhere.
Followers are not the engine. They are the exhaust.
What this changes about sequencing
If reach mostly comes from non-followers, then the sequence everyone assumes is backwards.
The assumed order is: build an audience, then you will get reach, then you will get business.
The actual order is: make something worth showing strangers, the platform supplies the reach, and a fraction of those strangers become the audience. The follower count is a lagging indicator of work you already did.
This is genuinely good news for a business starting from nothing, because the thing standing between you and a million views is not a follower count you would need months to build. It is the quality of the premise, which you control today.
It is also bad news, in a fair way. You cannot blame a small audience for weak results any more. In our own data, the strongest and weakest videos for one client sat on the same account with the same follower count and finished 189 times apart, which we broke down in the piece on why the average view count is meaningless.
What the platform is actually measuring
Since follower count is mostly out of your hands, it helps to know what is not.
The first two seconds. Almost every video that dies, dies here. If the opening frame does not give a reason to stay, nothing later in the edit gets seen.
Retention through the middle. One client's YouTube Short held 84.4 percent retention and passed 1.2 million views within four days of publishing. Retention is the single signal most tightly coupled to how far a video travels.
Rewatches. A short video watched twice is a very strong signal, which is part of why tight edits outperform loose ones.
Sends and saves. A share is a person spending social capital on your video. The platforms weight it heavily.
Comments, with a caveat. Real discussion helps. Bait that generates angry one-word replies tends not to, and it damages what the audience thinks you are.
Notice that follower count is on none of those lists.
The practical version
Start now, at whatever size you are. Waiting for an audience is waiting for the output of the thing you are refusing to do.
Judge reach, not follows. Follows will come as a byproduct. If reach is climbing and follows are not, the content is working and the profile is not, which is a much easier problem.
Do not buy followers. Beyond being obvious to anyone who checks, a following that does not engage actively poisons round one, which is the round your followers are actually in.
Assume the viewer has never heard of you. If 97 percent of the audience is strangers, content that assumes familiarity is written for the wrong people. Say who you are and what the video is about, inside it.
Count non-follower reach as the real scoreboard. It is in Instagram insights. It tells you whether you reached the market or just talked to the people who already knew you.
For the Toronto real estate version of this, see real estate video marketing in Toronto.
FAQ
Do you need followers to get views on Instagram Reels?
No. In one client month we recorded 1.4 million views with 97 percent of reach coming from accounts that did not follow the client. Reels is a recommendation feed, so follower count mainly affects the small seed audience a video is shown to first. Everything after that is decided by whether people watch, rewatch and share it.
What percentage of Reels reach should come from non-followers?
On content that is genuinely reaching new people, the large majority. The client month above was 97 percent non-follower reach. If most of your reach is coming from existing followers, the video is not clearing the early distribution rounds, and the usual cause is weak retention in the first seconds.
How do Instagram Reels reach people who do not follow you?
The platform shows a new video to a small seed group, measures retention, rewatches, shares and saves, and expands the audience in rounds if those signals are strong. Each round pulls in more people who have no connection to the account. A video that holds attention keeps getting promoted until the signals weaken.
Should a business grow followers before posting video?
No, and it is not possible in that order. Followers are produced by reach, and reach is produced by content. Waiting to post until the following is larger removes the only mechanism that grows the following.
Is non-follower reach better than follower reach?
For a business trying to find new customers, yes. Follower reach is talking to people who already know you. Non-follower reach is the part that grows the market. It is also the number most dashboards bury, which is why so few businesses track it.