Inflation is rampant on Social Media
If I asked you to write down the name of every single person you know, how many names do you think that would be? 100? 500?? 1,000???
What if I let you use your phone, social media, address book, etc? Do you think you could get to 2,500? Maybe 5,000??
Well I did the math. I added up every numeric measure of my network that I could find. After totalling up my phone and email contacts, my social media connections, and every real-life person I could think of, I came up just shy of 6,000 names. I’ll say up front, that number is WILDLY inflated because I didn’t cross reference those sources for duplicates. Acknowledging that, I’m still going to use it as a reference point. Let’s all live in this imaginary world where I can name 6,000 individual people in my network. To put that into perspective, the capacity of Radio City Music Hall is 5,960. With me so far?
We’ve established that 6,000 people is a lot. It’s a sold-out-Roxy’s amount of people. It’s more people than you know right now. But on social media, 6,000 is just north of nothing. TikTok users can’t even join the Creator Rewards Program until they have 10k followers. On Instagram, follower counts are displayed as an exact number until they surpass 10k. To make another real world connection, that’s a few hundred more than the capacity of Red Rocks Amphitheatre, which is 9,525.
The point of these figures is to show how skewed our perspective of “a social following” has become. In the 20+ year history of social media, the quantitative goal post of influence has only ever been pushed back. Unfortunately for everyone trying to kick that field goal, growing a social following hasn’t become more accessible. I’m not saying that social growth is “too hard” or “impossible,” I’m saying it’s not accessible. Why is that? Because of inflation.
What’s Inflation?
Most folks recognize inflation when they see it in the grocery store. You can buy less eggs in 2025 for the same amount of money you’d spend in 2016. There are plenty of other specifics that go into economic inflation, but dammit Jim, I’m a marketer not an economist. The simple understanding of inflation is that, overtime, prices rise and the value of currency does not. That means the same amount of money buys less product than it used to. So if there’s inflation in social media, what are the “prices” that are rising, and what is the “product” we’re getting less of? And, while we’re at it, what is the “currency” we’re using to pay this price?
Ok, follow me here, in this metaphor, the “product” you’re trying to “buy” is ROI from your social media. You can determine how you measure that ROI, but do that on your own time and just stay with me. If the “product” is ROI, then the “price” you need to “pay” is an investment in your social media. Maybe that’s content strategy, maybe that’s paid advertising, again, figure that out on your own time and keep up.
So, if the “product” is ROI and the “price” is personal investment, then what’s the “currency.” It’s easy to assume that the “currency” is whatever you invest into your social media, but it’s not. Anyone who’s spent money on boosting social posts can tell you that monetary investment doesn’t guarantee ROI on socials. Anyone who’s worked hard on a social post for it to only receive one like and zero comments can tell you that sweat investment doesn’t guarantee ROI on socials. There’s only one thing that guarantees ROI on socials: engaged followers.
Inflation means that prices have gone up and the same amount of currency buys less product. Over the last five years, the amount of effort required to see return on social media has skyrocketed. And, as shown in the number-heavy portion of this blog, the amount of engaged followers you need to even earn your seat at the social table is out-of-reach for the average user. Prices went up, currency got harder to get, ROI has stayed the same.
How’d That happen?
How and why did this happen? Well those are blog posts in and of themselves. As a simple answer, here are some more numbers that I think are interesting:
Number of social media profiles in 2010: 970 million
Number of social media profiles in 2015: 2.08 billion
Number of social media profiles in 2020: 3.71 billion
Number of social media profiles in 2025: 5.24 billion
Sources: DataReportal, Backlinko
These numbers are inflated in the same way that my “all the people I know” number is. There’s no way to accurately exclude users with multiple profiles or profiles that don’t belong to an active user. Still, we can use these numbers and understand that they are maximums. To summarize, there are 40% more social media profiles today than there were 10 years ago. That means that you need a little more than 5 million followers to reach .001% of all social users. For reference, the 2020 census listed the population of Alabama at about 5 million.
So What?
As with economic inflation, this social media inflation is far more complicated than I’ve made it here today. That doesn’t change the fact that you, as a social media user, are experiencing it. It has become an unfortunate reality of the modern internet and the best advice I can offer is to adjust and adapt. If you’re hunting for ROI on socials, remember that this inflation exists. Much like shoppers at the grocery, keep your eyes out for “products” with “lower prices,” and don’t forget that the “currency” hasn’t changed. On social media, your less-than-10k followers might feel small, but imagine if those less-than-10k people were at a sold-out-opera to see you.
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