In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, we’re diving into one of the most frequently asked questions from our DSC business members: “How do I grow my Instagram following?” With the way social media has evolved, follower count doesn’t equate to success in the way many people think. So today, I’m breaking down why having more followers doesn’t necessarily lead to more revenue or business growth, and sharing insights from our own experiments with social media that prove it!
Join me as I walk through:
- How Instagram’s algorithm has shifted and why follower count is no longer the most important metric.
- Why a smaller, engaged audience can be just as valuable—if not more—than a large following.
- Real-world examples from our business that show followers don’t always drive sales.
- How to use social media strategically without feeling pressured to post constantly.
- Tips on maximizing visibility, engagement, and shares to build deeper connections with your audience.
Links:
- DSC Legacy Launch – in November 2024, the pricing and structure of the DSC membership will be changing (but only for new members). Join before November to lock in the current pricing and membership!
- Check out the Dietitian Success Center membership here
- Check out our Freebies here – PES Statement Cheat Sheet, Client Resource Kit & Business Planning Workbook
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. I’m Krista, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, an online learning platform for RDs and students. I am on a mission to help more dietitians build confidence and expertise in running successful, profitable businesses. I went to business school so you don’t have to.
My team and I have grown DSC to a platform that serves hundreds of members. We’ve experimented with all types of marketing, tech, sales strategies, productivity tools, systems, and more. And we want to spill the tea on what’s working, what’s not, and how you can leverage our insights to kickstart, expand, or elevate your own business.
Ready to dive into your business school crash course? If so, let’s get started.
Hey, they’re really quick. Before we get into this episode, I just wanted to let you know that we are about to go into our legacy launch for Dietitian Success Center. So, what does this mean? In 2025, we are making some really big, really incredible strides within the membership and within Dietitian Success Center and what we offer to our members.
And so consequently, for any new members. Who joined after this legacy launch, our pricing and offer structure is going to be changing. But again, only for new members who joined after this legacy launch. So, if you join now as part of our legacy launch, you’re going to lock in the current pricing of our membership, which is the lowest it will ever be from now on, by far, like by far. Um, because honestly the value we offer in time savings and money savings in not having to invest in one-off courses or coaching far exceeds the price you’re paying for the membership. But you’re still going to be able to take advantage of all of the incredible things that we’re going to be offering in 2025 and beyond. More handouts, more courses, a better platform, user experience to make it even easier to find the information you need quickly.
We’re actually rerecording all of our business content to make it even better and covering what actually works in 20 24, 20 25 and beyond. Not what worked two years ago. Plus after November 22nd, we’re actually no longer going to be accepting new members into the business membership. No, I’m not joking.
How we deliver our business content is going to be changing completely in 2025. So if you want to join the membership, a program that has literally helped over 500 dieticians start and grow businesses. For the most affordable rate that you will find you will want to join right now. So if you’ve been on the fence about joining now, it’s the time don’t miss out on this incredible offer. And also don’t forget if you join us as a group of four or more practitioners, you can actually take advantage of our group membership rates, which have even bigger discounts.
So reach out to us on Instagram at dietician success center or through the contact form on our website, www.dieticiansuccesscenter.com to inquire more about group membership rates, but otherwise make sure and join us in the membership during this legacy launch, you do not want to miss out.
Hey there. Happy Thursday. Welcome to a new episode of the dietician success podcast. So the other day I had a DSE business member submit a video, ask talking about follower growth. So just as a backstory here, we have this feature within the business membership where we use this program called video ask. Whereby a member can submit a video or an audio question directly to our team.
And then either myself, Maria or Olivia will personally respond back with a video or an audio answer to answer the question, to give personalized feedback and coaching. And so it’s such a cool feature. It would help so many dieticians get answers to their biggest questions that are kind of keeping them stuck. In an easy way.
And so. Anyways, someone submitted a question asking about. How to grow their Instagram following. And so I thought that that would be the perfect response for it would be the perfect topic rather for today’s episode, because the way that social media works has changed so dramatically. And so drastically. And actually in kind of a great way. I feel like even for me, the way that I’ve talked about Instagram and using Instagram in our business and my business it been overly positive over the last year or so? But we’ve actually done a lot of really cool experimentation over the last couple months.
And I feel like I’ve learned a lot about what actually is working and not working right now at this point in time with this algorithm. And so I want to share some of that with you today. Some of those learnings and why. Number of followers actually does not equate to more revenue or more success in your business.
And I have two very specific scenario, examples that I want to share from our own experience to support why this is actually the case. And so. I hope that today’s episode really helps to reinforce that you can have a successful thriving business with a very small audience. Or if you don’t want to use social media to market your business. That’s okay.
You don’t have to. And I just want to add this in as a little side note, because I know that sometimes there’s sort of this pressure feeling that like, oh my gosh, it feels like I have to be on social media in order to have to have a successful business. That’s not the case. I think that there are different ways that we can use social media.
I think it’s helpful to have a presence so that if somebody looks you up, they. You know, see you and they’re able to get a sense of you, but that could just be you create an Instagram page. You have like six or seven posts on there. Kind of explaining what you do and giving people a sense of your philosophy and your vibe.
And then you could just not contribute to it again. Like it, you know, it’s there, it’s living, breathing so that if somebody Googles you, it shows up. Or looks you up on Instagram, it shows up, but you don’t necessarily need to be contributing to it regularly. I think that’s a good strategy. Anyways.
That’s kind of a side. I’m actually not really talking about that in today’s episode. But I just wanted to mention that because it’s been top of mind for me. And it’s been a part of a few conversations I’ve had over the last couple of weeks. But so the, the original question of do you need more followers to grow your business?
And so when I got this question via video, asked my response back to it was. Well, why? Like, why do you want to grow the number of followers? Like what is the objective? And the person responded back and they said, well, you know, I know I need a bigger audience in order to sell more of my stuff in order to sell courses, in order to sell digital products in order to be able to grow and scale my business.
And I was like, well, actually I think that that’s very much a belief that is held by a lot of people, but that’s actually not true. And I’m speaking about that being not true from personal experience. So from our own personal experience. And so I’m just going to pull up our, my Instagram account. And I say our, because it’s equally myself, Olivia and Maria posting content to the Instagram account. But right now we have 2,794 followers on our dietician success center.
Instagram account. You can follow us at dietician success center if you’d like, but. That is not very many in the grand scheme of things like that is a pretty small audience. Now, if you have 300 followers, you might think, oh wow, that’s actually pretty big. But in the grand scheme of things, this is a small audience. And it really honestly has grown very minimally.
Like I’ve started this account back in 2021. So that was almost four years ago. And. It really has not grown very much or very fast. If you think about three years of regularly posting content and this only growing to about not even 3000 members like. That’s tiny. That is tiny, but I’m also here to tell you that. That doesn’t really. Matter.
Like we get regularly re we regularly get customers and members who find us on social media. And so I want to share some evidence to support this hypothesis that I have. That number of followers actually does not contribute. To revenue or to business success. And I also do want to. Just mentioned today to that. I’m I’m talking about I’m talking about when you, in the context of selling digital products or services or services.
So whether that’s one-on-one nutrition, counseling, or coaching, whether that’s group workshops with that’s online courses. That’s really what I’m talking about today. I think it’s a bit of a different conversation. If you’re trying to embark on more influencer style work, where brands will actually pay you. To post their products to your audience.
I think that there’s definitely still a component of audience size to that type of work. And so I’m really coming more from a place of like, if you’re selling, if you’re selling services like most dietitians are, or if you’re selling digital products, like a lot of dieticians are too. So I’m not really talking about that influencer style work. But I think also as a side note, too, One of the really cool things that I’ve observed within the dietician community is that you ha, if you have a specific expertise in something, so a specific niche, and you find like there’s a lot of opportunity to work with brands that also want to cater to the same niche. Even if you have a smaller but more tailored and engaged audience.
So I’ve seen dieticians doing brand work with 10,000 followers, maybe even slightly less, which again may sound big. But I think in the grand scheme of like social media and how many followers, bigger accounts have, that’s quite small. So, I don’t think that you need hundreds of thousands of followers in order to be successful in this area.
But again, let’s talk more about if you’re using social media to sell services or to sell products. So I want to share two specific examples from my own experience that really support the idea that number of followers does not equate to more sales. Okay. So the first scenario is going to be on Instagram.
And then the second scenario is going to be talking about YouTube. So, and even if you don’t use YouTube, I think this will be really interesting learning just about how it works. And maybe even to get you to think about, Hey, maybe I could use YouTube in a super strategic way for my business and not have it be something that takes up an incredible amount of my time.
So I’ll talk about that in a minute. Okay, so let’s talk about Instagram first. So because of how the algorithm has changed over the years, we really need to shift our mindset to measure success by how many people actually see your content and how many people share your content instead of how many people follow you, because. In old world Instagram, the only content that would show up in your feed is people you follow.
Right? You remember those days where the only stuff that would show up in your feed was people you actually followed. So back then, You know, followers and number of followers was very much a metric of success because that meant more people actually saw your content. This is not how it works anymore.
I see people in my feed all the time regularly that I don’t follow. And it’s because I’ve watched their reels. Maybe multiple times when they come up on my discover page, I will watch their content. I will see their content all the time. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that I actually follow them.
And I actually see this all the time where I will click on someone’s profile, that I really liked their content and I don’t even follow them. That probably is the case for you too. So then if people are seeing my stuff without following me, why do I even care if they’re following me or not? Right. That’s really the question. Other than the fact that number of followers is a vanity metric.
And if you’ve never heard the term vanity metric, it basically means a metric. That. So it’s a, an analytics item. So it’s something that can be measured, but it’s not a signifier of a real return on investment. So it doesn’t really mean anything significant in a business content context. So. But what is not a vanity metric is people actually seeing your stuff? And people sharing your stuff so that other people can see your stuff. That’s really the more important piece here.
So that is one of my thoughts around why actually number of followers doesn’t matter. It’s about how is your content getting visible to other people? And I know that there can be a lot of frustration around views and around, you know, putting something out there into the world and maybe it only gets a few hundred views or gets like basically no engagement. So I think that there’s an important shift that has to be made here, a mindset shift that if you put a real out there into the world and let’s say it doesn’t do as well as some of your other ones, or perhaps it only gets three or 400 views, and you’re used to getting a thousand or 2000, or maybe you get a thousand and you’re kind of disappointed with that because you used to get 6,000. Now ask yourself, have you ever stood in front of an audience of a thousand people? To talk about your offer or your services?
No, you probably haven’t like in person, you probably have never done that. I’ve never done that. But I’m able to do that on Instagram. And so remember that. Those a thousand views. Although it counts people that have watched it more than once. Like. You know, that is potentially 500 individual people, 600 individual people that have seen that piece of content from you. And I think we’re kind of in a day and age where we need to place more value on fewer deeper, more sincere interactions and engagements. Versus trying to speak to the masses, trying to cater to going viral.
I’ve seen many examples of people who have said, yeah, I had a post that went viral and it literally had no impact on my business. None. Whatsoever. So. That’s really not the important thing here. And we need to stop chasing that. As an important metric of success. And I think just a reminder that when you do put something out there, it’s the world.
Even if only a few hundred people see it, that’s still a few hundred individual people that are seeing it. And so I find that that’s really helpful. That’s sort of something that helps us stay really motivated and engaged with our Instagram is like, Hey, you know, we’re not trying to. We’re not trying to reach everyone.
We’re just trying to have more meaningful interactions and create more meaningful content for those few people that really resonate with what we have to offer. And so I want to talk actually very specifically about what we have been doing over the last few months in terms of our Instagram and why, again, I have the additional data to be able to support that number of followers actually doesn’t matter. So, this is kind of cool.
And it was a fun experiment that we did. We, so within, within the DSE team, which the core team is myself, Maria and Olivia. You’ve heard me talk about them multiple times. But we are really the three people that work within dietician success center on a daily basis. And so one of the things we decided to do was we decided to do a book club a few months ago, where basically we all read the same book.
We read day trading attention by Gary V. Now, you know, I have mixed feelings. I think about Gary V I think a lot of people do. If you never heard about, about him, he’s sort of an online social media personality. But I had heard really good things about this book because his book day trading attention is basically about how does social media work in today’s day and age, because that’s really been such a top of mind question where there’s so many more people creating content.
There’s so many more accounts out there. There’s so much noise. How do we cut through that and still be successful and can we even still be successful? And so I actually really liked the book. I think, as a team, we all really liked the book because it gave some very specific ways. That you can rethink your social media strategy. In today’s day and age.
And so what we did is we all read the book and we came back to the table with some specific ideas on how to approach. And I would say specifically our Instagram, it’s kind of applied to all of the channels that we’re on, but specifically Instagram. And we were really coming from a place of questioning.
Well, what even works anymore? Do we have to post every day? What kind of content even resonates? Do we even need to be using Instagram? And so I’ll share with you some results from what we’ve been doing. So basically. What we decided to do is we would decide to say, well, Hey. You know, let’s let’s really try and go for it and let’s really try and. Create more volume of content because that’s kind of Gary B’s whole idea is that you need to create a higher volume. You need to not overthink, you need to just put that stuff out there to the world so that you’re able to learn what, what works and what resonates and what does it.
And you’re able to do more of what works and what resonates. So we decided to do that. We’re like, Hey, let’s not overthink it. Let’s just, you know, every day when somebody has an idea for an Instagram post, let’s post it in our slack channel, we’ll all contribute to it and then we’ll post it and we’ll just see what happens, what the results are. And so, that has been a really cool process.
First of all, just to learn what type of content actually gets the most views for us, for everyone, it’s going to be different. But that’s been really fun to just see and learn, because now we know, Hey, this is the messaging that really resonates with your ideal clients. So we can do more of that. But again, just to bring it back to the idea of follower growth.
So from. And really we’ve started doing this over the last. We started posting higher volume and really paying attention to what’s working and doing more of that over the last couple months. So I would say so at the time of this recording, it’s October 16th. So, you know, heavier through the month of September, and then to this point in October, So. Now this is a little frustrating because on Instagram, in the metrics dashboard, you can’t actually go back to like, I can’t go back to let’s say March of 20, 23 and see how. What our metrics look like during that month, but. W back when we used to actually measure have some data back when we used to actually measure like number of followers.
So I’ll share that in a minute, but, okay. So from September 16th to October 15th, so this is of this year, basically over the last 30 days. We posted 23 times. So that’s essentially us posting pretty much every day, except for on weekends. We generally don’t post on weekends. We have a couple of times, but we haven’t really noticed that. We can post do. Better at all than our weekday posts. Now it’s been a combination of reels and static posts, but mostly reels.
So I would say probably three quarters of that reels and then a quarter maybe static posts. So when I look on Instagram, And I look at our follower count over that 30 days. Actually, no, I’m going to share our, I’m going to share the other metrics first and then I’ll share all our follower accounts.
So, if I look at the 90 day metrics for us Over the past 90 days. Oh, sorry. No. Over the past 30 days, not 90 days. Over the past 30 days. My professional dashboard on Instagram is telling me that we have received a total of 31,000 views. In the last 30 days. Our accounts reached has increased by 505%.
Our profile activity has increased by 14%. Our profile visits have increased by 10% and our external link taps. So that means people actually clicking the link in our bio or a link that we are sharing in whatever an Instagram story has increased by 71% versus the previous 30 days. And so that’s really great.
Like that is awesome. That means our content is being seen by more people as being accessed by more people. Now. Our followers. So over the last 30 days, our follower count has increased by 70. No, sorry. By a net of only 58. We’ve had 78 new followers. We’ve lost 20. So a net of 58. Now, if I go back to. 2022, because that was the last time we actually captured number of followers and how that changed month to month.
So actually don’t have that data from anywhere between 2022. And now. But back in 2022, back when we were posting maybe two to three times a week, we were getting, I don’t know, maybe a few thousand views versus 31,000 views. Our net increase in number of followers was 53. That is no different than what we’re doing now.
So 58 followers now, 53 before, but yet. The views that we’re getting the accounts we’re reaching the external link taps. All of that stuff is so much greater, so much greater because we are being more strategic about how we’re posting. We are paying attention to what is working in and what doesn’t work, what resonates with our audience.
We’re not overthinking it. We’re just putting stuff out there into the world. And we’re not concerning ourselves with number of followers because Hey, we have proof. That actually really does not matter. So I hope that that is, is really a telltale sign to you that. Number of followers doesn’t matter.
That is not the metric we should be striving for. We should really be looking at how many people are able to see our content. View our content share our content. I think shares is honestly. One of the actual best metrics of success, because that’s just, you know, you’re essentially getting in front of new people without you even having to do anything, right?
Like you are relying on other people, other people are sharing your content, exposing your content to a completely new group of people that you didn’t have access to before, which is really, really cool. So, yeah, I think that this has been a really interesting experiment. It’s been a really interesting experiment and we’ve really, really enjoyed this process. And I think this is also why we like to talk about things like tracking your metrics and paying attention to what is actually working and what’s not working. And to really look at your business and look at your marketing from a more holistic perspective, that’s really what we teach within dietitian success center.
You know, if you don’t. Want to use social media. You don’t have to, to market your business. You can, you don’t have to. Here’s all these other ways that you can market yourself instead. Never put all your eggs in one basket, because just because this is what’s working today, doesn’t mean this is what’s going to be working in 2025.
I don’t know what’s going to be working in 2025. But we will have to change and adapt when that time comes to. So that’s my first first example. Of how have the evidence to support the idea that number of followers does not actually impact business success. Number two, example, number two is actually with YouTube. So, YouTube has been something we have sort of thought about for a long time, but didn’t actually start putting serious effort into. Until April of this year.
So that was only six months ago. It’s October now. So that was only six months ago. And I think the question was always like really, can you even start a YouTube channel in 2024 and have any success at all? And again, it depends on how you measure success. So our YouTube channel has 203 subscribers.
That is it. That is like nothing. 200 of these at three subscribers. Like that’s, it’s nothing. However in September of 2024. YouTube popped up on our list of top referral sources to our website. So what that means is every month we look at how are people finding our website and YouTube? Popped up on that list as a top referral source. And so this is so, so, so interesting to us because it goes to show. That again, number of subscribers is not necessarily the important thing we have about 30 videos on our YouTube channel right now.
And it’s a combination of. Reposting this podcast episode. So I’ve started reposting, mostly guest episodes on the YouTube channel. And we’ve created videos. So we’ve taken some of our blog content and then also just create a videos in isolation. That dieticians can actually send to their patients to explain some common, basic nutrition concepts. So things like diabetes, you know, or explain the lock and key analogy for diabetes or the healthy plate model. Those types of easy, easy videos. So we have some of those. We’ve repost our Instagram reels as shorts on YouTube as well. But so we have 30 videos and so we’ve posted about, and that’s going back a long time.
Like I actually posted, I think I can’t even remember the first video, but I did it very inconsistently. I posted the pop few of the podcast episodes. It was really only till April of this year that we started to actually post more. So probably 20 of those videos are my boot maybe from. April of 2024 until now. And I think, you know, it’s also an important reminder that. You don’t necessarily need to be posting to YouTube every single day in order to be able to bring people into your business.
Like you can have a few. Now, one thing I have to mention is that we have been super strategic about the topics we cover on YouTube. They have been keyword optimized that we know that it’s stuff that people are actually already searching for. Now, this is a topic that we are going to be covering when we completely revamped our business content within dietitian success center.
This is like, oh my God. One of my favorite famous favorite famous favorite topics to talk about is keyword optimization and how to create content. Based on a need versus just putting it out there, putting something that you want to talk about out there into the world. That might never get seen by anyone. And so having a few keyword optimized YouTube videos, especially if you’re in a very specific niche, allows you to kind of just set it and forget it and get regular traffic to your site through those videos. That’s sort of been, you know, the, the videos that have the highest views on our channel are things that we posted a while ago and they just sort of continue to grow and bring people to us.
So again, another example of how number of subscribers really doesn’t matter. It’s actually, because again, if I subscribe, it doesn’t matter if I subscribed to you or not. If I search a video, if I’m looking for something in. YouTube search. It’s not just going to show me videos from people. I follow.
It’s going to show me videos from anyone. And so that’s really the thing that we need to meet more concerned about is just getting our content seen by more people. So, yeah, I hope that this was an eyeopening episode for you in terms of what actually matters when it comes to social media and what does not matter. And how things are shifting and changing over time. And so again, just as a reminder, as a recap, it’s not about number of followers.
It’s really about engaging deeper with a specific audience of people that actually care about what you have to say. It’s about getting your content in front of more people. It’s about getting your content shared by more people. It’s not necessarily about those number of followers. That is a vanity metric. If you have a team of dieticians that you work with, or a team of business friends, do a book club, do a book club, read a book like day trading attention to learn about how does Instagram work in today’s day and age. And then with YouTube as well, this idea of actually creating a few really solid keyword optimized videos, as opposed to feeling like you have to set yourself up to post every single day in order to be successful, because that’s just not necessarily the case anymore. When it comes back to Instagram too, I also talked a lot about creating. Not overthinking it and just creating content and. Create and, and continuing to create based on what you feel like is resonating. So taking those threads of things that tend to do quite well and using those figuring out how do I creatively use those again and again and again, in my content, because. That will just continue to expand your reach. So yeah, and then the last, but not least is considering marketing from a holistic perspective, too.
Right? If you don’t want to use Instagram or social media to market your business, you don’t have to, there’s so many different ways to market. Within dietician success center. We talk about email marketing. We talk about blogging. We talk about SEO. We talk about making connections in your community. We talk about outreach.
We talk about all of these things so that you don’t have to put your eggs in one basket. You can consider multiple different marketing channels and really think about what is the thing. That feels the best for you that is most aligned with your personality and the business that you want to build. All right.
So once again, make sure you join us in the membership now through our legacy launch. In order to be able to take advantage of all of the amazing things that we are going to be offering in 2025 for our current pricing, our current rates. Because again, for anyone who joins us after this legacy launch prices will be increasing.
If you are a member right now. And so long as you keep your membership active. Your pricing will remain the same. So lock it in today, make sure and lock it in today. And yeah, join us. Come join us in the membership. You can take advantage of that video as feature I was talking about earlier and take advantage of all of the amazing content that we’re going to be updating reviewing rereleasing in the new year.
So there’s going to be a lot of really, really, really cool, great stuff like that. YouTube topic, very specific. You to talk at a topic I talked about before, and I’m really pumped about that. Okay. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and I hope you have an awesome week. I will see you next Thursday.