Updated Oct 2026
I’ve had a hunch for a while that brands don’t really own their followers. The platforms do. So I went digging in our internal data to check.
The short version
About 10%.A typical post from a brand account with 100k+ followers got views equal to about 10% of its follower count. Half of their posts got less.2.6x on Instagram, 2.3x on TikTok.That’s how much higher the engagement rate was on posts from the brand’s own customers on Kale, compared to the brand’s own posts.Every single brand.Customer posts beat the brand’s own account on average engagement rate for every brand we looked at, on both platforms.
Basically, a big following doesn’t mean you control who sees your posts. Instagram and TikTok decide that. Getting your customers to spread the word works a lot better, and the data shows it.
All the numbers below come from our internal proprietary data on brands with 100k+ followers on Instagram or TikTok, over the past year.
How many of your followers actually see your posts?
Far fewer than your follower count suggests. The median post from a brand account with 100k+ followers got views equal to 11.5% of its followers on Instagram and 6.5% on TikTok.
Platform | Median views per brand post (% of followers) | Middle half of brand posts (% of followers) | Brand posts with views under 10% of followers |
|---|---|---|---|
11.5% | 5.4% to 32.0% | 46% | |
TikTok | 6.5% | 2.6% to 44.0% | 56% |
Both | 10.0% | 4.2% to 34.9% | 50% |
And that’s being generous. Views include people who don’t follow the brand and people who watched more than once, so the share of actual followers who saw a post is probably lower.
Why doesn’t a big following guarantee reach?
Because a follower count is a ceiling, not an audience. I spent six years at LinkedIn working on content creation tools, so I’ve seen up close how much the feed decides what people actually see. A follow is just one signal among many, and the platform can change how it ranks posts at any time.
So you’re basically renting your community. You can’t message all your followers, take them with you to another platform, or make sure your next post shows up in their feed. You can have a million followers and still be talking to a mostly empty room.
Do customer posts get more engagement than brand posts?
Yes, by a lot. For the same brands over the same year, posts from their customers on Kale averaged an 8.7% engagement rate on Instagram vs 3.4% for the brands’ own posts. On TikTok it was 11.0% vs 4.8%.
Platform | Brand’s own posts: avg engagement rate | Customer posts on Kale: avg engagement rate | Brand’s own posts: median engagement rate | Customer posts on Kale: median engagement rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
3.4% | 8.7% | 2.8% | 3.9% | |
TikTok | 4.8% | 11.0% | 3.6% | 7.5% |
The part I like most: this wasn’t one or two brands pulling the average up. Customer posts beat the brand’s own account on average engagement rate for every brand we looked at, on both platforms. If you compare the median post instead, customers still came out ahead almost 9 times out of 10. The gap there is smaller (1.4x on Instagram, 2.1x on TikTok) but it points the same way.
Quick note on how we measure this. A lot of industry benchmarks divide by followers. We divide by views, so don’t compare these 1:1 with theirs:
Why do customer posts outperform the brand’s own account?
From what we see across Kale every day, it comes down to three things:
People trust people. A recommendation from someone you know lands differently than a post from a logo.
Every customer reaches a different network. Each post goes to that person’s own friends and followers, places your brand account never shows up.
You stop betting everything on one account. Customer posts still go through the same algorithms. The difference is that your message doesn’t depend on how one account is doing in the feed this week.
For the typical brand in this group, customer posts added up to around 3.2 million views per platform over the year. And it’s not a one-time spike that fades after launch week. It’s an always-on channel: your customers keep posting all year, so your brand keeps showing up in feeds, and you’re not counting on every one of your own posts to win the algorithm. If you want to see what that looks like for one brand, here’s how Sweetgreen used its community for a product launch.
How should you think about your communications mix?
To be clear, I’m not saying stop posting on your own account. Each channel is good at something different:
If you need… | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
Your brand voice: how you look, sound and show up | Your own account | It’s the one place you fully control your tone, look and story, and it’s where people go to check you out. Just don’t count on the feed to show every post to every follower. |
Precise targeting or guaranteed impressions on a deadline | Paid social | You’re buying the audience and the timing |
One big burst of reach for a single moment | A large influencer | One post can reach a huge audience fast, if the fit is right |
Steady engagement and trust from real customers | Your community on Kale | Many real voices, each reaching their own network, at 2.3x to 2.6x the engagement rate of brand-owned posts in our data |
How do you get your community to spread the word?
Make the customers who already love you your channel. On Kale, your fans post about your brand on Instagram and TikTok and get cash for it, and you only pay for real posts from real customers.
If you want to go deeper, Lauren from Nuuly shared how they put community at the center of everything, and our first annual data report looks at how superfans drive share of voice.
And if you want to see what your community could do, book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.
