The short version
If you have 5,000 Instagram followers, a typical post is seen by roughly 150 to 200 of them. On Facebook it is closer to 110. You did not lose your fans. You are renting access to them, and the rent keeps going up.
Every band we sit down with says a version of the same thing: we post and nothing happens. It is not paranoia and it is not your content. The platforms changed the deal, slowly enough that nobody noticed the day it happened.
What the numbers actually are
Instagram's average reach fell about 12 percent year on year, and a typical post now lands in front of roughly 3 to 4 percent of an account's followers. Smaller accounts do better: under about 10,000 followers you may still see 8 to 15 percent.
of your followers see a typical Instagram post
Smaller accounts under ~10K followers still see roughly 8-15%
average Facebook organic reach in 2025
Down from 5.2% in 2020
Run that against a real list. Five thousand followers, a show on Friday, one post about it. Somewhere between 150 and 200 people see it on Instagram. Not 150 people who come. 150 people who scroll past it.
Why this is a landlord problem, not a content problem
The follower count you spent five years building is not an asset you own. It is access you are permitted, on terms that change without notice and have changed repeatedly. You cannot export it. If the algorithm reprioritises tomorrow, there is nobody to call.
That is the definition of renting. You pay in content instead of cash, and the landlord is free to raise the rent by showing your posts to fewer people and offering to sell you the difference.
What a text message does instead
SMS open rates get quoted at 98 percent, and you should be suspicious of that number, so here is the honest version. That figure measures a message expanding on a lock screen, not a human reading and absorbing it. It is not directly comparable to an email open.
A text about Friday's show lands on a lock screen on Thursday night, in the hand of somebody who gave you their number because they liked you enough to do it. No algorithm decides whether it arrives.
The part that matters for a working band
You do not need a bigger following. You need a list you own, tagged by the town people live in, so that when you are back through that circuit you are texting people who already raised their hand, in the town they actually live in.
Two hundred names you own beats five thousand followers you rent, and it is not close.
Sources
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We build the site, wire the fan capture, and keep it running. And we come to the shows, which is the part a platform cannot do.
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