What Loosing 1000 Followers In One Week Taught Me

Watching my follower count drop rapidly not only shocked me but it also revealed something within me, something that has been stirring for a while.

No warning. No explanation. Just absence.

Over the past week, I lost over a thousand followers on X (formerly Twitter).

Not because I changed anything. Not because I said something controversial.

But because the platform decided they were no longer real. And that my lovelies, tells you everything you need to know.

Why now? What triggered this mass clear out? Who knows, but it has happened and it has wiped thousands followers off peoples audiences and dramatically reduced engagement.

The illusion of audience

We are taught to believe that the numbers mean something. For years now we have been encouraged to put the work in to build something that could be used as a metric for success

Followers. Likes. Reach.

It's kind of like a digital currency, it suggests relevance, desirability and even success.

But what happens when a thousand of them disappear overnight?

Nothing changes.

The same people still see you

The same people still pick up the phone to book you

The same people still understand you and support you

Which means those numbers were never what we thought they were.

They were placeholders. Estimates. Noise.

The reality of building a business on platforms like X and Instagram

Social media seems like the easiest place to promote yourself, grow and audience and in many ways build extra revenue streams like Onlyfans. The truth is, social media platforms are curated spaces, constantly adjusting and changing the way that they operate.

Building an audience and a following is not easy, it takes a lot of work and the bottom line is simple... you don't own any of it, the platform does and they can take that audience away whenever they want to.

Not maliciously. Not personally. Just... whenever they decide to for whatever refinements they are making at the time.

This is why building a presence within a platform is never enough, hence why I have my own website, my newsletter and my Telegram channel plus adverts on well ranked escort sites.

Why this changed nothing (and everything)

Loosing a thousand followers didn't change my work.

It didn't change the way that I operate my business

It didn't change the relationships that I have with my clients

It didn't change the plans that I have for the business

But it did remove something unnecessary... the illusion of scale. And with that gone, what's left is far more valuable:

Clarity

Control

Intention

The right time to reset

I now realise that visibility is not the same as value. That being seen by everyone is not the goal. In order to refine my social media, there will need to be a reduction. This is exactly what is happening to platforms across Twitter/X, not just mine, but world wide.

Not a loss. A correction.

One thing that I have been reminded of is that the posts were never about being performative. It was always about building something so special that the right people would find it and resonate with it.

Closing

So I reset.

Not because I had to but because it made sense.

Because if a 1000 followers can disappear without consequence then they were never the audience I was building in the first place.

My focus now is simple, post content that resonates with my current client base and hopefully attracts new clients.

Also as I begin to celebrate my 20th year in the business, it's time to share some of the wisdom that I have picked up along the way with #stillsashapaige. Going forward I will be using X/Twitter to promote my website and drive traffic to my Onlyfans but in a compliant way. I will be using Instagram to share something new, videos filmed at my dressing table, sharing the wisdom that I have picked up over the past 20 years.

I am looking forward to using social media differently, being informative, not performative.