I used to ask friends what they thought about my Instagram posts, and they always said everything looked great. The real surprise came when I stopped listening only to positive feedback and started paying attention to the followers who quietly disappeared. That shift completely changed how I looked at growing an account.
Instead of assuming every unfollow was a failure, I treated it like useful information. I reviewed the weeks when follower numbers dropped and noticed that the biggest losses often happened after I experimented with topics that didn't fit my usual content. While researching the issue, I found https://recently-followed.com/why-people-unfollow-on-instagram/, which explained that many users regularly refresh their feeds as their interests change, making unfollows more predictable than I had imagined.
Since then, I no longer create posts just because they seem popular. I think about whether each one fits the audience that chose to follow me in the first place. That small change made my account feel more consistent, and over time I noticed that the followers who stayed became much more engaged with everything I shared.