Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / When Marketing Automation Ignores Customer Social Media Unfollows
Transcript
- Lucas: So you follow a brand on Instagram — maybe it's a sneaker company you liked in college. One day their posts start feeling like noise — too many product drops, too many influencer collabs — so you quietly unfollow. Now here's the question: does that brand's marketing automation know you did that? Luna: I'd bet most of the time the answer is no. At least, not directly. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the blind spot I want to talk about today. Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and Marketo are incredibly good at tracking what you do inside their ecosystem — email opens, form submissions, website visits. But social media unfollows? That's almost never a native trigger. Luna: Which seems like a huge miss, because an unfollow is a pretty clear signal. It's the customer saying 'I'm losing interest,' or at least 'stop showing up in my feed.' Lucas: Right. And the consequences are real. A brand might keep sending re-engagement emails to someone who's already mentally checked out. Or worse, they keep spending on social ads targeting that person because their CRM still tags them as 'engaged follower.' A midsize DTC brand I looked into — Rothy's, the sustainable sneaker company — they actually built a custom integration to surface unfollow events. Luna: How did they do it without native support? Lucas: They used a middleware layer — something like Zapier or Make — to pull follower count changes from their Instagram and TikTok APIs every hour. When the follower count dropped, they cross-referenced with their CRM to identify which accounts unfollowed. Then they'd tag those people in HubSpot as 'socially disengaged.' From there, they'd trigger a specific re-engagement sequence, but with a twist: the email wasn't a generic 'we miss you' — it was a survey asking why they left. Luna: That's clever. Instead of assuming, they ask. What did they learn? Lucas: The biggest takeaway was that about 40 percent of unfollows were what they call 'soft unfollows' — the algorithm simply stopped showing Rothy's content, and the user didn't actively choose to leave. Those people were actually still open to emails. The other 60 percent were genuine — too many emails, irrelevant product launches, or they'd moved on from the category. By segmenting based on that feedback, they reduced their re-engagement email cost by 22 percent in Q2 this year. Luna: And that 22 percent — that's not just fewer emails sent, it's also better targeting, higher conversion on the ones they do send. Lucas: Exactly. The cost per re-engaged customer dropped because they weren't wasting energy on people who'd already decided to leave. But I think the bigger lesson is about data philosophy. Most marketing automation treats every customer event as a positive or neutral signal. An unfollow is almost never positive, so it gets ignored. But ignoring it means you're flying blind on one of the clearest intent signals available. Luna: Let's talk about the privacy side. If a brand starts tracking unfollows, is that crossing a line? Lucas: It's a fair concern. Public follower counts are public data — anyone can see them. But tying an unfollow event to a specific email address or CRM record gets into gray territory. Rothy's approach was opt-in: they only tracked unfollows from accounts that had previously given their email. If someone followed anonymously, they couldn't be matched. They also didn't store the unfollow event permanently — just used it to update a tag, then discarded the raw data. Luna: So it's a consent-first model. That feels sustainable. And it also avoids the creep factor of 'we know you unfollowed us.' Lucas: Exactly. You don't want to send an email saying 'we noticed you left Instagram' — that's weird. The email should just be a natural check-in: 'Hey, we haven't heard from you in a while, what's up?' And if someone does say 'I'm not interested,' you respect that and remove them from your active list. That's just good email hygiene. Luna: You know, this episode is a great example of why these conversations matter. If these marketing automation insights have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, that's exactly the kind of thing that keeps this show going. Lucas: Yeah, listener support is what makes Fexingo possible — no ads, no sponsors, just two people digging into marketing automation. A couple of dollars a month makes a real difference. If that's something you believe in, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Even a small contribution helps keep the conversation going. And now back to the unfollow problem — because there's another layer I want to explore. Lucas: Which is? Luna: The difference between platforms. Instagram unfollows are fairly straightforward — you're either following or you're not. But LinkedIn? Or TikTok? Those platforms have mute and snooze options that aren't the same as unfollowing. Lucas: Great point. LinkedIn has 'unfollow' vs. 'disconnect' vs. 'mute.' TikTok has 'not interested' which trains the algorithm to hide your content without an unfollow. So an unfollow trigger alone is incomplete — you need context. Rothy's actually built a second tier: they tracked mentions and engagement rates as proxy signals. If someone's engagement fell off a cliff but they were still following, that was treated similarly to an unfollow. Luna: So they're essentially modeling disengagement, not just binary unfollow. Lucas: Exactly. And that's where marketing automation needs to go. Most platforms can't do that natively yet — but some of the newer CDPs, especially those with AI layers, are starting to incorporate social engagement scores. I think within the next twelve to eighteen months, we'll see HubSpot or Marketo acquire a social listening tool or build it in. The demand is there. Luna: What about smaller brands that can't afford a custom integration like Rothy's? Are there off-the-shelf solutions? Lucas: There are a few. Sprout Social and Hootsuite both have APIs that can push follower change events into a CRM via Zapier. It's not as seamless as a native trigger, but it works. The key is to define what action you want to take when someone unfollows. Do you immediately suppress them from email? Or do you wait? Rothy's waited 48 hours to avoid reacting to bot or ghost unfollows. Luna: Good point — not every unfollow is permanent. Sometimes it's a cleanup, sometimes it's a misclick. Patience matters. Lucas: Exactly. And that brings us back to the central idea: marketing automation should treat social disengagement as a nuanced signal, not a simple negative. If you can capture it with care and privacy, it's one of the most honest pieces of feedback a customer can give you. Luna: Well said. And I think that's the takeaway — listen to the silent signals, not just the loud ones. Lucas: Next time, we'll look at what happens when customers don't just unfollow but actively block your brand — and whether automation can ever recover from that.