A shoutout is one account promoting another to its own audience: a story mention, a post, a pinned comment. It borrows someone else's reach for a moment, and it's paid for in money, in a return shout, or in friendship.
A spike, not a slope: a burst of profile visits while the mention is live, converting at whatever rate the two audiences overlap.
Overlap is the whole product. A shoutout from an adjacent account in your niche converts; a shoutout from a random big account sends tourists who look and leave. Evaluate the audience fit before the price.
The market is informal: DMs, no escrow, screenshots as receipts. Protections that work: pay through methods with recourse, check the promoter's real engagement (comments, story views) rather than their count, and start small.
Ask for the mention at a specific time you can watch, and measure: visits and follows in the hour after tell you the true price per follower.
Shout trading at scale becomes the exchange scene: communities where accounts pair up on schedule. That whole world, its vocabulary and its per-platform rules live in follow-for-follow and the /f4f alphabet.
No standard exists: prices track audience size, engagement and niche. Judge any quote against the follows it plausibly delivers, and test small before spending real money.
With audience overlap, yes: they're among the highest-converting discovery events. Without overlap, you're buying a spike of tourists.
Give the promoter a reason and a hook, not a script: mentions read best in the promoter's own voice. One clear line about why their audience would care beats a paragraph of praise.
Related terms
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.