Definition of "following"

Towards the following morning, the thermometer fell to 5°; and at daylight, there was not an atom of water to be seen in any direction.

1835, Sir John Ross, Sir James Clark Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-west Passage …, Volume 1, pages 284–5

And White Hart Lane was stunned when Rovers scored just five minutes after the restart in front of their away following.

2011 September 29, Jon Smith, “Tottenham 3 - 1 Shamrock Rovers”, in BBC Sport‎

Mikayla has 14.4 million followers on TikTok and it is growing every day, and she has accumulated over one billion likes on the app. She also has 2.5 million followers on Instagram. Both her followings accumulate to an impressive 16.9, almost 17 million followers.

2023 January 31, Katelyn Mensah, “Who is Mikayla Nogueira? The beauty TikToker whose face and eyelashes are all over your FYP”, in The Tab‎, archived from the original on 31 January 2023

Move Forward, which has built a strong following among young people, appeared to have outperformed expectations.

2023 May 14, Rebecca Ratcliffe, Thitipol Panyalimpanun, “Opposition parties take lead in Thai election”, in The Guardian‎

When a new user joins Weibo, he should register Weibo and get a unique ID, and then he takes some existing users as his followings and waits for others to follow him.

2014, Zhengbiao Guo, Zhitang Li, Hao Tu, Da Xie, “Weibo: An Information-Driven Online Social Network”, in Marina L.Gavrilova, C.J. Kenneth Tan, editors, Transactions on Computational Science XXII (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; 8360), Springer, part I (Neural and Social Networks), page 6

A follower can follow any other users and receive any kind of tweets from his or her followings.

2017, Konglin Zhu, Xiaoming Fu, Wenzhong Li, Sanglu Lu, Jan Nagler, “Population Growth in Online Social Networks”, in Xiaoming Fu, Jar-Der Luo, Margarete Boos, editors, Social Network Analysis: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Case Studies, CRC Press, section 3 (The Data), subsection 1 (Three Online Social Networks)

She scrolled through her [Chloe’s] page and liked a few of her pictures that were like candy to her eyes before thoroughly checking her followings. She then checked Chloe’s followers, which was well over a thousand followers.

2020, Jay Janzee, Don’t Get Too Close, Pittsburgh, Pa.: RoseDog Books, page 79