Imagine you're working on a social media platform where users can follow each other. How would you design SQL queries to retrieve the list of followers for a given user and to find mutual followers between two users?

When designing SQL queries for a social media platform where users can follow each other, you would typically use JOIN operations to retrieve follower lists and find mutual followers. For retrieving the list of followers for a given user, you can use an INNER JOIN with a WHERE clause to match follower IDs with the user's ID. This ensures that only followers related to the specific user are returned. To find mutual followers between two users, you would also use INNER JOIN, but this time between the follower lists of both users, ensuring that only followers common to both users are included. Using JOIN operations with appropriate clauses helps efficiently fetch follower information and identify mutual connections on the platform.