A small update:
I was able to solve this issue by implementing a custom button on the profile pages, using this https://github.com/r-a-y/buddypress-followers/wiki/Add-a-follow-button-on-a-regular-WP-page (I changed get_the_author_meta to bp_displayed_user_id) and although that threw a php error, I used this https://github.com/r-a-y/buddypress-followers/commit/03d0348e088454f504ea671fcb66889f62ba5915 to resolve it. All works fine now!
