You may or may not have seen that @mosseri posted a long video this week about how Instagram works. He talks a lot about how it works in terms of what’s shown to us, but also he talks a little about it in terms of when and why our content might be shown to others.
I watched and listened and I’ve deciphered it for you.
First of all, full disclosure…
My Instagram reach is absolutely terrible. Here’s my insights graph:
I hope you’re as shocked and disappointed as I am every time I check this page, hoping for a miracle!
Sow did I make instagram hate me? Let’s start with what I think is the number one reason by a mile…
Yep.
On paper this seemed like a great idea. Instagram was giving the ‘swipe up’ feature only to accounts with over 10,000 followers at the time. So you could link your stories to pages on your website. I wanted to be able to do that.
My account at the time was at something like 6000 followers. Maybe less. I can’t remember.
So I bought followers and thought nothing of it. I don’t remember how many I bought. Maybe 8000 or something for about $30. So it took my account well over 10k and I got the swipe up. You know… the feature that doesn’t even exist any more?
Anyway. It actually didn’t take long for me to lose a good chunk of those fake followers, taking me back under 10k, taking the swipe up feature away from me… and ever since that day sometime in 2015 my account has lost as many followers as it’s gained.
What this means is that it’s almost impossible for me to achieve good engagement on my posts as a percentage. And poor engagement means Instagram won’t bother showing my posts to people because it predicts poor engagement. So the cycle continues.
I think this is the biggest reason my account doesn’t perform well for me.
If I could go back in time I’d not buy followers. It was an ego move. Ego moves never end well.
Don’t be like me, don’t give into the ridiculously cheap and easy quick win of buying followers. It’ll kill your engagement and that’ll kill your account.
I don’t know for sure this has anything to do with whether Instagram pushes my content out but I used to have a personal account and a business account. A lot of my best engagement and my most regular posts came on my personal account (anyone remember my mince pie reviews) and my business account has always been kept totally professional.
Then I also created an account for my soon-to-be-deleted podcast and I did reels on there and actually was getting some good engagement there before I abandoned that account too.
So again I can’t say for sure, but spreading myself thinly across multiple accounts and personas probably didn’t help.
I get triggered easily by what I see on Instagram so at one point in the ultra depressing years between 2020-22 I muted everyone. I didn’t want to see stories, or posts or reels or anything. So I muted everyone.
I would guess that Instagram’s ‘signals’ (as @mosseri calls them) include ‘if you don’t want to see other people’s stuff, we won’t show your stuff to other people’.
These days I’m less trigger happy with the mute button.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve also been muted by a lot of my followers. I’ve done a lot of gloating and showing off of my own over the years on there. I’d probably have muted me too. No judgement.
It was a long video, but I’d summarise it like this…
Instagram is an entertainment app. What you make and post needs to have the sole purpose of entertaining other Instagram users.
Instagram’s one main goal is to keep people entertained and keep people on the app. If what you post doesn’t do that for other people, then good luck getting it shown.
Instagram will treat your content better the more you’re engaging with the app and other people’s content.
He did NOT mention hashtags. Which I found very interesting. He also clearly didn’t talk about making it work for a business. Why? Because he wants us to advertise. This video was clearly aimed at ‘content creators’, wannabe influencers, and just your normal Instagram users who want a shot at going viral.
Basically, you have to be making content that pleases Instagram.
Listen, if this is how it works then I’m not going to thrive on Instagram.
I’m an introverted, private person. I don’t want my life on instagram. I don’t want people knowing stuff about me.
I’m not very social in real life, and I’m not very social online either. That’s just me. And my business is me.
I’ve learned to be ok with this. We don’t all have to thrive on every marketing channel available to us. I’m never going to be an influencer or a content creator or a ‘personality’.
Also, all I want from Instagram is for a bride or groom planning their wedding to somehow see my photos. I’m not sure that’ll happen if I make a reel about AI or camera settings, or mince pies!
So these days I treat Instagram simply as a portfolio churner for me personally. With such a poorly performing account it’s never going to do anything else. But my past and current clients follow me on there and a lot of them watch my stories. That means I stay front of mind with them so that when their friend is getting married they know I’m still here, they know my business is still here and they might recommend me.
So that’s it in a nutshell. Either get entertaining or just chill and accept low engagement.
I’ve said it many times before we have so many marketing channels available to us, it doesn’t matter if Instagram ‘works’ or doesn’t work. You have to put your time and energy into the stuff that works, not throw more and more of those priceless finite resources at something that, ultimately, just wants you to pay to advertise.
But if you’ve got the personality and the time and the ideas, be the entertainer that Instagram wants.
I do still wonder though, whether the reach from that approach will translate into wedding photography bookings. Let me know!
Thanks for reading!
Adam
PS – It’s relevant and I don’t have a lot to say on it, but the insta ‘verified’ blue tick… Again I don’t see how it’s a good investment at £144 a year on an app that apparently doesn’t work for the vast majority of creative businesses. It’s following in the footsteps of Twitter, and on Twitter now a purchased blue tick is seen as a bit of a badge of shame so that’s what’s put me off the Instagram one so far. But of course I expect blue-tickers to be promoted above free accounts across the whole of instagram so I look forward to hearing some success stories and then changing my tune and getting a bit of blue for myself!
