Instagram is changing awfully quickly
I freakin’ love Instagram. A few days without it would see me curled up in a ball rocking back and forth in the corner of a dark room.
It’s the most enjoyable of the big four social media platforms.
Lately though, its like a switch has been flicked. For so many years little about Instagram changed. The quality of photography went through the roof but it remained a simple app and experience.
All of a sudden engagement is down. I’m not talking about one brand or one public figure. I’m talking across Instagram as a whole. It’s down for the average person with a few hundred followers, the startup with 5000 followers and the established brands with six figure followings.
I’ve had colleagues in the digital world speculate that Instagram might be curating our everyday feeds and hiding some posts, ala Facebook.
I’ll speculate that its for any of these reasons. In reality, its probably a combination of all five:
- We’re all following more accounts — Instagram wants us to follow more accounts and have built out good features to explore and discover new talent. Those extra fifteen accounts you followed the other night when you were bored just added an extra fifty photos to you daily feed.
- You’ve seen it, even if you haven’t— There are more accounts, each posting more often and many reposting the same photos from the same account. Even if your content is fresh, its probably not original. How can it be with so much content out there? If you’re a brand, you’re posting more which makes it harder to keep it fresh. Everything is the same and gets old quickly.
- It’s too polished — The thirty best photographs that you saw today were all on Instagram, not the news, not in a magazine and not on a website. It’s intimidating to post your mundane photo in amongst the pixel perfect lives of those that you follow.
- Your friends are posting less — Like Facebook did, Instagram is fast becoming all about brands. I worry that with our friends posting less, we’re getting over the platform. It’s losing its soul.
- Snapchat — That’s where your friends are posting (in most key demographics).
Instagram usage metrics look incredible now, but I can see it losing its way very quickly.
Observations on what works
As we stand, it’s still an unbelievable platform and it still works for brands and personalities.
Across the five brand accounts and my own personal account, I’ve made a few observations about what generates growth:
- A distinct, consistent style — Your photos should be their own brand. High growth accounts use the same key design elements in every post. Every post has remarkably similar colours, angles or composition. You see a photo and know what account its from just by looking at it.
- Sex appeal — are you surprised? The single most powerful path to growth on Instagram is an account with sex appeal. Girls follow sexy women. Guys follow sexy women. Sexy women rule Instagram.
- Aspiration — Content that teases some sort of aspirational way of life cuts through. Health, style, exploration, products. Hundreds of trainers have built huge careers off photos of yoga every morning and Kale in the evening.
- Frequency — Post often, and post consistently. If you want crazy growth from day 1, post at least ten times a day. It seems ridiculous, but the difference in followers posting twice a day in your first month compared to ten times a day is massive.
- Personality — Not all accounts need a personality shining through in their captions, but a strong personality can aid growth. Consistently making interesting captions to your posts can pay off. Long form actually seems to work better than short and sweet captions.
- Give back — call out others. Comment on something that impresses and inspires you. It’s a community after all, not just an ego booster.
— —
Other random observations:
- Video gets less engagement than you’d think, but I think they’re spending most of their energy on working it out right now
- I don’t think ads are hurting engagement, but most Instagram ads suck.
- We’re already close to the maximum level of advertising that users will deem acceptable.
- Instagram ad pricing for post engagement is cheap, but CPC is closer to par with Facebook.
Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself an Instagram expert. I think about strategy but my personal account is the only one that I manage. I’m probably not even the best at Instagram in my company. These are just my observations over the past few months.