Pressing Pause on Instagram
When a labor of love becomes too laborious
Lately Instagram has been giving me pause, and I had to figure out why. It’s starting to feel like I’m running a gauntlet of street vendors, each one shouting at me to consume his wares. That’s the vibe I often get on Instagram — more content coming! Look at my stories! Check my feed! Subscribe to my channel! Etc. I know why that’s happening, and I’m loathe to contribute to it. I post content because I want to share it with others, but without engaging in that LOOK AT ME behavior, sharing content can feel futile.
What does it take to be successful on Instagram? I couldn’t tell you, because I don’t know; even just defining “success” probably merits a whole other essay. The most consistent advice I’ve gotten from people who have a large following and consistent engagement is that you have to engage with other profiles to grow your account. Not with the people you follow — God forbid! You have to go to specific hashtags, and like/comment/follow. Any course or workshop you take on growing your Instagram presence instructs you to engage with other people for at least an hour per day, if not more.
The trick more than one 250k+ account has relayed to me is this: engage with other profiles for an hour before you post and an hour after. I must also visit the page of everyone who liked/commented on my post, and like/comment on multiple of theirs. I don’t know how anyone has time to be an “influencer” on Instagram if it’s not your full time job. Even if it IS your full time job, I know people who hire assistants to like and comment for them!
So, in addition to the time I willingly and lovingly spend to shoot a photo, edit it, craft a caption, etc, in order for my photo to get distribution I have to spend two (or more) hours shooting the shit with randos on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I like shooting the shit with randos; in fact, some dear friends are former Internet randos. But to engage with other profiles as a distribution mechanism feels disingenuous.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m not on Instagram to become an influencer. I’m on the gram to enjoy work by other artists and to express an artistic side of myself. If I like an illustrator’s photo I don’t expect her to comment on my last three images. I appreciate her work, and I show it by liking and maybe commenting. That artist then gets reassurance that her work isn’t totally going into a void, but is, in fact, connecting with someone somewhere.
I don’t live in a vacuum. If I post something on Instagram I would like to think that people will see it, enjoy it, and express that enjoyment. I create content because I do believe that there is an audience out there, somewhere; and I want to do what I can to reach that audience. But it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good to blindly stumble through hashtags and the Discover page, trying to get people’s attention so that they’ll pay attention to me later.
Why does Instagram want us to force these connections? It boosts their numbers. Every creator that feels pressure to engage with other accounts boosts Instagram’s DAU (daily active users) count, and the number of hours those DAUs spend on the platform. That helps them sell ads, etc…
Allow me a moment of shaking my fist at the clouds: in the early days the platforms were the distribution method. If you were on blogger the platform would suggest additional blogs for you to read as you went along. On Tumblr you had a feed of the blogs you were following, as well as hashtags and the “reblog” feature that made it quite easy to share content you loved (and thus help distribute great content)
Plus, with blogging you can focus more on the content and NOT soliciting peoples’ attention. Of course, optimizing a post for SEO is annoying, but at least it’s straightforward, and I can use a plugin that guides me through the process. It doesn’t guarantee me distribution, but at least I’m not guessing.
For example, how did I learn that 30 hashtags is the limit on a post (caption and comments included)? I had to Google why my hashtags were disappearing. Some people swear by using descriptive tags (#pinkdress, #kitchen, etc), while others live and die by their theme hashtags (#thatsdarling, #ihavethisthingwithfloors, etc). Some people say ‘only use a handful’ while others say ‘use all 30’. Some put everything in their caption while others put hashtags in their comments. And of course, the ultimate sign that you’ve truly made it is when you don’t have to use hashtags AT ALL. But the point is that we don’t know. We don’t know how to best optimize these posts. We can guess but we don’t know.
So why am I complaining (because this is, ostensibly, a rant)? Because it’s adding pressure and removing pleasure. It doesn’t feel good to engage with other people just for the sake of getting more eyeballs for myself. It can feel defeating as well. A friend came up with a creative idea for a profile, then fretted about how he would get people to see it. Nobody likes to feel like their work is going into a void. Especially for those of us who have jobs we like, if the goal isn’t to be on Instagram full time, where does that leave us?
One thing is for sure, it leaves an opening. Influencers — especially fashion bloggers, have always been the power users of Instagram. Instagram, in turn, arguably made influencing the viable career path that it is, because it was the first platform to unify all the content in one place. If influencers went somewhere else, Instagram would lose one of its main engines. I, for one, would be keen on a visual platform where I wouldn’t have to work to distribute my content, and instead it could speak for itself.
