I see a lot of posts from people who are puzzled and even upset about the reach and engagement that they are getting on instagram these days. I still Love Instagram despite the changes over the last few years. In Fact I might even be starting to love it More.
I can understand some of the frustration especially where your business and your livlihood depends upon it, or If you measure your enjoyment on Instagram just by pure numbers.
Many of us are creators in the simplest of definitions. We take pictures and sometimes we add a few words. Then we hope some people will look at the picture and like and maybe say something nice about it. As photographers that is our Instagram Ecosystem
Instagram tell us that the algorithm is set up to show you pictures to people most likely to engage with you so in my mind that equals the people who are in that same habitat as me.
But my stats didn’t agree with that. Or so I thought. insta would show a pic to 200 people ( not enough but hey ) and only 40-60 would engage or like ) 99% of my reach was to my followers. But only 1 in 4 liked a post. That didn’t make sense to me. So I started to look more closely who was following me. I mean really look.
Over the years I thought I had done a pretty good job of removing spam and bot type stuff. I assumed that everyone else was fully engaged in the platform. How Naive. When I started looking at every individual follower this is what I discovered.
Many hadn't posted for 3 or 4 years. I found people with more recent posts but then saw that they only post 2 or 3 times a year. There were people who were following 5 6 7 thousand accounts. Loads of private accounts where I had no idea what was going on and had no intention of following just to find out. I decided though they were unlikely to be very engaged.There were accounts where the content didn’t align with mine. or more to the point was wildly different I could not understand why they were following me. Accounts Full Of Party Shots or Selfies. There were Accounts of Wannabee influencers and people who appearred to have zero interest in either photography or my subject matter. overseas followers with no English language content or demonstrating any interest in the uk or my subject matter.
With some exceptions I removed them all. Some were easy decisions where they fell into several of the categories above. Some not so easy where they only fell into one. I have some followers who would by this criteria be removed. For whatever reason they and I see each others posts and respond as and when appropriate. Some of them are following multiple thousands of people proving that Instagram does know who and what you are interested in and puts you in front of those people. But that has to be at the expense of other followers; we can't all be at the front. And I would not dream of Removing these people. Some of them are among the strongest connections I have on Instagram.
With the vast majority that I removed I could not recall any level of engagement with those people. Ever. When I was finished the result was that I cut my followers by over half. I’m still finding a few stragglers but happy to pick off one or two at a time now if needed. The big cull seemed to unnerve Instagram and for a few days things went quiet but it soon bounced back.
So what's happening now. Well more of my kind of people are seeing my pics and they are engaging. Which reminds me they are there and active and I can engage back.
My engagement levels for the same amount of time spent is, currently, so much better. My account was never huge and it is now sub 1000 followers. When I post now I see steady growth in the like count. No whizz bang for the first two hours and then nothing. It seems to grow over 1-3 days and then keep tipping in as people come back onto the platform again. They like something and so Insta seems to go Oh you like that do you. Well here’s another one you haven't seen. I’m posting about every 3 days or so at the minute and I think this helps. I think some people stop looking if they see too much of you.
It’s taken a couple of months to get to this stage. I will not bore you with Stats because well, stats are boring. What's not Boring is that I.m enjoying Insta the way I used too. Partly because I think it's a place now where the numbers mean less ( not that they really ever shold’ve) and I have discovered how to properly reconnect. In simple terms when my pictures are shown to the right people (because I’ve told Instagram who the right people are ) Then I get Engagement. Not sure what the next stage is or even if there is one but I’ll let you know.
Peace out