Instavanity Insanity

Back in March Instagram announced an algorithm change, and a lot of small brands, photographers and influencers absolutely bricked it. Terrified that a change in the way posts are presented to users, from a chronological order to one dictated by an algorithm to “show the moments we believe you will care about the most”, would negatively impact their visibility, panic ensued and feeds were littered with posts begging followers to “turn on notifications”.

Instagram now has a community of over 400 million users, who share more than 80 million images every day. It’s become not only incredibly popular, but incredibly influential. And it’s free. If Instagram makes changes to its free service to allow the company to monetise its product then you’d be hard pushed to take umbrage; why should individuals and brands get to use it as a free marketing tool to increase their revenues without Instagram itself being able to see any of the benefits of its enormous popularity? It takes time and money to develop, launch and maintain a service such as Instagram so the monetisation of it was inevitable, and a move towards boosted posts and paid adverts is likely to turn-off far fewer users than some sort of blanket subscription-based model. Those users who have seen their stock increase in value due to Instagram should be confident that they have been successful because they posted engaging and relevant content and that therefore they will continue to sit near the top of their followers fields as and when an algorithm change is introduced.

Unfortunately however, some of the platform’s users suffer from what we’ll term “Instavanity Insanity”, and this was highlighted by the scrabble to request followers to “turn on notifications” back in March. There is one primary thing that fuels “Instavanity Insanity”, and that is the set of figures at the top of every profile that shows not just you, but everybody else, how many followers an account has and how many accounts it follows. Vanity drives an awful lot of Instagram users to relentlessly pursue a positive ratio of followers to followings – if you’ve ever used a third party app that tracks an accounts Instagram data, you’ll have noticed how many users follow and then immediately unfollow an account a few days later, purely in the name of growing their followings. At the end of the day this game is of very little value as an account that isn’t grown organically on the virtue of the images that it posts will see very little engagement and eventually lose those followers. Getting somebody to follow an account is just the hook, but you need consistent content (both in terms of aesthetic and regularity of posting) to set that hook if you hope to reel them in and eventually convert that follower into a customer.

Accounts that post quality content – beautiful and relevant imagery that their followers enjoy – generate positive ratios and high levels of engagement. And celebrities too, regardless of what they post which is the unfortunate and rather large exception to the rule. This rule doesn’t just apply to Instagram, but to every social media platform.

“All Things Must Pass”

George Harrison

George Harrison once sang that “All Things Must Pass”, and thus it certainly looks as though the days of brands and influencers getting a free ride on the insta-bus are numbered. But it needn’t be the end of the world. Expect it, plan for it, and keep sharing the best content that you possibly can and engaging with your audience’s comments regularly.