These days, it seems pretty much impossible to run a successful business without using social media as the main marketing tool to grow your audience and increase sales. And when every platform pushes their most successful content to your feed on a daily basis, it’s easy to compare your account to the top tier of viral content, when really the majority of users are not experiencing those levels of success.
And while TikTok has exploded recently and Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. are still giants in the tech industry, Instagram seems to be the Holy Grail for many business owners and bloggers in particular, yet in my opinion (and many others), the hardest to grow on. I constantly see bloggers and business owners complaining about the lack of reach they have on the platform due to the algorithm suppressing their content. I also see tons of users posting photos of their account being blocked from an activity for days because they were incorrectly flagged as a bot for taking too many actions in a certain period of time.
Now don’t get me wrong, I feel for Instagram and understand they have had a tough road to navigate in keeping their real users happy and also trying to weed out the spam, bots and fake accounts littering their platform. And with roughly one billion monthly active users, they have a lot of accounts and content to manage.
Back in the good old days users could pretty much do whatever they wanted on the platform as far as no limits to how many accounts they followed in an hour, likes, comments, etc. It was super easy to get your account to explode playing the follow/follow back game, it was easy to buy followers, likes, etc. (even the biggest celebrities like Kim Kardashian bought followers) and the chronological feed allowed your content to get seen by more users instead of the algorithm picking and choosing which content you’ll see.
In my opinion, and based on the countless complaints and eye rolls and I’ve seen from users, they aren’t doing a good job of managing users’ very valid frustrations. For example, many times my content gets pushed out to less than 10% of my audience! Read that again. A whopping 90% of my followers don’t even see my content!! And this is not a rarity, this is how it is on a regular basis. It’s an exception when my content actually gets pushed out to more people. And this is not a content issue. I know I am creating the type of content my followers want to see. And they do follow me for a reason right? If they didn’t want to see my content, they wouldn’t follow me.
Instead what Instagram does is cater to their successful accounts. The algorithm monitors how much total engagement your content gets within the first few minutes, and then overall, the first 30-60 minutes, of posting. So if you have a highly engaged audience that is constantly fed your content and they tend to like, comment, view or share your content, it will continue to get pushed out to them and the algorithm will prioritize it in their feed, thus perpetuating the success of your page.
Accounts that have had low engagement will continue to get pushed out to small numbers accounts, therefore never having the opportunity for high levels of engagement because hardly anyone sees it, and the cycle continues. Successful accounts continue to be successful because the algorithm creates success for them, and it continues to rob unsuccessful accounts of breaking through by not allowing them to have any reach. I have far fewer followers on TikTok than Instagram, yet my videos often get more views on TikTok! How annoying is that?
Plus let’s face it, some users spend more time on the app than others. An account that has a lot of Generation Z followers is likely to get pushed out to a ton of users because they are constantly on social media and are very engaged. Whereas some older users check the app once a day. They might not even see your content until a day or two later, which will still get your post the view but not in the critical period of the first minutes and hour of posting.
My frustrations with this app are through the roof. Yet I don’t give up on it entirely because it should, theoretically at least, be a key contributor to my success (maybe someday, anyway!). Is Instagram also slowing your business growth? With pretty much zero customer service unless you’ve paid for an ad, there’s not much you can do about it. The reason I bring it up is to think about ROI. For me, I spend a ton of my time creating content for Instagram only to have most of it flop and not bring me any real return. And I’m not exactly thrilled for them to be able to control the reach of my content like that.
The thing is, with any social media platform, they (obviously) have control over your content. And if they want to suppress it, delete it, or even worse, deactivate your account (another dumb issue I’ve also seen with a lot of small business owners) they can decide to do that. Whereas your website is something you actually own and get to control. You are allowed to actually say terms like “Selling fast!” because it’s true, whereas Instagram will ban your content if you say that. Plus if you have good SEO, your content is getting pushed out into the universe through Google and you have the chance to reach countless people by delivering quality content that people are looking for.
So take a look at how much time you’re investing in Instagram and the ROI you’re getting. You might want to delegate your time and resources differently and focus on your website and other platforms that actually give your content a fighting chance and give Instagram the amount of time that’s proportionate to the ROI. And hopefully someday Instagram will wake up and see how frustrated many of their “valued” customers are and make some changes to their frustrating algorithm.
