Why You Need To Stop Using The Instagram Algorithm As An Excuse
We need to talk about the algorithm. It feels like every day I see someone (usually a blogger, usually on Twitter) bemoaning what the algorithm has done to their Instagram numbers. Drops in engagement and slow follower growth are almost uniformly blamed on the algorithm, so much so that it has become an easy excuse to make: “oh my posts are doing badly because of the algorithm”. But what if the problem is actually with the post?
I’m not jumping to judge people here; I’m speaking out of my own experience when I too blamed the algorithm for my bad content. Last summer during the turmoil of moving and just not knowing what to do with summer tones on my autumnal feed, I was posting, let’s just say, not my best work. And I was getting very low engagement and growing at a snail’s pace. Of course my reaction to this was “what is Instagram doing?”, but with hindsight I know it was all my own doing.
The hard question we all have to ask ourselves is: "am I blaming the algorithm for my bad content?"
When it comes to Instagram best practices, there is no rumour mill like it: hashtags in the comments, hashtags in the caption, don’t send your post in a message, comments must be 4.5 words long, you have to post while standing on one leg and chanting if you want to get over 100 likes. Many of the rumours, when you think about it, don’t make any sense. Strip away the hysteria, and look at the facts.
Instagram is a business. It exists to make money – not to make your life difficult, not to make you jump through hoops and play along to an invisible nonsensical rulebook for the hell of it. Next time you hear an algorithm ‘hack’, ask yourself whether that helps Instagram make money – more often than not it’s a no. For example, a multi-billion dollar company isn’t going to invest time and resources into creating features it doesn’t want you to use, so don’t worry about sending that post in a message.
The mindset that I’ve developed around Instagram, and all algorithmic platforms, is to think about what the platform wants. Think about what the platform wants and work with it to help it get there, and in so doing, you will be rewarded too.
So what does Instagram want? It wants to keep users in the app for as long as possible so that it can sell advertising space on the platform for increasingly high price tags. The algorithm has therefore been designed to achieve that end, by showing users high quality, relevant content they’re going to engage with, and eek out the time they’re spending on the app.
So the question, really, is are you helping Instagram with their mission?
Below I’m going to take you through the key ways you can work with Instagram better. But first, I want to credit Sara Tasker’s The Insta Retreat course. I took the Insta Retreat last year and that got me under the hood of Instagram and undoubtedly set me on the path to where I am now. When it comes to advice about the Instagram system and succeeding with it, there is no better expert than Sara – accept no imitations on that front. The observations in this post are ones I’ve developed over the last year, but have come through a lens I wouldn’t have had without that course.
Create exceptional content
The number one reason people stay on the app and scroll just that little bit longer is because they’re being served great content. Think about when you’re scrolling the feed and then that one blurry picture of a cocktail from your sister comes up: it knocks you out of that scrolling trance and reminds you of all the other things you’re supposed to be doing. Instagram wants to keep people in that trance, so you need to be creating content that will make that happen.
Most of the time I see people complaining about their lack of engagement, the pictures aren’t very good. And I don’t mean that in a mean way; I’m sure if they looked at those images objectively they’d say the images weren’t their best work too. But it’s become so easy to blame the algorithm that we’ve stopped being critical of, and analysing, our own work.Take the above image for example. It didn’t do as well as I thought it would when I first posted it. It looks pretty good here, but seeing it as a small thumbnail in the app, I realised that there wasn’t enough tonal distinction between the pottery and the wall behind – it was kind of washed out so wasn’t attracting the attention and engagement, and therefore the algorithm didn’t show it to as many people.
The content always comes first.
Don’t be spammy
The shadowbanning saga of last year was a period of heightened algorithm dissatisfaction, and in many cases the computer got it wrong (I never said it was perfect!). But what we needed to do in that situation was not throw our hands in the air and cry “the algorithm is ruining our lives!”, but go back again to what the platform was trying to achieve. As part of it’s mission to keep people on the app by showing them quality content, it was trying to root out the spammers. Which is a good thing - the trouble was that it was a computer doing it, and computers aren’t famed for their understanding of nuance.
With everything that comes in and out of the rumour mill it’s hard to decipher what is and isn’t considered spammy behaviour. My advice is, forget the rumours and pretend for a minute that you’re a real person. By which I mean, not someone who studies Instagram strategies and are on the platform day in day out. Pretend you’re average Joe using it just as a social network (because this is the audience the platform is geared up to serve). How do they behave? Well they don’t spray around thousands of likes and comments in a day. They only follow people they like. They don’t use the same hashtags every day because they’re not posting the same types of image. Use the platform like a human and you won’t be spammy.
Be an engaging member of the community
I’m willing to bet that many of the people who complain about their post-algorithm engagement are post-and-runners: that they don’t hang around engaging with other accounts after they post, that they like rather than comment, that they wait for engagement to come to them rather than being proactive.I always advise my clients who have smaller accounts to use engagement as a way around the algorithm. Rather than waiting and relying on the algorithm to show people your post, bypass it altogether and get in front of people by commenting. Show up in their comments with something meaningful or hilarious and they’ll come over to see your account too – and Instagram being the reciprocal place it is, many of them will engage back (make sure you have captions that invite engagement to really maximise this). Real human connection trumps formulae, so if you believe that your content deserves more stop refreshing your notifications and go start a conversation.
