Instagram and Algorithms - What's the New Goal?

Those Damn Algorithms

Alright if you’re in any circle revolving around media, advertising, marketing, “influencer culture” (I hate that I couldn’t think of any other word for that), or small business - you hear it a lot: INSTAGRAM SUCKS.

It used to be that posting at specific times of high traffic paired with consistently captivating photos was a sure way to see exponential growth on Instagram. That meant different things for different people - but in general it meant one thing: success. Photographers grew careers off of it, start-ups rocketed, and honestly our whole culture was suddenly shaped by it.

Now the climate looks a lot different and no matter what you post, tag, etc. there’s a limited chance it reaches all of your audience. In fact, I’m noticing my Instagram stories outperform my posts as far as reach! And, maybe it’s the algorithm or maybe it’s just we’re tired of what Instagram has become - everyone’ experiencing a large drop in engagement on their posts.

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When I took over Woodsman Trading Co.’s social media I ran into this problem. I began posting high quality captivating images from the outdoors, but no matter when I posted or what I tagged the engagement was creeping back. It was not the ideal analytics you want to show your client after being brought on board!

So one thing I had to analyze was why are we steadily declining on engagement? Then I had the realization: why does it even matter?

Woodsman’s Instagram at the time was a little above 1,400 followers. Really what the business needed was growth of audience, not engagement. And not having a budget to work with for paid ads, I knew I had to get creative. I was thinking about engagement, we gauge that as a score for how successful one does social media - but how many amazing photographers are out there that’ll never get over 1,000 followers? This whole scoring system is wildly inaccurate. What we need to do is re-examine what the goals are and why they matter! Especially for businesses.

So I decided to take a new approach. If Instagram’s algorithm was only showing my posts to a certain percentage of my audience, let’s say 15% - what if I quadrupled my posts per day? I’ve begun doing that with Woodsman’s Instagram. Our engagement will sometimes double, but mostly it’s gone down per post. Red alert right? But why? That was my question. If Instagram is already making the game hard to win at, why play by those rules?

Guess what posting four times a day did? It quadrupled our impressions and reach! Go figure. That math seems to add up! Which as a new business, getting in front of more people was the goal I had placed on our social media. Would people get annoyed at it? It depends - but I suspect that not the same 15% (hypothetically) of our audience is seeing all four posts I make each day. What we have seen is a huge spurt in follower growth as well. We steadily rose about 200 followers over the summer, but in the last month or two alone have been growing by 300 followers.

I’ve had this debate with several people in the marketing field and my strategy is far from gospel. However, I think the larger point I’m trying to make is 1) Stop playing by Instagram’s rules. Having a high engagement was maybe cool if you’re trying to get free skin care to brag about to your friends in 2017, but times have changed 2) Figure out what goals you have for your feeds! There’s not one set of rules. For Woodsman I wanted to focus on reach and impressions because we need the business to get in front of more people! For others, maybe stop focusing on posts as much as building out super captivating Instagram stories?

I’d love to hear what you all think about this! I hope the conversation starts to shift and we can reign in control over this social media platform once again. Be sure to follow me on Instagram, I’d love to geek out over marketing strategies with you! And if you’re a business needing help with your own social media or marketing plan, be sure to reach out! I’d love to chat with you and help solve those problems of reaching your audience!