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Everyone and their mother is getting on the social media bandwagon recently, so I thought I'd share some broad strokes notes from what I learned about Instagram as a result of the "girl influencer" side project I mentioned in this thread (around 250k followers at this point despite slacking off quite a bit) since this place has been so helpful to me in the past.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be some expert, but I have done quite a bit of testing and have volunteered to help a few people with their IG accounts in different verticals with decent success, so take all of this with whatever size grain of salt you feel is appropriate.
1. Follower Count is Not a Vanity Metric
A few years ago, Mr. Beast made an off-hand remark in some interview about how YouTube subscriber counts were basically a vanity metric. Since then, people seem to want to parrot that line, apply it to other platforms, etc.
However, in practice, it seems that initial reach scales with follower count, and that goes for both followers and non-followers. Therefore, I would recommend assuming that you're going to spend at least several months just posting content to slowly build in the beginning.
2. You Lose Followers Daily
You can see in your analytics that there's a graph showing your new followers and unfollows each day. These unfollows can be accounts that closed, bots that got popped, people who legitimately unfollowed you or whatever else.
This is from a three-week period in January 2024 from the account of someone I volunteered to help with to illustrate what I mean.
Since the primary way that you gain followers is through posting content, I suggest posting daily (both photos and reels) to combat this effect.
3. Growing With Photos (ie: reaching non-followers)
The primary way to grow with photos is through the explore section, which is what you see when you tap the search icon. It's a grid of thumbnails of both photos and reels (IG's 9:16 video).
It stands to reason that if people choose to tap on your photo in the explore section over others that it will serve it up to more people (ie: click-thru rate matters). Along these lines, it's critical to have a good thumbnail for your photo posts. If you've ever studied thumbnail performance in other contexts, you'll know that things like contrast, brightness and so on are important, and that's a sizable topic on its own. In general, you could look to see what's common in your industry and then adjust accordingly (ie: doing what other people are doing but better).
Note the explore section reach in the screenshot above.
You can also have your photos just served to non-followers on your home feed, but if you have a good thumbnail, then the whole picture will look good enough when it's in its full size, so I wouldn't worry too much about that part.
4. Growing With Reels (ie: reaching non-followers)
The primary way to grow with reels is to have them perform well when people are swiping through reels. It seems that you can largely ignore how they perform on the explore page since you can't control the thumbnail directly, and if it does well for people who are swiping through reels, it will tend to do well on the explore section.
There's an entire skill set that surrounds 9:16 vertical video in general, and that could be its own encyclopedia. With that said, IG will look at certain metrics to determine if it should distribute your video to more people including things like average watch time. The main takeaway is probably that these people have shorter attention spans than most people can imagine.
5. Reach to Followers and Non-followers Are Determined Separately (at least in part)
For a simple example, I can post a photo that does not have a good thumbnail, and if followers engage with it a lot, then it will be served to a whole lot of followers. However, because it performs poorly on the explore section due to the bad thumbnail, non-followers will not see much of it.
This can lead to posts that appear to "do really well" in terms of number of likes while simultaneously getting a really bad reach to non-followers. Along these lines, it's probably important to know what the point is of each individual post in the sense of whether you're trying to use it to increase reach, engage with your existing followers or something else.
6. There Appears to Be a Reach Penalty for Posting Similar Content
If you make a post that's visually similar (not exactly the same) to one that you've made recently, its reach seems to get penalized, particularly for non-followers. However, if you space the same two posts a couple of weeks from each other (with plenty of other content in between), it doesn't seem to incur a penalty.
It makes sense, and I don't really know the exact mechanisms being used. All I know is that I've adjusted by not posting anything too visually similar within a couple of weeks of each other.
7. Content is Served to Followers First
If you look at your analytics for a piece of content 12 hours after it was posted, the distribution of followers to non-followers will look much different than if you wait 48-72 hours instead.
This was taken about 18 hours after the reel went live. The same reel would go on to have twice as much reach to non-followers within 48-72 hours.
8. The Analytics Graphics Glitch Out a Lot
I don't know why, but this has been a consistent issue for years. The followers/non-followers circle will incorrectly be all white or all blue at random.
I only point it out because I've seen several people confused by it because they only glance at the graph and freak out before they digest the actual numbers.
9. My InstagramMarketing Subreddit Experience
In an effort to get more experience and see what I could learn, I put some time into volunteering to help people in the "InstagramMarketing" subreddit at one point. These are the main takeaways from that experience:
0. Final Thoughts
I didn't really mention AI anywhere in any of this, and I know that's a hot topic right now, so I'll say this. I think that people will need to have their fundamentals in place first before AI will be of much use to them in any form of media. Since fewer and fewer people seem to have that as time goes on, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I also didn't mention hashtags. In the thread I linked to at the top of this post, I outlined how I found and used hashtags early on. However, I dropped them completely after maybe 6 months, and I don't think they're necessary in today's environment. Also, IG has confirmed that you can sometimes get penalized for using hashtags that have been spammed to death, so I'd suggest reading up on that before just blindly throwing hashtags on everything.
Best wishes.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be some expert, but I have done quite a bit of testing and have volunteered to help a few people with their IG accounts in different verticals with decent success, so take all of this with whatever size grain of salt you feel is appropriate.
1. Follower Count is Not a Vanity Metric
A few years ago, Mr. Beast made an off-hand remark in some interview about how YouTube subscriber counts were basically a vanity metric. Since then, people seem to want to parrot that line, apply it to other platforms, etc.
However, in practice, it seems that initial reach scales with follower count, and that goes for both followers and non-followers. Therefore, I would recommend assuming that you're going to spend at least several months just posting content to slowly build in the beginning.
2. You Lose Followers Daily
You can see in your analytics that there's a graph showing your new followers and unfollows each day. These unfollows can be accounts that closed, bots that got popped, people who legitimately unfollowed you or whatever else.
This is from a three-week period in January 2024 from the account of someone I volunteered to help with to illustrate what I mean.
Since the primary way that you gain followers is through posting content, I suggest posting daily (both photos and reels) to combat this effect.
3. Growing With Photos (ie: reaching non-followers)
The primary way to grow with photos is through the explore section, which is what you see when you tap the search icon. It's a grid of thumbnails of both photos and reels (IG's 9:16 video).
It stands to reason that if people choose to tap on your photo in the explore section over others that it will serve it up to more people (ie: click-thru rate matters). Along these lines, it's critical to have a good thumbnail for your photo posts. If you've ever studied thumbnail performance in other contexts, you'll know that things like contrast, brightness and so on are important, and that's a sizable topic on its own. In general, you could look to see what's common in your industry and then adjust accordingly (ie: doing what other people are doing but better).
Note the explore section reach in the screenshot above.
You can also have your photos just served to non-followers on your home feed, but if you have a good thumbnail, then the whole picture will look good enough when it's in its full size, so I wouldn't worry too much about that part.
4. Growing With Reels (ie: reaching non-followers)
The primary way to grow with reels is to have them perform well when people are swiping through reels. It seems that you can largely ignore how they perform on the explore page since you can't control the thumbnail directly, and if it does well for people who are swiping through reels, it will tend to do well on the explore section.
There's an entire skill set that surrounds 9:16 vertical video in general, and that could be its own encyclopedia. With that said, IG will look at certain metrics to determine if it should distribute your video to more people including things like average watch time. The main takeaway is probably that these people have shorter attention spans than most people can imagine.
5. Reach to Followers and Non-followers Are Determined Separately (at least in part)
For a simple example, I can post a photo that does not have a good thumbnail, and if followers engage with it a lot, then it will be served to a whole lot of followers. However, because it performs poorly on the explore section due to the bad thumbnail, non-followers will not see much of it.
This can lead to posts that appear to "do really well" in terms of number of likes while simultaneously getting a really bad reach to non-followers. Along these lines, it's probably important to know what the point is of each individual post in the sense of whether you're trying to use it to increase reach, engage with your existing followers or something else.
6. There Appears to Be a Reach Penalty for Posting Similar Content
If you make a post that's visually similar (not exactly the same) to one that you've made recently, its reach seems to get penalized, particularly for non-followers. However, if you space the same two posts a couple of weeks from each other (with plenty of other content in between), it doesn't seem to incur a penalty.
It makes sense, and I don't really know the exact mechanisms being used. All I know is that I've adjusted by not posting anything too visually similar within a couple of weeks of each other.
7. Content is Served to Followers First
If you look at your analytics for a piece of content 12 hours after it was posted, the distribution of followers to non-followers will look much different than if you wait 48-72 hours instead.
This was taken about 18 hours after the reel went live. The same reel would go on to have twice as much reach to non-followers within 48-72 hours.
8. The Analytics Graphics Glitch Out a Lot
I don't know why, but this has been a consistent issue for years. The followers/non-followers circle will incorrectly be all white or all blue at random.
I only point it out because I've seen several people confused by it because they only glance at the graph and freak out before they digest the actual numbers.
9. My InstagramMarketing Subreddit Experience
In an effort to get more experience and see what I could learn, I put some time into volunteering to help people in the "InstagramMarketing" subreddit at one point. These are the main takeaways from that experience:
- The qualify of their content is almost universally poor. There was little to no consideration of fundamentals in photos like lighting, contrast, brightness, etc., and the reels (9:16 vertical video) were not put together in a skillful way at all.
- Many people try to get around this by just reposting other peoples content and see some success. That's fine if you want to build an account as a hobby, but monetization becomes difficult even if you are successful in getting up a follower count, and buyer intent largely appears to go out the window.
- They appear to have little patience. The concept of needing to post consistently and build up a following over time genuinely seems foreign to them. I don't say that to be funny; they legitimately had difficulty understanding the concept.
- If you do a lot of following/unfollowing/commenting/liking and that kind of thing early on, then they'll limit your account in various ways. There were endless posts of people complaining about this.
- They seem to focus entirely too much on the "quick fix" idea of posting something that "goes viral."
0. Final Thoughts
I didn't really mention AI anywhere in any of this, and I know that's a hot topic right now, so I'll say this. I think that people will need to have their fundamentals in place first before AI will be of much use to them in any form of media. Since fewer and fewer people seem to have that as time goes on, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I also didn't mention hashtags. In the thread I linked to at the top of this post, I outlined how I found and used hashtags early on. However, I dropped them completely after maybe 6 months, and I don't think they're necessary in today's environment. Also, IG has confirmed that you can sometimes get penalized for using hashtags that have been spammed to death, so I'd suggest reading up on that before just blindly throwing hashtags on everything.
Best wishes.
