As much as we shouldn’t care about how many ‘likes’ our photos get on Instagram, it’s still an important metric for businesses and influencers. Your competitor could be getting 3x the amount of likes as you, which may or may not correlate with the number of their followers and could have you scratching your head!
Instagram has been busy. In the last few weeks they have made a huge amount of algorithm changes and built some incredibly powerful artificial intelligence tools. As a result of this, there have been some fundamental shifts in the way people view and engage with content.
Automation used to be a huge part of Instagram. I’m not just talking about schedulers and analytics tools, I’m talking about programs built to automate likes, follows, comments, story views etc. These tools were built to mimic the types of organic behaviour that help grow accounts, as it can be quite time consuming to do this manually. There were a few extremely powerful tools such as FollowLiker or Jarvee that ran 24/7 on Remote Desktops and used an embedded browser and proxies to perform actions on behalf of an account. The way they could program actions down to the minutes and target audiences was quite impressive and certainly saved marketers hours of manual work. But those are being limited, accounts are being action blocked, frozen, or even deleted. I do believe the days of Instagram automation are over.
Instagram announced at the beginning of the year that they were going to remove inauthentic likes and follows which has resulted in the complete shut down of companies that made millions from selling their network of accounts to those desperate for Instagram fame. Commonly known as ‘bots’, they would use tools like the one above to automatically push hundreds of followers or likes to your accounts.
As a result of all of these changes and while Instagram deletes millions of spam accounts, the algorithms are evolving and as always, not all of your followers will see your content. I previously wrote about Instagram hiding likes, which demonstrates they are pushing the platform towards being a healthier mental space for users. Instagram wants more sense of community, more genuine engagement and less spam.
Anyone who isn’t using the platform regularly in this new, honest and positive way, is also going to see a sharp nosedive in their engagement. Users who are just casual Instagram users will probably see their contents visibility going down too. Basically, you can’t just post a couple of pictures and hashtags anymore and expect good engagement. I genuinely think brands whose businesses value social media marketing will have to hire Instagram community managers.
So how do you ride this wave and post the right content to get your engagement back up? Well, that would be spilling all my secrets! 😉
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