We were asked recently for tips on how to beat the Instagram algorithm and we didn’t have an answer for it. Instagram changes up things so often that it’s getting more and more difficult to keep ahead of them. Dropping likes on your favourite posts could be helping to make sure that you will see those account a bit more but we’re starting to get tired of trying to think about how to work around the algorithm and get our stuff seen.
Our response (which has come up a few times) was this – concentrate on the platform that you own.
We know that some of you are Instagram based influencers – and we’re not saying that it’s a bad idea to be building up your followers on there because Instagram is still the hottest social media network, especially for sponsored posts. However, it’s important to consider what would happen if Instagram disappeared tomorrow – if the site completely closed down, what would happen to your content and audience on there?
When talking about owning your own website, we strongly recommend paying for your own self hosted WordPress setup and making your own backups, because if your host disappeared, it wouldn’t take too long to get your website back online elsewhere, looking the same. (You could of course use Blogger or Squarespace, but it would be a little more work to get your site back online as you would need to convert the data to a different platform). We have spoken in the past about IFTTT, so it may be useful for you to set up a recipe like post new Instagram photos to WordPress or save new posts to Google Photos – these things should just run quietly keeping copies of whatever you post to your feed, which would allow you to have a back up of photos if needed.
We were listening to the Fohr U podcast episode “State of Influencer Marketing in 2018” (which came out on 1st Feb) and around the 10 minute mark was an interesting section about why Instagram has an algorithm. The average (non influencer) user probably spend less than 10 minutes a day looking at their Instagram feed. James Nord asked his audience if you are only looking for a brief time at Instagram, does it make sense for Instagram to show you what happened to be the most recent post by any of your followers? It’s an interesting point and has made us reconsider our feelings about the algorithm – although it would be nice if there was an option built in which asked “Do you want to see posts in order or if you would like to see the most relevant posts”
What do you think? Will blogs make a comeback in 2018, or will we all be looking for the next big social media platform?
