Is your Instagram engagement down? You’re not alone
Every time I check one of my Instagram accounts , I experience a momentary feeling of disappointment upon seeing the number of likes and comments on my posts.
My dog, who has 16.7k followers, used to get upwards of 500 likes and is now lucky to get over 200. My boba blog page, which has 14.1k followers, used to regularly hit over a thousand likes and once in awhile, it’d hit as high as 8,000 likes. Now I get around 150 on each photo. On a hotel’s account, I’d post beautiful photos of the surrounding city and regularly reach 100 likes. Now — a few dozen. Even my personal account has dropped from around 200 likes a post to a little over 100 a post.
Ever since mid-2021, I’ve been experiencing a drastic decline on Instagram. Less likes, comments, DMs, and saves. My reach has gone down tremendously and my follower counts have stayed stagnant across all six of my accounts (3 business, 2 influencer, and 1 personal). Initially, I thought the problem was me. Maybe the quality went down? So, I switched to photos taken with a professional camera instead of my phone. Maybe Instagram had flagged me as spam? So, I had my six accounts stop interacting with each other and stopped commenting on dozens of photos a day. None of it worked.
If you’re running social media accounts, whether it’s for a company, as an influencer, or just for fun, chances are you’ve noticed the rollercoaster that is Instagram. You’ve probably even questioned yourself the same way I have, wondering what you’ve done wrong. And the answer is, you haven’t done anything wrong.
Each time Instagram launches a new feature, whether it’s carousel images, videos, panned out photos, stories, or Reels, Instagram has heavily pushed the user into engaging with the new feature. Typically, a user will see notifications in the form of speech bubbles and glowing buttons, encouraging you to try it out. And if you do it, Instagram rewards you by pushing your content up to the top of the timeline or by featuring it on users’ explore pages.
In August 2020, Instagram introduced Reels to compete with TikTok. Like past features, they heavily pushed you to create Reels. Even now, they’re still pushing Reels and in November 2021, they introduced a Reel incentive program, offering to pay influencers for their Reels. (Both my boba and dog accounts have been invited to participate in this program.) This feels like a desperate attempt to keep pushing an unsuccessful program by rewarding creative users. Additionally, Instagram appears to be struggling to differentiate its Reels from TikToks as shown by how Instagram encourages users to create Reels specifically for Instagram, ones without the TikTok watermark (screenshot above of these recommendations).
To get on board the hype and hopefully get rewarded, I started making Reels and I made a lot of them for my business and influencer accounts.
In the beginning, it paid off. My Reels consistently reached over 10k views on my boba page and were DMd and saved by over 100 users. It felt like I had won Instagram’s game and was being rewarded for playing along. But then it stopped. My reels have, if anything, gotten better. More video clips, different angles, close up shots of the drinks, trendier song choices, etc. Yet nowadays my reels only gain 2–3k views.
For anyone on Instagram, you know that Instagram is still heavily pushing Reels. One look at your explore page shows how much space Instagram is dedicating to Reels (screenshot above) and many top influencers post almost exclusively Reels (Ex: Abbie Herbert, Alessandro, and Marta Sierra). While my Reels currently do reach a higher number of accounts than my photos do, the reach is nothing like it was when Reels first came out or even like how my photos performed before 2021. My guess is that Instagram has stopped promoting my Reels by featuring them on users’ explore pages or pushing them to the top of my followers’ timelines.
The truth is no one knows how to engage with Instagram in a way that guarantees long term success, other than by continuously purchasing promotions for your posts. There are obvious tips and tricks that help — share beautiful photos, engage with other accounts, post to your story to provide more frequent updates, be famous, etc.
But the problem with Instagram is that it has strayed so far away from its original intent and purpose — providing a space where you can instantly share photos with friends and family — that it’s hard to grow organically the way one did before Instagram developed into the ad hungry beast that is is today. Originally, Instagram featured a chronological timeline, meaning if you scrolled down long enough, you’d see every single post from every single person you follow since the last time you logged on. During that time, your explore page was also more tailored to you and your interests. It was most likely made up of posts related to others you’ve liked and things your friends may have liked or commented on.
For the past few years, Instagram has increasingly craved ad money and has heavily favored ads. For example, every 3–5 posts on your timeline is an ad. Check your timeline and go count. I’ll wait.
Instagram desperately chases relevance and adds features unique to other, higher performing social media platforms — stories to mimic Snapchat, Reels to copy TikTok, randomly chosen photos on the timeline similar to how TikTok suggests content for you — in an attempt to stay trendy. It’s trying to be so many things that it no longer provides the user with what the user wants — to see posts from the accounts they follow. Instead it guesses at what you want to see and severely limits what you do see. Because of this, I spend less time on my timelines. I don’t want to be bombarded with ads and photos from accounts I do not follow.
If you click who you’re following, you’ll see an option to view the top 50 accounts “most shown in feed” (screenshot above). Chances are they’re mostly brands and celebrities, and if there are personal connections, they may not be the accounts of the people you interact with the most. For example, my best friend and I constantly DM each other posts. We tag each other in photos and we often tag each other in the comments of other posts. In theory, if Instagram’s algorithm was based off of showing you what you wanted to see, it would realize whom I’m closest to and what I want to see, thus showing me this friend. Instead, we rarely see what each other posts and neither of us is in the other’s “most shown in feed” list. To see each other’s posts, we literally have to type each other’s usernames into the search bar and visit each other’s pages.
Similarly, if you are a business or an influencer, there is a good chance that your followers, the people most interested in your page, may not even be seeing your posts. Through an unknown algorithm, Instagram may or may not choose to put your posts on your followers’ timelines. Therefore, your posts are most likely reaching less people than when Instagram had a chronological timeline.
This is not to say that everyone’s engagement has gone down. There are plenty of accounts, whether it’s business, influencer or personal, who have experienced exponential growth. One food blogger I know of consistently received less followers and likes than my food account did for about 3 years. Her content has remained the same level of quality yet her following has skyrocketed past mine and she now receives 10x more likes than my food account does. It is still possible to grow organically; it just feels a bit more random.
While it sounds superstitious, it almost feels like Instagram chooses which accounts to hype up and then just as randomly, chooses which ones to no longer feature. The reason why I say this is because the growth I experienced on my food account was exponential. My food account experienced exponential growth from about 6k to 14k followers, averaging about 100 followers a day, when previously we would receive maybe 100 a week. Then we hit 14.3k and stopped; now we’re at 14.1k. Natural growth should be steadier. My dog’s account experienced more natural growth and stayed at about 100 new followers every four days until she hit 16.5k and now her account has stopped growing as well. There is no rhyme or reason for this. The accounts’ goals have stayed the same, the quality is similar if not better, and the tone of the accounts have been steady. The only reason I can think of why they used to grow and now they don’t is this: my boba account was once highly favored by Instagram and now it is not, while my dog’s account was never in favor and with the new algorithm, receives less attention. My dog’s account grew steadily because people wanted to see the content and now she no longer appears on their timelines because Instagram favors business and celebrity accounts.
