ICYMI, this blog post is a continuation of The Social Media Struggle for Small Businesses. These articles are part of a five part blog series we’re working on this month. Last time, we introduced the idea that the same social platforms that were once crucial to small businesses are now working against those same businesses due to their algorithms and money-hungry nature. Make sure to follow along to get the most out of this series.
This week, we’re digging deeper into these algorithmic changes and influences, using our own Instagram Business Account Analytics as a case study for small businesses that are experiencing an all-time low percentage of reach and engagement.
As we mentioned in the previous article, Instagram isn’t just a social platform made for fun; it’s a business. This means that they need to create revenue while attempting to maintain a focus on the social media aspect of their platform. Many users have begun to criticize Instagram, and their parent company Meta, for prioritizing money-making features over purely social ones.
While Meta is a business that needs to turn a profit, we think they’re going about it in all the wrong ways.
Our Instagram page @recreative.co has 650 followers, but we rarely get more than 20 likes on any given post. Whether it’s a reel, a single image, or a carousel of photos, our engagement rate is sitting below the 5% mark.
Meta would love it if we looked at this data and determined that people aren’t engaging with our posts because we’re putting out the wrong type of content. This would lead us to keep trying new things, putting time and effort into any and all new features, and keeping up with trends. We’d start working harder to make sure our content was what our followers wanted to see and engage with.
However, engagement is only part of the story. The first step to getting someone to engage with your post is making sure they see it. For us, the Instagram algorithms are making this simple step a lot more difficult. Our posts are only being seen by a small percentage of our followers.
Only about a third of our followers have seen one of our posts on their feed in the past month. While expanding reach to possible new followers is great, we don’t want to leave our existing followers behind. Of the accounts that our posts have reached, only 7.1% followed us already.
This means that even though Instagram is showing our posts to people, 92.9% of them might be completely uninteresting in our content. Meanwhile, the accounts who actively decided to follow us and opt-in to seeing our content, aren’t regularly being shown our posts.
As we’ve discussed in other blogs like What Do Impressions Really Mean? simply seeing your content while they’re scrolling through their feed isn’t always enough. If you’re noticing that a ton of accounts were reached by your post, but only a small percentage engaged with it, it’s likely that Instagram is showing your content to the wrong accounts.
A staggeringly small amount of the accounts who follow us see our content on their feeds. It makes sense then, that only a teeny tiny percentage of the accounts that “saw” our content would engage with it. The people who would normally engage with it aren’t seeing it at all!
Meta does offer options to “fix” this abysmal reach, but of course, it’s gonna cost you. Instagram offers business accounts the option to “boost” their posts by paying a fee that will make the algorithm show it to more people. However, they still can’t promise the people who see it from the ad will engage with it or even want to see it.
These changes are likely to make small business owners look back to years ago when it seemed so much easier to grow and promote your business on social media platforms. You’re not going crazy; it really was easier. Not only was it newer, and therefore more engaging, but back then the platform wasn’t actively working against you.
As a business, Instagram wants you to spend as much time as possible on its platform. They want you to keep making more posts and engaging with other posts and never feel content enough to leave. It’s a business that feeds off of people’s impulse to always want more.
The algorithms are designed to keep people on the platform by continuing to show them what they want to see, but Instagram also couldn’t exist without people constantly posting content of their own. Above all, Instagram needs creators to keep creating.
In the past, they used to do this by rewarding creators with measurable positive results from their content. However, post-pandemic, they’ve begun to swing in the opposite direction. Now, they’re killing creators’ organic reach and telling them to keep trying new posts and features and paying for ads that just aren’t working.
Instagram metrics are only available for posts from the past 90 days so we can’t see any exact stats from the pre-pandemic era, but what we know for sure is before 2020 we had fewer followers than we do now, but got more engagement on our posts.
Long story short, if your social media marketing efforts have felt like an uphill battle since the pandemic hit, you’re not alone. The algorithm is keeping your post from being seen by your followers who actually want to see your content because they’re pushing ads and other recommended content onto their feeds instead. Next time, we’ll focus more on the infamous algorithms themselves, the rise of AI, and dive deeper into the reasons why reach can be a deceptive metric. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we post the next part.
