Instagram: What You Don't Know

So let’s see, where do I even start with this topic! I decided to talk about this, because I always get questions about how I gained followers on Instagram, etc. So about 4 years ago I got on this Instagram bandwagon and hey, I was still considered one of the late comers. I guess I hadn’t gotten the memo years before that and to be completely honest all I knew was Myspace and wasn’t even willing to open up a Facebook account. Finally one day I heard of this App and decided to give it a go and start posting my makeup looks. When i first started, I invested so much money as I still do, in purchasing different brands of makeup just so I could create a look and pray that the company would notice me and repost my work. Let me tell you, at the time when Instagram was “normal” and everyone was given a “fair chance” of being noticed, I got reposted… A LOT! HUDA used to repost me at least once every 2 weeks, and with every repost I would gain over 800-900 followers. Lilly Ghalichi was the first major person who reposted my work and I received a message from Instagram that warned me of unusual/suspicious activity occurring on my page (due to the sudden outpour of followers I was gaining) and I had to authorize the message in order to continue using my page. I mean, seriously THAT is the Instagram I want back!

Working so hard to build a platform for years and then seeing it crumble right before your eyes due to the stupid algorithms and changes Instagram has implemented in its app, is straight out frustrating and heartbreaking. Not only for myself, but other artists who are very talented, are being stripped of opportunities that are simply handed only to those who began their Instagram journey years before and now have over a million followers. What makes you or I any different or any less talented? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

So with that being said, I am going to give a brief breakdown of how Instagram used to work versus how it works today and where your posts actually end up, in case you were wondering. Backtracking to three years ago, things were much simpler. Particularly pertaining to the beauty world since that is my expertise, one would take a great quality picture, post it to Instagram with a catchy caption and add multiple hashtags. The point of the hashtags used to be to expose the picture posted into those particular pages. For example, a #hudabeauty hashtag would land you on that hashtag page and when she checked her hashtags, your picture using her product would appear. If she liked it, she would repost it and that would bring a storm of new followers, thus making the artists page grow at light speed. Realistically speaking, the only responsibility we as artists had, was to use the company’s makeup, put forth an excellent picture, hashtag them and cross our fingers to be reposted. Thinking back to that and writing this actually makes me reminisce on the good old days. *TEAR* lol

Now lets fast forward to today and to say the least, Instagram has become a battlefield. The ones armed with the most ammunition and years of Instagram experience are winning, and the rest of us are in the distance waiting for someone to throw us a chewed up bone!

Today, you can go bankrupt buying new products, sprain your ankle posing for that perfect picture, strain your neck for the perfect angle to show off that $60 dollar NEW highlighter you bought, although you owned 100 more just like it, and hashtag the crap out of your pictures. If you don’t get enough likes within the first few minutes you post, your hashtags get swallowed up into a place only God knows! This becomes an automatic defeat in itself, as the only pages/pictures that can collect enough likes to stay relevant are the ones who already have around a million followers. Once again, we are all left behind. Moreover, hashtags are actually not on our side anymore, as using a lot of them throws shade (literally) on your post and Instagram thinking it is SPAM, “shadow bans” your page. Shadow banning a page is throwing a page/user into an unknown space in the social community. “Blocking or partially blocking” their content in such a way that isn’t too obvious to them that they have indeed been banned. Too much to soak in? Well there is definitely more! I plan on writing a blog post entirely dedicated to the Do’s and Don’ts of Instagram, so I will only limit this to the basics. To sum it up, Instagram wants to limit your growth, because too many people were making money off of posting (paid by companies to do so) and Instagram was not getting a cut. By limiting people getting noticed, they are limiting everything else in between, hence making it almost impossible for anyone trying to climb the ladder to success in this social community.

Have you ever noticed that when you open your page to see your friend’s posts, they are ever rarely there and instead there are multiple posts from popular pages that were posted hours, even days ago? That is another tactic of making our pages with less followers just a little smaller and practically nonexistent. The popular pages get all the exposure as if they needed more of it, and the rest of us remain vague stragglers, yelling “someone notice me,” except no one hears us! If you’re asking yourself what now? Well, there really is no answer unfortunately.

There are some semi-solutions that can help us slightly, but we have to work as a team and support one another in order to push forward, even a little. How is it that when I post a story, thousands of people see them and yet my pictures get only a hundred or so likes? This sums up everyone’s bitter Instagram reality, not just mine. It’s like Instagram is filled with window shoppers who see, but never buy. We see the story, we think to ourselves thats nice; we make an effort to scroll down to see what the story leads us to and when it comes down to the last second of clicking that “like” button we just decide to pass on it. And we are ALL guilty of that, including myself. Sometimes I have to remind myself to go back to a post I scrolled through and click that like button, because my brain liked it but my finger was to lazy to take action. If more of us gave feedback to one another, supported by “liking” and appreciating one another’s efforts, we too could start our path to social media success. So the next time you find yourself liking every single post of someone with a million followers, stop and sprinkle a little love on the rest of social media artists who actually need your support to shine.