#TGLife
Instagram has been quite popular in recent years, but it appears that the photo-sharing site is now facing declining user engagement. Social media studies have attributed various factors to this decline, but we could narrow down on two major ones: average users and brand accounts.
Instagram is a site meant to promote good photography, and there are a number of good photographers here, but there are far more average users, who do not exactly care about good photography.
They’re here to follow friends and celebrities and find an escape from the real world by looking at some pretty pictures. Being a user-driven platform Instagram promotes content generated by such majority of average users who promote short-lived trends and challenges.
This leads to good content created by professional photographers falling behind in the race, and affects the quality of the site in turn. Fortunately, there are a number of hashtags, and some accounts dedicated to curating good pictures that keep the good taste alive on the photo-sharing social network.
That said, there is another category of users that is creating serious problems for the site: influencers. Influencers are individuals with a large number of followers who can in some way influence the choices of their followers like celebrities.
As a result, people with huge number of followers are approached by brands who strike a partnership with them for advertising their products. Technically, the deal is good for both as it helps the user gain recognition and it gives the brand organic reach. However, as more and more people choose to become influencers, the platform is being crowded by such people.
Additionally, there have been allegations that many influencers are buying followers and using bots to boost their follower-count, and Instagram has not done enough to rein in the fake accounts.
Instagram’s numbers look phenomenal because of bots and pods. The automated activities of bots (for both fake and real profiles) accounts for a massive percentage of engagements on the platform. And, the engagement pods (which are manipulated by real people rather than bots) are also creating a massive amount of phony engagement on the platform.
If Instagram took action against the bots and pods, their numbers would drop massively.
However, as social media allows for more people to achieve fame and influencer status, social media quickly has become oversaturated with influencers. It is impossible for audiences to keep up with all of the content (especially sponsored content) coming from the influencers they follow. It’s also worth noting that fame, particularly the kind formed on social media, is fleeting. The same influencers that capture audience attention may not be holding onto that attention tomorrow.
When social media audiences are bombarded with sponsored content on their feeds, they are less likely to engage with both influencers and brands, which is reflected in recent studies which reveal an overall decline in instagram engagement. Mobile Marketer reports that the engagement rate for sponsored posts fell to 2.4% in the first quarter of 2019 from 4% three years earlier, while the rate for non-sponsored posts slid to 1.9% from 4.5% for the comparable periods.
To know where this is leading, take the example of ‘Pages’ on Facebook. The concern with the rise of Instagram,is that we’ll eventually see the same trends we saw on Facebook.
Facebook started out by giving brands plenty of organic reach, but eventually, that reach started to decline, then decline further, to the point where now it’s very difficult to maintain any type of non-paid connection with the majority of your Facebook Page audience. Facebook’s justification for this has been that people want to see more from their friends, and less from brands.
All things said and done, Instagram still has the power to reinvent itself, and it has done this before by introducing new features such as stories. But more that such features, the site needs to think of ways to ensure more genuine and quality content reaches its users rather than average ephemeral trends and outright advertising, which most users can detect and avoid. Here, the photo-sharing website seems to be facing a situation which perhaps shapes the present and future of any good business:maintaining a belance between authenticity and advertising. If it sells too much of its soul, it will lose users that are the real soul of the network.
