Freewriting // Day 6
What Do We Do With Instagram Now?
A journey with a platform I’m not sure I will use anymore
I remember the early days of Instagram, where it was christened the “hipster” platform, where people shared photos of their food heavily filtered, with a border. These were the people Too Cool for Facebook, more artistic.
I remember when people started to use apps to include rectangular (either horizontal or vertical) photos by adding white borders to their pieces to fit into the Instagram square grid.
I remember when Instagram implemented stories directly after Snapchat did, and everyone moaned and groaned about how we didn’t need this feature at all.
I remember when Instagram changed from a timeline format, where you saw posts chronologically from everyone you followed, to an algorithmically generated format, with the “most fitting” posts coming to your timeline first.
Acknowledging but also letting go of “the good days”
I had a pretty good run with Instagram as a platform for many of the years that I was on it, using it both for personal reasons and to promote different side hustle ventures.
The account that grew the biggest is likely my “join.a.groupchat” account, which I think was just born in an era that supported this kind of engagement. It currently has 4.3k followers, which is not nothing, but also quite small compared to some astronomical influencers these days.
That being said, I learned so much from this project.
It started out because I used to make Twitter groupchats, but people started asking for Instagram ones, as soon as Instagram started with group DMs. Yes, this was in the super early days, when this was a new feature.
In fact, I started making groupchats before Instagram implemented the “join groupchat” story feature that was around for one short year. I think that’s what help boosted this account significantly.
Before that button was implemented, I was using excel sheets and Google forms to get people to drop their usernames, and have me manually add people. It worked, and I learned so much about using Google Sheets to organize information by theme and category to make groupchat making seamless.
Those skills translated directly into some of my current research skills, with using “arrayformula” to automatically get everything to update, to pivot tables, which are horrendous to learn without a project. This account let me try out all those skills in a leisurely pace.
I also created a mobile app via Glide to manage new groupchat requests from users, and it’s an app I still use today to manage the myriad of requests and votes.
I also needed to set an incredible amount of boundaries and use templates to manage all the requests. By the 1k mark, you start encountering people who don’t care that you’re human and will hurl anything under the stars if they don’t get their requests right away.
Think about that. At 1k. Think about the requests that artists with 10k, 100k, 1M+ and what kinds of weird messages they get all day, from people who don’t think there’s someone on the other end reading the message.
Finally, this account gave me a reason to look for Instagram scheduling apps so that I could have posts up and running while I was in classes and at work. This is how I experimented with websites like Planoly, which I ended up subscribing to to manage scheduled posts.
Those were the good days, but I’m ready to move on.
Nowadays, it’s really hard to promote on Instagram if you don’t already have a following
In fact, even if you have a following, you still might not be able to keep up with the treadmill of content you need to create in order to stay on top of the algorithm.
Part of it is because you can’t schedule anything other than photo posts — that means you constantly have to be ONLINE in order to keep up with a posting schedule that will feed into this monster algorithm. It’s a recipe for burnout.
People have to save and comment on your posts for them to be boosted in the algorithm (likes or views alone do not matter as much) meaning that controversial posts that grate people actually usually get more engagement. Art that’s just aesthetic to look at, that I love, and that I really don’t have anything wordy to say about — gets forgotten and left behind, which I genuinely think this kind of content is the rest we all need ON our timelines right now.
In order to remain relevant to the algorithm, you also have to stay active in responding to messages. And by active, I mean at least once a day, maybe even up to four times a day. For someone whose account was focussed on making groupchats, even when I was not counting the groupchats themselves, this was an upwards of 100 messages a day.
Shifting to promoting to videos is a lot of work for people whose niches aren’t … visual. For me, it’s incredible how writers and non-visual artists were able to adapt their pieces for the photo-centric platform already, but this platform is constantly evolving not to support artists, but to battle other platforms (e.g., Tik Tok). That’s why decisions like shifting to video who are honestly just on social media to create a portfolio and share their stuff organically with the world behind, particularly indie artists.
All this together really points to the fact that you might actually need a whole team just to produce enough to stay relevant in the algorithm. Though this is true in many cases on social media, I’d been able to approximate the efforts of a team by using a combination of scheduling apps and programming to sub in.
You can’t do that with Instagram, as their API isn’t open for any developer to work with, and even if you get approved, you can do such a limited number of actions. You cannot post. You cannot comment. You cannot DM.
And the programs out there that do currently charge exorbitant amounts of subscription fees to maintain.
So ironically, the platform that got everyone to leave Facebook in my teen years for a “hipster” and “creative space”, is now owned by Facebook and focussed on team-based, big influencers that the small creators who made this space popular in the first place are not supported.
I’m not using Instagram to promote anymore
I’m closing my groupchat account as soon as my subscription to Planoly runs out — it was a good run, and it’s not something I need in this season of my life anymore.
I’m also no longer really spending too much time experimenting with Instagram as a promotional tool, because it’s not a space that welcomes indie creators to use it in that way. It caters to big influencers, big advertisers.
Instead, here’s my game plan:
Instagram Grid
With the Instagram Grid not being a priority for many anymore given the recent video shift, I still wanted to keep it. This grid is the original attraction for many of us to start posting our art and writing in the first place, and I still want to keep my existing portfolio of things on there.
Why?
Because I finally have some semblance of an aesthetic down, and it’s PURPLE:
Shh, don’t tell anyone, but these quotes are also automatically generated from a database. Meaning that I archive all of my pieces into a database (in case Medium ever shuts down), and this program takes tidbits of quotes and makes them into square-shaped posts of a dedicated palette of colours. Currently, it’s purple, until I get sick of purple.
Like I said, I rely on automation to do more than one person’s promotional work, so that I can focus on the creating, not the promoting. And if I can’t do it in a way that connects with Instagram, I thought I’d still be able to do something about creating pretty quote tiles.
Instagram stories
I find that Instagram was originally meant for photos more than text, and I’m already adding a lot of text to a photo-based space with my grid. So my stories are about non-words. Just photos. Just moments in time. And this is how it works:
I alternate between a) photo and b) using my stories to promote small creators who post under hashtags.
A) the photo
The photo will typically have no words, minimal editing (save for tiny smiley face doodles that I like to add to inanimate objects from time to time), and just be a general rest from reading for that 0.2 seconds you see it before you tape forward.
B) promoting small creators’ grid posts
In line with what I’ve been doing on Twitter in terms of promoting writers (on ramyeonjpg) and artists (artsharewlucy), I want to make my stories a space to share small creators who post under certain hashtags.
Here’s my schedule for now:
These are really the hashtags that define who I am so far, with a mixture of writing and art and food, and I want to keep supporting small creators trying to survive on this platform.
Effect: This creates a story effect that alternates between a full photo and a square-grid post, and honestly, even if you’re tapping through my stories, it creates this rhythmic visual change that I really like.
Some sort of an ending?
This free-write celebrates the end of an era, but also the beginning of one.
And I’m really excited for both.
Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I may be a little bit too excited about my purple grid theme but listen,,, it took me 3 days to figure out the math for transforming a string of text into a reasonable number of lines x words to be created into a .jpg and then figure out the average width of letters and space in order to fit the words into a reasonable .jpg canvas and then have to calculate the math to figure out how to add header and footer stripes to make it a square. And yes, this is what I do in my free time because believe it or not, the 3 days is actually pretty short in terms of getting some feeling of gratification, compared to my PhD. So yes. In sum, I’m Lucy and I’m a nerd. Ps, check out the Instagram story pattern I mentioned here?
^ by Melanie J.
