The Instagram Algorithm & How It’s Frustrating Me ATM

I’ve seen a few questions floating around the internet recently all about Instagram.

Is Instagram taking over blogging? *Yeah, I feel like at the moment it kind of is*

How can we beat the Instagram algorithm? *Someone please tell me ‘cos I’d like to know too*

I love Instagram. It’s definitely my favourite form of social media, and to be honest, my favourite platform to post on too. From a blogging point of view, it’s so quick and easy to create your own portfolio of images. All you have to do is write a punchy caption and add a few hashtags and you’re done. From a blog follower’s point of view, it’s so quick and easy to catch up on all your favourite people in one collective space without having to visit individual websites and blogs. So yeah, I have my own blog and yet I’m still guilty of not visiting other blogs often enough. Instagram is just killing it right now, and it’s the place we all want to be. Am I right?

On the other hand, I hate Instagram. It frustrates me on the daily, and sometimes I feel like I just shouldn’t even bother with it at all. And that’s all thanks to the Instagram algorithm. So the algorithm is meant to ensure that you’re seeing the content that’s truly relevant to you and it cuts out the stuff it thinks you don’t wanna see. I did a bit of research on what exactly the Instagram algorithm is before I started writing this post and here’s what I came out with.

Apparently the 7 key factors of the algorithm are:

engagement and popularity of your post
relevancy of your post to your followers and what genre your post comes under e.g. fashion in my case
your relationships with other people/accounts
timeliness – if your not posting often enough and at the right times when you do then what’s the point?
profile searches – who are people consistently searching for?
direct shares
time spent viewing any given image/video/story etc.

If you ask me, it’s all starting to sound a little too complicated. All I really wanted when I logged onto Instagram this morning was to share a pic that I’ve spent time creating with the world. Isn’t that how social media all started out? Yet now when I log onto Insta to post an image, I have so many other things to consider. Is what I’m about to post relevant? Am I posting it at the precise minute past 10 that will allow the most amount of people to see it? Are people going to want to spend a certain lengthy amount of time viewing my post? And obvs, most importantly, is the image going to fit with the rest of my feed? (Heaven forbid it would interfere with that theme you’ve got going on rn *rolls eyes*)

And it’s all these questions that make me start to overthink what I’m posting and whether I should even bother posting at all today. Some weeks the algorithm seems to love my account and I get a lot more engagement than I did the week before. Other times it literally hates my images, and like last week, I see a drop in likes and followers off my account.

Is there really any explaining it? Because I don’t seem to be able to work it out. All I know is that I’m not the only one who feels these frustrations with the Instagram algorithm, and that at the end of the day, the reason I’m posting a pic to Instagram is because it’s what I love doing. It’s way too easy to get wrapped up in the numbers and stats these days and forget what you’re really doing it for. So if nothing else, this post is a little self-reminder that I should never just stop Instagramming because yesterday I only got 60 likes on that image I spent ages planning, shooting, editing and captioning. It’s really not the end of the world, and it’s certainly not the end of my blog.