Legendary as a place where ordinary people turn their passions and styles into steady incomes and phenomenal fortunes with engaging free posts, 2021 changes to Instagram are frustrating some microbusinesses who now say paid posts are making them all but invisible as sellers.
Some might say this is déjà vu all over again. Two years before Facebook went public, in 2010, campaigns to build “likes” and a fan base began to emerge. It was then when small businesses also invested in programs to harvest likes and build a fan base with the expectation that those likes represented a direct channel to a fan, and hopefully a sale. Only when Facebook’s S1 was filed did those businesses understand why the odds were stacked against that result without those businesses investing in advertising to boost their position in the news feed.
This latest debate over the inability of small and often independent sellers to compete with the presence and ad buying power of big brands and social influencers, has been raging inside Instagram since 2018 when concerns over losing crucial teen users to rival platforms TikTok and Snapchat caused Instagram to heavy-up its focus — and spending — on teens.
In mid 2021, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri spelled out aspects of Instagram’s various algorithms in a blog where he also touched on “shadowbanning” — the practice of taking down certain content that may (or may not) violate Instagram standards, and has the effect of lowering post engagement. That harms sellers without the budget for sponsored posts.
Although more “shoppable” features have been added for balance, on Monday (Dec. 27) the Financial Times reported that “the recently-updated advertising set-up on Instagram also means that large businesses can boost their visibility through paid advertising. Businesses promote existing posts for a small fee to reach a wider audience — a promoted post — or create a new post to use as an advert, known as a sponsored post. These give more reach, which in turn helps secure preferential treatment from the artificial intelligence powering the app’s algorithms.”
“Not all small businesses can afford this and the changes have had a tangible effect on sales traffic and engagement from Instagram,” FT said.
While still leading its main competitors in terms of user base, Instagram has fretted over losing its lucrative teen users for some time, and not without reason.
The New York Times recently reported that “Instagram, with more than 1.3 billion users, remains the biggest of [these] platforms, with TikTok at one billion users and Snapchat at 500 million, according to data from the companies. But in a survey this year from the financial services firm Piper Sandler, 35 percent of teenagers said Snapchat was their favorite social media platform, with 30 percent saying TikTok. Instagram was third with 22 percent.”
With more microbusinesses complaining about changes are negatively impacting views, engagement and sales, the company maintains that small sellers are vital to the platform.
The FT story notes, “Instagram says that ‘small businesses are the heartbeat of Facebook and Instagram’. The company adds that it has put business tools ‘into the hands of millions of entrepreneurs…around the world which were previously available only to the largest corporations’. It says there are more than 200m businesses globally using its services each month.”
In his blog, Mosseri explained lower engagement and related issues thusly: “The truth is most of your followers won’t see what you share, because most look at less than half of their Feed. But we can be more transparent about why we take things down when we do, work to make fewer mistakes — and fix them quickly when we do — and better explain how our systems work.”
See also: Instagram To Add More Ways For Creators To Monetize
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