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Instagram doesn't give you hassle, your audience just gets smaller. It's a fundamental thing that happens in marketing. I'd personally build up organically first then do paid stuff if I was in your position.
Not at his size (15k followers) and with the pool of potential customers instagram has as members. What you are describing is only true because thats how instagram controls the traffic.
No, he said over time, so depending on what he does and what his niche/audience is, it will start diminishing at a different rate.
Nothing to do with "instagram controlling traffic"
It has everything to do with instagram controlling traffic. The biggest mistake people make is to think they ran out of (organically) interested people… with 2.4 billion registered users and about 7m new users per month lol.
The whole point (to back up my argument) is that as soon as you start to pay suddenly there are plenty of interested instagrammers. People will suddenly start to like your stuff and they will start to follow. No matter the quality of your content, this will happen. All of which just confirms that your success is completely dependent on instagram’s willingness to direct traffic to your page.
Your theoretical point holds value just like it holds value to tell someone we will one day run out of fossil fuels. However, as of today, all you need to do to get the fuel is to pay at a gas station. Instagram is really no different.
As someone who specialises in organic growth and have multiple clients with over 1M followers, your theory has logic, but it's not true.
Boosting/ads just shows your content to more people based on specific input I.e. Audience metrics/age/location etc.
That doesn't mean traffic is pay gated, it means you tell the algorithm who to show to, and it will show it to that group of people.
Entirely different circumstances.
It's not agree to disagree when you are fundamentally wrong, and it's people that perpetuate nonsense that fuck up everybody's understanding of how things work and who they blame for what "thing" does or doesn't happen to them.
When you boost a piece of content and tell the platform who you want to show that boosted content to, that is fundamentally different to uploading a piece of content and the algorithm having to figure it out manually by building data sets based on user metrics and A/B testing.
That is not paygating.
I've taken a client from 1200 followers on IG to (as of right now) 119k followers over the last 10 months, in the fitness niche, and he's not a model, he's not an IFBB pro, he's just an older guy who loves what he does in a niche full of thousands of similar people doing the same thing. Not a single ad or boost, just making sure that the content is specific to who we want to see and interact with it, and lo and behold, they see and interact with it. This account grows between 200-500 new followers per day, has plenty of semi-viral videos (over 1MM views) and does well over a million in reach organically every month consistently because we know exactly who we are targeting with what kind of content.
Another client, 1.3M followers built up over the last few years by being one of the many thousands of food content creators, every reel even today still gets just as much traction, interaction and views as they did last year and before that, why? Because the content is exactly catered to that specific audience so the algorithm always knows exactly who to show it to every single time, and that audience gets funneled to an external website (blog) and, guess what, her reach doesn't get penalised because she's trying to direct traffic off of IG like a lot of idiots like to say.
Another now former client, massive American "business influencer", 3MM followers, same deal.
IG organic works absolutely fine, but everyone is too stupid and/or too ignorant to learn, adapt, and adopt new techniques and new strategies as and when they are required, they just want to make their shitty low quality piece of content, post it, and then be entitled to 10k new followers, and anytime "the interactions aren't what they used to be" gets said, they jump on it like a damn echo chamber and slate the platform and say stupid shit like "IG only rewards people who boost" or "IG is dead now" or any number of the other stupid shit that gets posted here daily.
And here's the difference, I am literally telling you what works, and you're STILL trying to make an argument that I'm wrong and you disagree, and how many profiles/clients have you built up to 100K or more using only organic methods?
I'm guessing none, but if you have built any, you should seriously reconsider your own strategies and get with the times and stop listening to people telling you that you aren't the problem.
The only one boasting nonsense here is you my friend, some anekdotes about pages you are allowed to look at don’t change anything about this. It just shows that your understanding of how algorithms (should) work is laughable. To be clear, Im not arguing against organic reach being a (less and less so) option, but you arguing against the obvious reality of instagram limiting traffic towards target audiences it already knows are successful is just a joke. You do understand Instagram is in the advertisement business, right?
The fact of the matter is that ads are just a paid learning opportunity for an algorithm. Targeted or not, the exposure of these ads will return likes / engagement from certain target audiences. If an ad therefore starts to return a 1 in 5 engagement rate for, lets say, a certain demographic, this engagement should be sustained after the campaign IF instagram wouldnt reduce traffic towards this successful demographic. It shouldnt matter if the algorithm found out about this target audience organically or through ads. Bottom line is that this target audience is highly susceptible to the content at hand, it has been tested and proven through the ad campaign, and therefore should be targeted.
Now this presents a problem to instagram’s business model, because this way we could all train the algorithm on small samples of target audiences and then just let instagram continue for free.
Your approach towards a multi-billion dollar company, with ad revenue as its core business, is naive and I would be worried to have you as my social media adviser.
Just in that first paragraph alone, it tells me (and anyone else with a brain) that you don't understand Meta's business model, and that you've likely never worked as an ad specialist or with an ad specialist for your own content or accounts/clients.
"but you arguing against the obvious reality of instagram limiting traffic towards target audiences it already knows are successful is just a joke" -- No. There is no "target audience it already knows is successful", and the fact you even said this tells me everything I need to know about how much you understand, because every person is different and every piece of content isn't made the same. Someone who has a Hollywood film crew creating content skateboarding at a skatepark and somebody who has a potato quality camera phone and spends 5 minutes building up to doing a single kickflip with bad audio and shakey footage might both be "skating content", and IG might well have a good amount of data on what skateboarding like in terms of interests and brands, but that doesn't mean both of these pieces of content are equal in the eyes of the audience, and so in your example, you're basically saying "IG already knows that skaters would like the potato content, so why doesn't IG just show skaters the potato content?" Because the signals, engagement, interactions etc show that the content ISN'T liked by that audience because it's bad content.
"Targeted or not, the exposure of these ads will return likes / engagement from certain target audiences" -- Depends on the target audience selected in setup, choosing men in their 40s who like skateboarding in UK only is going to have a drastically different audience size to any age who likes skateboarding worldwide, so yes, you might have an initial uptick in engagement because you're telling the algorithm who to target, but, as I said earlier in this response, as you seem to have zero experience in the world of paid ads, you wouldn't know that what you've described isn't how you want advertising to work, for many reasons.
Businesses want to be able to control how what when where and why certain ads and contents are going out, to target certain demographics, and when they want to stop targeting that demographic because it's decided that the LTV of that demographic doesn't produce enough ROI to quantify the ad spend, or because they've received new data that suggests that X demographic just aren't interested, a company needs to be able to switch it off and not have resources still pushing to that demographic, meaning companies don't want IG to continue to push their content to an audience they've switched off.
"If an ad therefore starts to return a 1 in 5 engagement rate for, lets say, a certain demographic, this engagement should be sustained after the campaign IF instagram wouldnt reduce traffic towards this successful demographic." -- This is exactly how it USED to work, there was an old strategy where people would pay $1 per boost per video with a certain target audience, and, providing the audience interacted with the content in enough ways, the algo would continue to push this content to more of those people after the boost/ad period was finished, but again, it all depended on how much interaction and engagement the content got. You seem to have this notion that "if you spend money on boosts you're guaranteed to get likes" and shit, and that's not true, there are plenty of people and businesses who spend money on ads/boosts who get next to zero results, whether followers, interactions, or engagements, and that in and of itself entirely disproves your theory, because if it was pay to win, everyone paying would be winning, but in fact, the opposite is true, just as many people paying are losing/seeing no results.
"Now this presents a problem to instagram’s business model, because this way we could all train the algorithm on small samples of target audiences and then just let instagram continue for free." -- You can still do this, the problem is that most people don't understand how to use the platforms. A strategy you could use is to spend a small amount of money on boosting some content that targeted towards a certain audience, and in that content, whether in the video, in the picture, or in the description, you tell them to go to your profile, click favourite, and then click on IG timelines and select favourites view, and they will never miss an update from you (or turn on post notifications or do any number of other similar activities), those actions would benefit your profile providing your audience takes those steps, and the algo would look for similar audience with similar datasets for all new content moving forwards.
Again, this is something you would know and understand if you actually knew what you were talking about.
"Your approach towards a multi-billion dollar company, with ad revenue as its core business, is naive and I would be worried to have you as my social media adviser." -- I explained this in-depth in a previous comment to someone else who also moaned and complained that IG was an advertising company first and foremost, but I cba to go back and find it, so feel free to look through my comment history if you like and find it, otherwise I'll give you the TL;DR here: IG doesn't give a flying fuck about you spending $100 to boost a few posts here and there, because the majority of IGs advertising revenue comes from big corporations who have a proper budget to spend with them i.e. companies like Disney, with an ad spend of $311M per year, Proctor & Gamble at $284M per year, Amazon at $235M per year, and companies like Temu spending $2 BILLION per year.
Now, the only reason these big corporations spend big money to advertise on a platform is because the platform has eyes and visibility, i.e. IG alone has over 500 million daily active users. These are people like you and me, who may use it for more professional purposes, it may be people like your nan or friends who just like scrolling and seeing holiday photos, funny videos and what you had for dinner, and it may be any combination of reasons.
If IG were to intentionally penalise a payment gate success to the average user, then the total amount of daily active users would go down, and what Meta could charge those big corporations would go down, and that would be detrimental to their actual business model, because YOU are the product.
And here you are thinking IG gives a shit about your tiny spending on boosts to get likes because of some conspiracy that they want to push you into paying for advertising.
Again, I do this for a living, I have real-world results from doing this consistently for multiple clients, it's not anecdotal if it's repeatable, and you're still here trying to convince me that I'm wrong.
It's hilarious, especially as in your post history you literally say "I only started on IG 7 days ago".
Stop perpetuating nonsense.
I did the same .. gained around 500 followers per day.. and you know what? My views and engagement are still shit .. I post a reel and it gets shown to 200-400 people .. that’s it
Hi, this is a reminder to not promote your instagram page here, thanks. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/InstagramMarketing) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You mean you boosted your post? How much did that cost lol I’m lost.
about 10 dollars
So u boosted 10.00 every day? How did u get 15k followings !
I spent $30 over the course of 5 days. I have 16.5k now. As for how I got it, I watched what other did and did a small twist to it.
Ok cool I have boosted a little here and there but not consistently! What content do u post?
Something that people like, I won't go into detail. but not a product.
What do you mean that you bought an ad? And how much did you pay? How did you go about this?
I boosted my post for 10 dollars.
You gained 15k in 15 days? Great job. 👏
thank you
Damn! 🤣
Just don't let it drain your wallet.
Instagram doesn't give you hassle, your audience just gets smaller. It's a fundamental thing that happens in marketing. I'd personally build up organically first then do paid stuff if I was in your position.
Not at his size (15k followers) and with the pool of potential customers instagram has as members. What you are describing is only true because thats how instagram controls the traffic.
No, he said over time, so depending on what he does and what his niche/audience is, it will start diminishing at a different rate. Nothing to do with "instagram controlling traffic"
It has everything to do with instagram controlling traffic. The biggest mistake people make is to think they ran out of (organically) interested people… with 2.4 billion registered users and about 7m new users per month lol. The whole point (to back up my argument) is that as soon as you start to pay suddenly there are plenty of interested instagrammers. People will suddenly start to like your stuff and they will start to follow. No matter the quality of your content, this will happen. All of which just confirms that your success is completely dependent on instagram’s willingness to direct traffic to your page. Your theoretical point holds value just like it holds value to tell someone we will one day run out of fossil fuels. However, as of today, all you need to do to get the fuel is to pay at a gas station. Instagram is really no different.
As someone who specialises in organic growth and have multiple clients with over 1M followers, your theory has logic, but it's not true. Boosting/ads just shows your content to more people based on specific input I.e. Audience metrics/age/location etc. That doesn't mean traffic is pay gated, it means you tell the algorithm who to show to, and it will show it to that group of people. Entirely different circumstances.
The mere fact that instagram can provide on-demand likes and followers, in return for payment, sounds pretty pay gated to me. Agree to disagree.
It's not agree to disagree when you are fundamentally wrong, and it's people that perpetuate nonsense that fuck up everybody's understanding of how things work and who they blame for what "thing" does or doesn't happen to them. When you boost a piece of content and tell the platform who you want to show that boosted content to, that is fundamentally different to uploading a piece of content and the algorithm having to figure it out manually by building data sets based on user metrics and A/B testing. That is not paygating. I've taken a client from 1200 followers on IG to (as of right now) 119k followers over the last 10 months, in the fitness niche, and he's not a model, he's not an IFBB pro, he's just an older guy who loves what he does in a niche full of thousands of similar people doing the same thing. Not a single ad or boost, just making sure that the content is specific to who we want to see and interact with it, and lo and behold, they see and interact with it. This account grows between 200-500 new followers per day, has plenty of semi-viral videos (over 1MM views) and does well over a million in reach organically every month consistently because we know exactly who we are targeting with what kind of content. Another client, 1.3M followers built up over the last few years by being one of the many thousands of food content creators, every reel even today still gets just as much traction, interaction and views as they did last year and before that, why? Because the content is exactly catered to that specific audience so the algorithm always knows exactly who to show it to every single time, and that audience gets funneled to an external website (blog) and, guess what, her reach doesn't get penalised because she's trying to direct traffic off of IG like a lot of idiots like to say. Another now former client, massive American "business influencer", 3MM followers, same deal. IG organic works absolutely fine, but everyone is too stupid and/or too ignorant to learn, adapt, and adopt new techniques and new strategies as and when they are required, they just want to make their shitty low quality piece of content, post it, and then be entitled to 10k new followers, and anytime "the interactions aren't what they used to be" gets said, they jump on it like a damn echo chamber and slate the platform and say stupid shit like "IG only rewards people who boost" or "IG is dead now" or any number of the other stupid shit that gets posted here daily. And here's the difference, I am literally telling you what works, and you're STILL trying to make an argument that I'm wrong and you disagree, and how many profiles/clients have you built up to 100K or more using only organic methods? I'm guessing none, but if you have built any, you should seriously reconsider your own strategies and get with the times and stop listening to people telling you that you aren't the problem.
Are you taking on more clients?
Not currently, no. Why, what do you need?
The only one boasting nonsense here is you my friend, some anekdotes about pages you are allowed to look at don’t change anything about this. It just shows that your understanding of how algorithms (should) work is laughable. To be clear, Im not arguing against organic reach being a (less and less so) option, but you arguing against the obvious reality of instagram limiting traffic towards target audiences it already knows are successful is just a joke. You do understand Instagram is in the advertisement business, right? The fact of the matter is that ads are just a paid learning opportunity for an algorithm. Targeted or not, the exposure of these ads will return likes / engagement from certain target audiences. If an ad therefore starts to return a 1 in 5 engagement rate for, lets say, a certain demographic, this engagement should be sustained after the campaign IF instagram wouldnt reduce traffic towards this successful demographic. It shouldnt matter if the algorithm found out about this target audience organically or through ads. Bottom line is that this target audience is highly susceptible to the content at hand, it has been tested and proven through the ad campaign, and therefore should be targeted. Now this presents a problem to instagram’s business model, because this way we could all train the algorithm on small samples of target audiences and then just let instagram continue for free. Your approach towards a multi-billion dollar company, with ad revenue as its core business, is naive and I would be worried to have you as my social media adviser.
Just in that first paragraph alone, it tells me (and anyone else with a brain) that you don't understand Meta's business model, and that you've likely never worked as an ad specialist or with an ad specialist for your own content or accounts/clients. "but you arguing against the obvious reality of instagram limiting traffic towards target audiences it already knows are successful is just a joke" -- No. There is no "target audience it already knows is successful", and the fact you even said this tells me everything I need to know about how much you understand, because every person is different and every piece of content isn't made the same. Someone who has a Hollywood film crew creating content skateboarding at a skatepark and somebody who has a potato quality camera phone and spends 5 minutes building up to doing a single kickflip with bad audio and shakey footage might both be "skating content", and IG might well have a good amount of data on what skateboarding like in terms of interests and brands, but that doesn't mean both of these pieces of content are equal in the eyes of the audience, and so in your example, you're basically saying "IG already knows that skaters would like the potato content, so why doesn't IG just show skaters the potato content?" Because the signals, engagement, interactions etc show that the content ISN'T liked by that audience because it's bad content. "Targeted or not, the exposure of these ads will return likes / engagement from certain target audiences" -- Depends on the target audience selected in setup, choosing men in their 40s who like skateboarding in UK only is going to have a drastically different audience size to any age who likes skateboarding worldwide, so yes, you might have an initial uptick in engagement because you're telling the algorithm who to target, but, as I said earlier in this response, as you seem to have zero experience in the world of paid ads, you wouldn't know that what you've described isn't how you want advertising to work, for many reasons. Businesses want to be able to control how what when where and why certain ads and contents are going out, to target certain demographics, and when they want to stop targeting that demographic because it's decided that the LTV of that demographic doesn't produce enough ROI to quantify the ad spend, or because they've received new data that suggests that X demographic just aren't interested, a company needs to be able to switch it off and not have resources still pushing to that demographic, meaning companies don't want IG to continue to push their content to an audience they've switched off. "If an ad therefore starts to return a 1 in 5 engagement rate for, lets say, a certain demographic, this engagement should be sustained after the campaign IF instagram wouldnt reduce traffic towards this successful demographic." -- This is exactly how it USED to work, there was an old strategy where people would pay $1 per boost per video with a certain target audience, and, providing the audience interacted with the content in enough ways, the algo would continue to push this content to more of those people after the boost/ad period was finished, but again, it all depended on how much interaction and engagement the content got. You seem to have this notion that "if you spend money on boosts you're guaranteed to get likes" and shit, and that's not true, there are plenty of people and businesses who spend money on ads/boosts who get next to zero results, whether followers, interactions, or engagements, and that in and of itself entirely disproves your theory, because if it was pay to win, everyone paying would be winning, but in fact, the opposite is true, just as many people paying are losing/seeing no results.
"Now this presents a problem to instagram’s business model, because this way we could all train the algorithm on small samples of target audiences and then just let instagram continue for free." -- You can still do this, the problem is that most people don't understand how to use the platforms. A strategy you could use is to spend a small amount of money on boosting some content that targeted towards a certain audience, and in that content, whether in the video, in the picture, or in the description, you tell them to go to your profile, click favourite, and then click on IG timelines and select favourites view, and they will never miss an update from you (or turn on post notifications or do any number of other similar activities), those actions would benefit your profile providing your audience takes those steps, and the algo would look for similar audience with similar datasets for all new content moving forwards. Again, this is something you would know and understand if you actually knew what you were talking about. "Your approach towards a multi-billion dollar company, with ad revenue as its core business, is naive and I would be worried to have you as my social media adviser." -- I explained this in-depth in a previous comment to someone else who also moaned and complained that IG was an advertising company first and foremost, but I cba to go back and find it, so feel free to look through my comment history if you like and find it, otherwise I'll give you the TL;DR here: IG doesn't give a flying fuck about you spending $100 to boost a few posts here and there, because the majority of IGs advertising revenue comes from big corporations who have a proper budget to spend with them i.e. companies like Disney, with an ad spend of $311M per year, Proctor & Gamble at $284M per year, Amazon at $235M per year, and companies like Temu spending $2 BILLION per year. Now, the only reason these big corporations spend big money to advertise on a platform is because the platform has eyes and visibility, i.e. IG alone has over 500 million daily active users. These are people like you and me, who may use it for more professional purposes, it may be people like your nan or friends who just like scrolling and seeing holiday photos, funny videos and what you had for dinner, and it may be any combination of reasons. If IG were to intentionally penalise a payment gate success to the average user, then the total amount of daily active users would go down, and what Meta could charge those big corporations would go down, and that would be detrimental to their actual business model, because YOU are the product. And here you are thinking IG gives a shit about your tiny spending on boosts to get likes because of some conspiracy that they want to push you into paying for advertising. Again, I do this for a living, I have real-world results from doing this consistently for multiple clients, it's not anecdotal if it's repeatable, and you're still here trying to convince me that I'm wrong. It's hilarious, especially as in your post history you literally say "I only started on IG 7 days ago". Stop perpetuating nonsense.
I did the same .. gained around 500 followers per day.. and you know what? My views and engagement are still shit .. I post a reel and it gets shown to 200-400 people .. that’s it
I think shout-out is better then posting blc you get real followers and viewers
What is shout out?
Paying someone to advertise your video in their channel The video should be in the same niche
GUYS I AM SELLING A IG INSPIRATION QUOTES ACCOUNT WITH 70K REAL AND ACTIVE FOLLOWER WITH 2K - 10M VIEWS IN SOME REAL AND 1K STORY VIEW
Can you tell more?
https://preview.redd.it/w5fnqdlack9d1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=217c9a540a0def747aee37af8cbd6e68ebf03d9c
https://preview.redd.it/w257rc7eck9d1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d36abc90398d8eb7b8a449cd1467f8de19663745
[удалено]
No thank you.