Remember the good old days of 2020 (bear with us), when growing an audience on Insta® was as easy as sharing a few beautiful product images and chatting away in the comments?
And let’s not forget the heady heights of Reach and Engagement that would shine back at us from the Insights screen.
Sadly, those days are long gone – and for all of us, you’re not alone in this.
Talk to any business owner and it’s a similar story,
“Instagram® doesn’t work for me anymore!”
“None of my followers see my content!”
“Instagram® is dead!”
We hear you, we hear you. And whilst it may feel like Insta® is dead, we can assure you that it is very much alive and well!
Instagram® remains a powerful and cost effective tool for marketing your business, however it has changed significantly over the past few years and strategies that worked in 2020, simply don’t cut it today.
If we look back to 2020, global users were at 1.04 billion, whereas the forecast for 2025 is 1.44 billion – that’s a whopping increase of 38%.
Quite simply, there is a whole lot more competition and whilst you’re trying to get in front of your followers, so are many, many other brands.
Aside from an increase in the number of users competing for attention, the goalposts have also shifted.
We’ve all seen the notifications suggesting that you boost a particular post or reel, right? Whilst it’s not a strategy that we would advise, you can bet your bottom dollar that a big chunk of brands are happily hitting that boost button – further increasing the competition for your followers’ eyes.
Instagram® is moving towards a pay-to-play space.
Now, when you’ve become used to a certain level of ‘free’ engagement and follower growth, hearing that you now have to pay to hit those same levels can be a bitter pill to swallow.
But what if those good old days had never happened, would the pill stick in the throat quite so much?
Imagine for a moment that you’ve never heard of Instagram®…
What would you say then, to a platform of 1.44 billion potential customers, where you can showcase your business and your products, and you only need to pay £3-£5 per day to get those products seen by the people most interested in them?
Sounds pretty bang on, to us!
We can all be dewy eyed and nostalgic for the Insta® days of yore, however it’s important to remember that it is its own business, and it doesn’t owe free marketing to anyone.
Oh and that £3-£5 per day we mentioned above, that is absolutely NOT for boosting posts! Instead, make your money work considerably harder with a fully strategic engagement campaign, built, with all the bells and whistles, in Ads Manager.