Hello and bye bye Instagram

It took me a long time to get on to Instagram. I simply could not understand why people were spending time on the platform. Instead of ignoring a billion active users I decided to do an experiment to find out why the social media platform was so popular. I posted something every day during a month.

In this article you'll learn:

• How I got started on Instagram
• My top posts from a month back
• The good & the bad
• Why I decided to stop Instagram

Starting off with a lesson in branding

I started off by asking for beginners advice in a post here on LinkedIn - see it here, and took a 1-hour free online master class by Hilary Rushford & Dean Street Society. This was recommended by a friend and active Instagram user.

I followed the advice on this slide when setting up my profile:

Resulting in this:

My purpose for the profile was to inspire people to start a business. I shared some experiences from my own life as a solopreneur.

I didn't plan the posts in advance, I just took an interesting moment or something cool I read posted it. I mixed quotes and images of myself. And I use the same north star as I do on LinkedIn - always provide value. And always have a business context.

To make the profile look coherent I decided to post mainly for magenta/black/white colour using the same filter.

I didn't have any hard goals (traffic to my LinkedIn profile or website, increasing follower amount, getting email addresses...). I just wanted to learn why people are spending time on the platform.

I noticed here is quite some space to add text to an image. I looked it up;

Although you have up to 2,200 characters in your Instagram captions, it will get truncated after 125.

Hence - to get people to click 'more' is valuable.

I didn't use Instagram Story, I only posted one video of me working out. This got many people thinking I do that all the time. Not true.

Bio

I noticed there are not many characters (only 150!) allowed in your profile. And you are not allowed to directly link to your LinkedIn profile, but it works with a bit.ly link. Unfortunately I cleared my cookies during the experiment so I can't see if or how many clicks it got.

Followers and following

I started an account a year ago but never did anything with it. So when I started I had 168 followers (apparently Instagram is syncing well with Facebook because all initial followers were FB friends. I do know FB owns IG) and I was following 1 account.

At the end of the challenge I had 242 followers (and increase of 74) and followed 34 accounts. I chose to follow only accounts where I can learn something opposed to following back on everyone that follows me. Sorry friends! I follow you dearly and happily on Facebook!

Posts getting +40 likes

On average my posts got about 20 likes. These 7 posts got more than 40 likes.

I think there are better insights and analytics available with a business account - I did this experiment from a personal account. So for the sake of the experiment I use likes as a metric for performance.

Not sure why me in my pyjamas was such a hit! It sure was a nice day and way of working.

Love this quote and Seth Godin. It really aligned with my inspire people to start a business goal so I was delighted it got some attention. Unfortunately the comments seem quite automated.

One of my favorite posts because it made me learn and develop thanks to the great tips in the comments.

With this one I tested if pictures of self really work best. They do. And this one led to a nice lunch too!

To test out that Instagram users favours pets I took a cat pic from Canva and added one of my favourite quotes for product-market fit. Seems pets is the way to go. This is my best performing post from the whole challenge with 57 likes.

Here I did some promotion and shared a taster of my presentation for an event where I was speaking at. I tagged some accounts which I believe contributed to the engagement.

Loved to learn more about my followers with this one, and hope it inspired people to think what they could write about and potentially start a business around. Here I also learned the questions work for engagement.

Tips on engaging posts:

• Ask questions
• Pictures of yourself in interesting contexts
• People like pictures of pets
• Tag other accounts

A word on hashtags

I don't know if this works or not, I do believe people beyond my friends did find my content based on the hashtags, but hashtags also enables plenty of spam.

The good & The bad

The bad

Instagram feels very shallow. It's fast paced. A post is forgotten in an hour. It also has many bots liking and commenting on post automatically, which makes it difficult to engage in a meaningful way.

I struggled to find accounts where I could actually learn from and be inspired by. Sure, pretty pictures... but I rather take the pics than watch them.

There is a Discover button and you can select Food, Pets, Fitness, Travel... all fine topics, but I just have no desire whatsoever to watch these things, I prefer experiencing them. I love LinkedIn because I learn so much from the posts there and it's easy to get to know people.

The good

One post resulted in re-connecting with a friend and we had a nice lunch date together.

I also got connected with a cool guy who does travel + copy writing combining stunning travel pics with awesome tips for writing better. If interested you can see his profile here: @svetpdimitrov.

I'm happy that I have a better understanding of Instagram after my experiment, and while at it I learned about branding too - much thanks to the masterclass by Hilary. I highly recommend in order to understand something and learn - do an experiment, e.g a 30 day challenge. This will force you to a) read up on it b) immediately apply the theory. Will definitely do a challenge soon again.

Some cool accounts to follow

I did see some nice marketing (Shane Perry Marketing) and startup things (foundr).

Loved also National Geographic's account with interesting images and a journalist describing the place/animal.

Bye Bye Instagram

I guess Instagram works better in visual industries and B2C, like photography, travel, crafts etc. Not so much for B2B and more business topics.

I will now stop my personal Instagram activity and keep going with my LinkedIn presence because this advance my business and personal brand more efficiently.

What have been your benefits from being on Instagram? Or, why are you not active on Instagram? Would love to learn about your experience in the comments below.