Instagram Is Losing Engagement

In a recent cold email pitch from a social media agency I was told that I should begin panicking, Instagram engagement was down. It dropped from 1.1% to 0.9%. While that’s only .2%, the email said a difference of 18%, to sell in the panic they were attempting to engender.

Now social media engagement is important. Without engagement you might as well use a billboard, TV or radio ad, or even a print ad. Let’s forget for the purposes of this article that there is zero (0.0%) engagement in any of those channels despite the perceived importance of audience engagement and no one bothers writing about the state of engagement for traditional media, which, interestingly, has reportedly stayed completely consistent since 1950. Stay tuned for my article What is the Engagement On My Radio Ad? WTF Knows?!

Abandon All Hope! Instagram Is Lost!

So, engagement on Instagram is down. Oh no! How will we ever reach Millennials Gen Z?! Quick, someone call FEMA, buy up as much bottled water as you can! Or calm down. Engagement is down, so what? Without knowing exactly what they’re measuring, let’s assume engagement IS down and examine why and why it matters, or doesn’t. The email quotes a report from Trust Insights that they looked at over3,600 brand pages and 1.4 million posts, including Stories from January to June 2019. For those that are counting, that’s 388.89 posts in 6 months, or 64 per month, 16 per week, 2 per day. First, let me applaud brands for posting at least 2.3148 posts per day. Second, let’s look at the growth of Instagram over those 6 months.

While I was unable to secure the user growth data of Instagram from January to June 2019, I was able to find IGs growth from June 2013 (130 million active daily users) to June 2018 (1 billion ADU) and extrapolate possible on-boarding of new users by month. Instagram has been adding users at approximately 14.5 million per month. Let’s assume that there was nothing special about the last 6 months that might have impacted user growth trends on the platform, and we get 87 million new users from January 2019 to June 2019.

The Rogers Scale of Adoption

Now let's discuss something called the Rogers Scale of Adoption, the Rogers Curve, or the Technology Adoption Curve by Everett Rogers from Diffusion of Innovation, 1962. The Rogers Curve illustrates how the adoption of new technology begins with innovators, a small portion of users. Innovators are people like me. I got into Facebook while it was still at Harvard through the sister of a friend that worked there and set me up with a fake Harvard email. I was in the audience and signed up when 2 skinny hipsters announced their new competitor to MySpace and Facebook called Twitter. I stood in line for both the first iPhone and the first iPad and still have my click-wheel iPod Photo (my 10-year-old uses it and the 64 GB of classic rock I uploaded to it). These early adopters set the stage for platform use. They get ignored in strategy meetings, are accused of wasting time on that “social media nonsense” and asked to show off their silly new “touchphone” gadgets by people with Blackberries and Razrs. They are a very small percentage of users. Next comes early adopters. These are typically professionals and people who are curious what the buzz is about. They are the audience that gets the media talking about new technology and learn about it through innovators’ unboxing videos. While this audience is not small, it ramps up slowly until it peaks and brings in late adopters. Early majority is when almost everyone but hold outs are using the platform followed by late majority, your buddy Pete in the cubicle on floor 4 who excitedly tells you by the water cooler that he's on Instagram now and is going to be a huge influencer. Following them are laggards; your mom or dad, my girlfriend.

Engagement is high for innovators and early adopters. They are poking around, establishing best practices, seeing where the opportunities are, sharing with each other, learning. They are there because they are curious and want to know the new tech intimately. The early majority have a similar drive but not as intense, they're just a bit late to the game. The late majority are there because they feel they should. It’s not in their nature to be highly engaged. And the laggards were dragged there kicking and screaming because it’s the only way to see pictures of their grandkids. Every platform, if it doesn’t die off before the curve picks up (RIP Digg), goes through this cycle which, after the cycle peak, sees the highly engaged innovators leave for the next new thing. Simple math will tell you, whether you’re talking about 10 users or 10 million users that as platform populations grow, with less engaged users, that overall engagement will drop. With 3 users, 2 of which are engaged, you’ve got an audience, 67% of which are engaged. With 10 users, 5 of which are engaged, you get an audience with 50% engagement.

Engagement Is Dropping. So what?

Engagement on Instagram is dropping. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s the same cycle I’ve seen over the almost 25 years I’ve been doing social media. Engagement may be dropping but the number of engaged users is actually much higher. And because so many low-risk brands are finally jumping on board IG, their attention is more divided. But since 2008 the platform has grown 669%. So while the engagement percentage has dropped, you're still seeing more engaged users than in the early days simply because there are more users.

First Mover Advantage

Marketers finally setting aside budget and developing strategies for Instagram have already missed out on the first mover advantage enjoyed by more risky marketers. This is part of one of the most interesting and frustrating aspects of social media; by the time you can get the c-suite to buy into a platform, all of the opportunities you’ve been trying to sell them on have evaporated. All the backdoors and glitches (ask me about putting images and videos in the same ad set on Facebook sometime) or unknown consequences of the platform have been ironed out and can no longer be taken advantage of. All of the unpaid guerilla possibilities have been codified and monetized by the platform. Best practices have already been established by more innovative marketers and brands so now you have to play by your competitors’ rules.

Taking Advantage Of A New Platform

I’d tell you to set aside an experimental marketing budget, or to stress test some quirky new app, but I’ve been telling you that for over 2 decades. If you didn’t listen when I told you about Prodigy, or about AOL, or about Friendster, or about MySpace, or about Second Life, or about YouTube, or about "The Facebook", or about Twitter, you won’t listen now. Or maybe you’ve already been nailing that Snapchat and LI Navigator strategy?