People ask me: How do I grow my Instagram today? My answer...start a TikTok page.
The truth is: Instagram is becoming a dead platform.
While I work on my main newsletter for November, I wanted to get out a bit of a quick hit with some thoughts on the current state of Instagram. My full newsletter and accompanying video will be released shortly and will be a breakdown of Taylor Swift’s robust marketing strategy and discuss her marketing powers. Stay tuned!
People ask me: How do I grow my Instagram today? My answer...start a TikTok page.
The truth is: Instagram is becoming a dead platform.
Yes, I'll hedge what I am saying, as you should still use Instagram and post content to it. It's still a huge platform. Video does well across the board.
However, Instagram does not innovate; it copies. Its most successful innovations, Stories and Reels, are direct copies of Snapchat and TikTok's respective offerings. Instagram started as an app where you could see pictures of your friends, similar to how Facebook started. Now you get Reels recommendations from pages you don't even Follow. Your page is being throttled down if it isn't massive or verified. The kicker is that even Instagram wasn't Facebook or Meta's original app; they bought it, if you recall.
As you can see, every step of the way, Meta has relied upon buying a company or copying a popular feature. Even WhatsApp, one of their big money-makers, was a company they bought. Threads, their newest app, is a direct copy of Twitter, which isn't doing great despite the initial intrigue. There is nothing wrong with acquiring companies, as many companies do. Still, the point is that they stopped innovating once Facebook became popular because they had billions to spend to acquire more popular apps. Copying features that were successful elsewhere worked. They relied on this strategy.
The same thing is happening with Instagram now. However, they couldn't buy TikTok. The years of relying upon copying ideas and buying companies have now come back to bite them because they don't know how to update their current line of apps to continue growing them and making them exciting. Even their ads platform is becoming outdated as ads perform much better on other platforms.
So, now, growth has stagnated for users, images get little to no traction in Feeds, you see recommendations of Reels, they have not monetized the platform for users, they banned the use of 3-party APIs, ads don't perform as well compared to other platforms, and they seemingly think that inserting Threads posts (which contain a heavy-dose of anti-semitism) into the middle of your Feed is going to be the answer.
I hope they turn it around, as people still enjoy Instagram, but their product development teams have yet to show much promise in innovation, harming the user base.