If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed that I’ve been spending less and less time there lately. (Though you may not have noticed, because with the algorithm, you never quite know what you’re going to be seeing anyway.)
But the fact of the matter is, I’m spending far less time there than I once did.
While I was initially a big fan of Instagram (finally, a social platform for visual people!) I’ve become more and more disillusioned with it over the past year.
And I know I’m not alone. I’ve written here before about all the grumbling I’ve seen on Instagram since they were bought by Facebook, switched to an algorithmic feed, and made massive changes to the platform.
But at the same time, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why spending time on Instagram was starting to feel more and more like a fool’s errand. After all, there are people who have managed to build significant audiences and grow thriving businesses using the power of Instagram.
And it seems like lately every (non-artist or maker) online business owner I follow was suddenly telling their followers that the best place to connect with them (because it’s where they’re currently hanging out) is Instagram.
Yet I couldn’t shake the suspicion that all this time spent hanging out on (and creating content for) Instagram isn’t as valuable as we’re making it out to be.
And it wasn’t until I was trying to make sense of what was happening to another photo-based online platform, Flickr, that I understood just how precarious time spent on Instagram truly is.
While mentioning to a friend that I needed to pull images from Flickr for a class I was teaching, she commented that she had heard that Flickr had closed down.
And while this isn’t true, Flickr does still exist, they did delete the majority of images from free accounts who exceeded their new 1000 image limit.
In trying to understand what was going on with Flickr (since many of the images of my work from graduate school and the early days of my business still live there), I stumbled upon this Vox article, which really put into focus my concerns about Instagram.
The article lamented over all the images that are inevitably lost in this process of mass deletion, but it was a quote from another journalist, Kate Notopoulos, that really got me thinking. She said:
“Who knows what Instagram or Twitter or Facebook will be like in seven years, or in 15 years. It’s not a stretch to imagine a day when all our words and images hosted on these services are removed [as] the companies collapse or morph.”
For a while now, I’ve been preaching that if the only place you’re putting an image is on Instagram, you’re wasting that image.
But Kate’s words and the decline of Flickr really emphasized the importance of putting your own images somewhere besides Instagram.
And it’s not just the safety of our own digital archives at stake here.
This is really about the core of your business strategy.
The Internet is always changing. No one knows for sure what the hot new platform will be or when those same hot platforms will cease to be relevant. (I’m looking at you, MySpace.)
Which is why, if you want to build an online business that is built on more than just short term fans, you should focus on two key concepts:
Own your content and own your audience.
Owning your content means that your words, images, thoughts, ideas, and art live on a space that you have control over. A website that you own and manage, where you can take that content to a new space or server if need be. (A self-hosted blog is a key example of this.)
Owning your audience means collecting customers in a way that you can reach out to them as need be, without being tied to a particular platform. (Email marketing is the best example of owning your audience, because you can export your list and take it to a new provider if you don’t like your current one.)
Now, I’m not saying everything you do needs to follow these two rules. Sometimes, it’s worth giving up one or the other in order to leverage someone else’s larger audience or grow your business.
On Pinterest, you don’t own your audience. But when you share from your website to Pinterest, you’re using the power of Pinterest’s audience to point people back to content that you own.
When you write a guest post on someone else’s blog, you’re giving up your content, but you’re doing so with the hope that the other person’s audience will come back to your site and fall in love with your work as well.
The problem with Instagram is that you own neither the content or the audience.
Instagram could shut down your account at a moment’s notice (for no good reason) taking years of images and words down with it. Or your account could get hacked, resulting in that same loss of content.
As as we’ve all seen with the Instagram algorithm changes, you have no control over how many (if any) of the audience you’ve worked so hard to build will actually see your next post.
Now I get that for some people, the potential rewards are worth the risk. If you’ve managed to build a massive following and make lots of money from that following, then what I’m saying about the need to own your content and audience doesn’t really seem that important.
But those stories of massive Instagram success are outliers, not givens.
What I see more often than not with the artists and makers I work with are people pouring their heart and soul into creating amazing images for Instagram, only to see little or no return on that investment.
All that time and energy has resulted in a few hundred followers and barely moved the needle on sales.
Because here’s what we aren’t talking about enough:
When you pour your heart and soul into Instagram, the thing that benefits most is Instagram.
As the owner of both the content and the audience, it’s in Instagram’s best interest for you to keep pumping more and better images onto the platform.
But is it in our own (and our business’s) best interest to do the same?
Is it worth putting so much time and energy into a platform where you don’t own the content or the audience?
It shouldn’t surprise you, from the title of this post, that I think the answer is no.
While reading Digital Minimalism, I took a hard look at the amount of time I was spending on Instagram. I was averaging about an hour and a half a day on the platform, which amounted to over ten hours a week!
Basically, Instagram was my part time job.
So I cut that back to about fifteen minutes a day, and I haven’t regretted it for a second. Not only has it given me time to read more books and allowed me to focus on the people I’m choosing to spend time with, but it’s made me shift my focus back to creating content on platforms I own for audiences I know I can reach. (Like here on Designing an MBA.)
Not only that, but cutting back my time on Instagram enabled me to write and release a new ebook in a month, which not only generated a piece of content that I own (and that I think is pretty valuable to the world) but it made me a decent chunk of money to boot.
Now, I’m sure you noticed that I haven’t quit Instagram cold turkey. The fact remains that I do have a sizable audience on that platform. But I’ve shifted my strategy there to mostly just alerting my audience when I’ve got something worthwhile on one of my own platforms, rather than giving Instagram my best content.
And when I do share an original image on Instagram, I make it a point to post it again on my blog. (Something I teach as a core strategy for any artist or maker looking to start or maintain their own blog.)
But the most interesting result of shifting my time away from Instagram to platforms that I actually own is that I haven’t seen a reduction in income. Which is pretty telling in and of itself. It means that ultimately, I wasn’t generating that much income from Instagram in the first place. The ROI really wasn’t there.
Now, if the bulk of your revenue does come from Instagram, cutting back might be problematic. But I will say that it also speaks to a deeper issue in your business. Having so much of your business tied up in one fickle platform is a recipe for disaster. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but sometime down the road.
And of course, if you’re not seeing the ROI from your time spent on Instagram, it’s time to be brutally honest about who is really profiting from all the energy you’ve poured into creating content for Instagram. Chances are, it isn’t you.
So whether you’re making the bulk of your money from time spent on Instagram or seeing very little results from the platform, my challenge to you is still the same:
Ask yourself how you can shift some of that time spent on Instagram to platforms and audiences that you actually own.
Commit to putting images that only live on Instagram on your blog. Share your new designs with your email list instead of just posting about them on IG. Start building a list of stores that you can reach out to at any time.
I’m not a fortune teller, and, to paraphrase Kate Notopoulos, I don’t know what Instagram will look like 15 years down the road.
But I know I’m no longer willer to invest massive amounts of time or energy into a platform where I don’t own the content or the audience.
Are you?