instagram hack #1
As someone who has loved Instagram as a fantastic tool to both document my work as well connect with collectors, galleries and the creative community, I have been increasingly frustrated with the viewing experience.
There’s a big post brewing but I wanted to list a few hacks to make your viewing experience a little better.
Favourite your 100 top accounts
It may feel like you’re not really seeing much from the accounts that you have chosen to follow. I can attest to how frustrating it is to post something and then you look at the stats (which I don’t do often) and Instagram has only shown the post to 120 people!
The more followers you get, the less people get shown your posts. Take the fantastic Australian Ceramics account, with over 70,000 followers you would expect more than 100 likes on a post - and 2 years ago they routinely got thousands of likes for one. But I would guess that very few people now actually see the images they share.
Meta (who own Instagram & Facebook) want account owners to pay to “boost” their posts to show them to followers, and its big business! I’ve found that any post that has key information about a sale, market or exhibition opening fares especially badly.
What you can do: You have the ability to “favourite” 100 accounts. This will put those accounts higher in your feed and display their posts in chronological order.
When looking at your home feed there are three dots to the right of account name - click on that and a dropdown appears. Click on the “Add to Favourites” button.
I would also suggest you go through who you follow and check in with that list, you might find there are accounts you haven’t been shown for ages. For me I’ve noticed that Dinosaur Designs always gets restricted and I love their photography so I’ve favourited them. If you go to an accounts home screen, click on the “following” button and click “Add to favourites” on the dropdown.
If you’d like images and more detailed instructions on how to favourite an account I found this blog post on how to do it
I reckon simply favouriting your top 100 accounts will change the vibe of your instagram experience. I’ll write next about another fantastic hack to claw back the good feels from the Instagram app!