Why I unpublished my business’ Instagram account
Marketer Jane Hillsdon decided to deactivate her business Instagram account when it was less than two years old. In this crossposting from Smallville, she explains why.
Last week I unpublished my business’ Instagram account.
I started the account in April 2016 and in the time between then, and now I had amassed 3,296 followers. However, there was something that just did not feel right.
As a marketing consultant who spends a good many hours a week marketing on behalf of other small businesses, my own businesses marketing can sometimes be a little neglected. I am certainly active with my marketing as, after all, this is what I espouse and champion with not only my clients but also my tribe. Marketing is an essential ingredient when it comes to growing a business.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
However, just like most small business owners, I have very limited time to attend to my marketing channels.
I’m lucky that I know what I’m doing so I can get my own marketing done pretty efficiently. This though does not mean that I have time to waste on ineffective channels that don’t work for my business. So when I identify a dud. I’m out.
Disclaimer: I have quit my business Instagram profile; however I still have a personal Instagram profile and an Instagram account for my podcast. These accounts are going just fine.
So why did I quit?
I will preface these reasons with the fact that I didn’t make this decision overnight. I studied my business account as well as a whole host of other accounts to try and ascertain if there was something I was missing before I quit. There wasn’t.
The engagement on my posts was so unbelievably low.
To make sure that it wasn’t just dud content or bad timing that was causing this disturbingly low figure, I shared the posts out via my Facebook page as well. The same posts were going great guns on Facebook.
The content on this Instagram page used to get awesome engagement. But that all changed last year when changes were made to the platform that affected organic reach levels. I did also check to see if my page had been shadow banned – it hadn’t.
I’m not convinced my ideal client uses Instagram in the way I need them to.
When I say, ‘ideal client’, I’m referring to the target persona that I have identified as being a perfect fit for my business and who will, at some point, part with their cash to engage me for their services.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved getting likes and comments from people, everyone does. But does this shift the business needle in the right direction?
I provide a professional service, so I don’t have a lot of awesome imagery to share.
And I’m not a graphic designer either. And I’m not willing to pay one to create gorgeous content for people to just like. People are on Instagram to look at beautiful and inspiring imagery; this is just not something I could deliver easily.
Not everyone has Insta-perfect photos to share
I love reposting other people’s awesome and beautifully crafted content. But that’s not a page that reflects my business, that’s a page that curates’ stuff from other people’s businesses.
It just felt like vanity metrics to me.
For a lot of reasons, I just did not feel like I was making a change with my Instagram page. I felt I was contributing content for the sake of contributing content. The likes just felt like validation as opposed to momentum.
My other social media pages (Facebook and LinkedIn) are where I feel that my business creates real impact. It is on those pages that I feel I can add real value.
The learning from this revelation?
If you notice that one of your marketing activities is not performing, it’s time to review its relevance and priority in your marketing plan and budget.
While I was not paying any money to promote my content out via Instagram, it was taking a lot of time to create the prolific amount of engaging content that Instagram accounts require to thrive.
These days, time is almost more valuable than money, and it’s not something that any of us can afford to waste.
Jane Hillsdon is the founder and managing director of Dragonfly Marketing. This post first appeared on smallville.com.au.
I feel the same way, I’m so going to change my business page to personal. I totally agree and as my creative service is not yet a big company, I think this is the right thing for me to do,
Thank you ??
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Read as ‘I published a heap of inspirational quotes and pretty pictures and none of it made me any money’. This is fairly weak advice, especially coming from someone who generates about 8 likes per post on Facebook, and sees virtually no engagement on either Twitter or LinkedIn. The core message here is correct – if a platform doesn’t help you connect with your audience, then you should re-assess how much time you spend on it, but failing to grasp the basics of social media marketing is not adequate reasoning to move on. If you’re a small business, you should be considering not only your organic presence (which, not noted in this piece, would include Stories and Live), but paid reach opportunities also, and you should be making an assessement based on where your specific audience is engaged. Throwing random trend posts at a wall and hoping something sticks is, exactly as noted in the article, just fishing for random engagement – start out with a strategy then make a real assessment.
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But fair.
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“While I was not paying any money to promote my content out via Instagram”
And that’s your problem.
Why would you expect a highly engaged, targetted audience for free?
It suggests you don’t really understand the medium, which as a pro, you really should.
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in a nutshell
“organic reach not working for business”
says marketing expert in 2019.
oh my days!
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Yikes, another ‘digital’ marketer that doesn’t understand the contemporary social marketplace and the importance of paid media.
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Hi ‘Weak Advice’
Thanks for your feedback on this article. I also thank you for taking the time to investigate my other channels and to provide your criticism of those.
It’s nice to see that you have some time on your hands. 🙂
Unlike you, I’ll own my response and not hide behind my anonymity – I think this is a far braver way to act when contributing opinions online.
I think you may have missed my personal profile on LinkedIn though in your research – this is where I generate most of my success. I have found that a person to person approach is far more successful than using the business page. I mostly publish my own articles on Facebook and introduce these via video. The objective behind these are to create awareness and position myself with my audience. The metrics are not measured by ‘likes’ here but by, video views, click thru to website links and by leads – of which I am getting a lot of.
I pay to promote my content via Facebook – not a lot though. I am a regionally based small business, serving a regional market and so the metrics I am getting thus far are ones that I am happy with and in line with my strategy. My decision to leave Instagram for my business was because I wasn’t prepared to pay. As stated in the article – I had determined that my clients were not using Instagram (NB my clients are mostly males aged 45+ who are only just using Facebook let alone Insta) so I decided to not pay and to just leave. It was a personal decision based on a strategic assessment.
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Hi ‘What the dickens’
There were several reasons that I listed as to why I left the platform. You’ve chosen to focus on my first. And you are right, paying to play is the way to go if you want to achieve goals on Facebook & Insta. My other reasons listed provide context as to why I wasn’t prepared to invest in this platform. The main reason was because my target audience don’t use the platform. As a strategic marketer – this is something I would be silly to ignore.
I perhaps should have made this a bit clearer in my article. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
Cheers
Jane
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Hi ‘A Social Z’
Thanks for your feedback. Nowhere in this article do I claim to be a digital marketer. In fact, I don’t believe in the term ‘digital marketer’. I’m afraid I’m just a marketer who uses certain digital channels to help achieve my marketing goals.
I absolutely understand the value of paid media as I spend tens of thousands per year on platforms that produce results. I perhaps should have made this clearer in my article. Thank you for pointing this out. Any feedback that helps me to become a stronger communicator is appreciated.
Cheers
Jane
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Thanks for your feedback Cha 🙂
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Hi ‘This’
I’m sorry that you feel organic reach is not working in 2019. I have found the opposite. If you choose the right platform and the right content (based on where your target audience is and what content engages them), organic success is absolutely still there for the taking. In fact, just recently we published a post on Facebook for a client. Within 24 hours, the post had received 41,000 video views, 375 shares, 10,022 engagements, organically.
We were pretty happy wth that. You are right though. You probably do need to pay lots of money to try and make the wrong type of content on the wrong platform look like it’s working. That’s just not something I’m prepared to do. ?
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