Instagram Algorithms in 2024

The death of the follower?

Author

David Park
August 21, 2024

Hey – it’s David. Welcome to Crafted Growth.

In this edition, we’ll look at changes being made to Instagram’s Algorithms. I’ll cover:

✔️ Why the changes happened
✔️ What it means for artists
✔️ What you can do about it

Estimated read time: 5 minutes 3 seconds

Setting the stage, here are a few realities of social platforms that transcend the recent changes in the algorithms that we interact with daily…

  1. The exchange we make by enjoying “free” platforms, is that our attention becomes inventory that is sold to advertisers. To put it another way, attention is the product; advertisers are the customer.

  2. Billions of people use these platforms, but the supply of attention is not infinite.

  3. Social platforms are motivated to create more supply(attention) by making the platform more engaging.

💡 The changes being rolled out in 2024 are motivated by the desire to increase total usership of the platform, which provides them inventory to sell to advertisers.

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Introducing: TikTok

The emergence of TikTok brought about the era of “for you”, where the algorithm recommends the content—even if you don’t follow the page. This took market share from Instagram, and they have been playing catch-up ever since…

Instagram 2024: the “novelty” algo

Instagram’s answer in 2024 is to launch its version of “for you.” This means that more of the content in your feed will come from people that you don’t follow.

The algo will show you content based on these interactions, among others:

  1. What content do you send to your others in your DMs

  2. What content holds your attention the longest

  3. What content causes a “thumb stop” aka you stop scrolling to watch it

💡Keeping the feed novel is a key way that Instagram can achieve its main goal of retaining more users for longer.

What this means for artists

This will benefit an artist if the content is spot on—maybe you’ve experienced this before. The downside is that if you’re trying to retain engagement with an existing audience, the algo is working against you.

This year, in March, I saw an artist I follow grow from about 15K followers to 100K in about 6 weeks. In the five months since then, audience growth has completely stopped, in spite of her doing everything right in her content strategy.

Most of the artists I follow have had slow to low growth in 2024.

💡Engagement over time is very important if you want to attract true fans of your work who will buy your art.

Time to “beat” the system…

There are many solutions to this problem. I’ll keep today's summary brief and dive deeper into these topics in future newsletter editions.

  1. Move your fans off social platforms into email/SMS.

  2. Become a true Meta customer: Paid Ads align your goals with Meta’s.

  3. Find low-effort ways to create more novel content.

💡Time is precious. Prioritize creating automated systems that will move your fans into mediums where you have more control over how or when they see your content. So when you do go viral, you can retain that audience growth, and increase your chances of selling them art.

Fin

That’s all for today. I’ve included links to 3 videos that you could check out if you’re interested in a real deep dive on this topic.

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