Have you ever felt that sinking feeling of posting something on Instagram that gets zero engagement? And no matter how much everyone shouts ‘it’s the algorithm’ it doesn’t make you feel any better, right?
I get this a lot. I don’t have time to create something MINDBLOWING every day, just so I can keep the algorithm happy and get my posts seen. And all the marketing pros say you have to post MINDBLOWING stuff and tell stories or people just won’t be interested. So if I follow those rules, I may as well close my Instagram account and not bother at all, because as a freelancer, I just don’t get time to do that amount of personal work, let alone ‘tell stories’.
For now, I just want to draw people on Zebra crossings…
But, what if we go back to basics. Go right back to when Instagram was fun and not about marketing, but just connecting and keeping a record of some snippets of your life/work, before Facebook Ads took over and told us all we should be selling ourselves every time we post on there.
Well, I’ve starting using the magic button to do just that. It was a bit weird at first because I stupidly thought that everyone else was interested in how much engagement my posts got. They aren’t. No one thought ‘Oh, 100 likes, eh? I better like this too…’ or ‘hmm, only 2 likes, I won’t like this one either’. That magic button is called Hide Likes.
It frees you of insecurity. that feeling like you have to market every piece of work you put up online. It stops that notion that everything has to be perfect. Instead of getting the satisfaction of likes, you get the satisfaction of just building a little world full of your work. You stop playing to the crowd and focus on what you love. You no longer feel the need to be perfect. I’m posting more often and without the heavy feeling that I’ve just thrown out a line to try and hook likes and followers (and without that feeling of failure when that doesn’t happen).
Try it for a week and you will feel the pressure lift. Let me know how it goes!