Flogging a dead horse

And getting a new, much smaller, horse.

At the start of the year I wrote this article about how unpleasant Instagram was as both a creator sharing their work and a consumer trying to follow their favourite artists on the platform. The former is surely familiar: uploading a picture you spent hours creating so that a handful of people could see it. Perhaps ten would like it. Five would immediately decide to unfollow you. But Instagram from the point of view of the consumer was just as depressing. I was no longer seeing posts from the people I chose to follow. And when I did, I had to scroll past endless ads or irrelevant and incredibly irritating reels just to see one post that meant something to me.

Anyway the upshot of this post back in January was that I stepped back from Instagram. I didn’t delete my account or boycott Meta or anything quite so dramatic. I just deleted the app from my devices and stopped using my account. And it felt good. It was so liberating to not have to think about content creation when I was creating art. And honestly, I didn’t miss it.

So what’s changed?

About four months on I was chatting to Giuseppe Castellano and he told me something I already knew: Art directors—that is the people who hire illustrators like me—still use Instagram to find those illustrators. That’s not just Giuseppe’s assumption. It’s a fact. So I decided to make a minimal effort to post new work regularly, but not often, to my account.

Once a week would have done but I built up to posting three times a week. The result? A handful of views, ten likes, five unfollows for each post. Building a following takes consistent posting and it takes time, but I should have started to see an uptick in engagement at least.

I think there were several factors at play here affecting my standing within the algorithm:

• My account had been neglected for a long period.

• For an account as old as mine, I had very few followers.

• When I came back from my hiatus, I unfollowed a lot of accounts I was no longer interested in (apparently doing this in one chunk can impact your SEO).

• My art style had changed somewhat from when I started the account and many of my earlier followers might not like what I do now. (In fact when I started the account Insta was new and it was still about sharing photos of your dinner with grungy polaroid filters.) So perhaps a large number of my followers were either not engaging with my content or were choosing to unfollow me.

• Posting and getting little engagement on an account that is losing followers only tells the algorithm this is not a very interesting account. It spirals and feeds itself.

I know things like follower counts and likes are vanity metrics, but if an account isn’t getting engagement and these metrics are heading in a downwards trajectory, that not only seems like a waste of time, it’s also more than a little disheartening. In this video from The Illustrator’s Guide, James makes some convincing arguments as to why the numbers do matter.

The instagram account I’d had for well over a decade was a dead horse that no amount of flogging would revive so I did something a little foolhardy that goes against everything the internet advises you to do…

I created a new account!

Apparently this isn’t a good idea. Supposedly you’re far better flogging your existing dead horse, but I decided to go with my gut. Coincidentally, I was in a severe ulcerative colitis flare at the time. My gut was literally bleeding, but I listened anyway.

That was just over one month ago. Today my new account has 345 followers. A tenth of what I had before, but the key thing is it’s growing and those followers are engaging with my posts.

How did I start again?

I took a pretty organised approach to starting the new account so that I could maximise its reach from the start.

1. I made a list of all the accounts I followed from my old account that I wanted to follow again. Yep, this took a while but it was kind of interesting scrolling through and remembering creators I hadn’t seen for a while. Most of them were still active on Instagram, the algorithm just hadn’t been sharing those posts with me.

2. I made a list of the people that I considered significant connections, whether people I knew in real life or those Insta friends who regularly pop up in my DMs. These were the people I definitely wanted to stay connected with.

3. I set up the new account, with relevant keywords in the bio as well as my user name, and I made a banner. That’s where you use the three pinned posts that appear at the top of your feed to stitch together into one image. You can use this to immediately showcase what you do. I kept mine simple with a single image split across the posts but included my website and Substack/Patreon details on it.

   

   Three pinned posts forming one banner image

4. I messaged my family, besties and critique group buddies asking them to give me a follow and to like my posts.

5. I followed about twenty accounts from my list of favourites. That was it for day one. The reason I stopped there was because I read that following a large number of accounts in one go can negatively impact your position within search results. It’s seen as spammy. Ditto following a lot more accounts than you have followers yourself. I don’t know whether that rule applies to new accounts but no harm in erring on the side of caution.

6. The next day I made another banner for my old account with text on the image saying that account was no longer in use and to follow me over on the new one.

7. I repeated that info in the old profile and archived all my old posts apart from the three that made up the banner. This would give people landing there an idea of what I did but hopefully direct them to the new account. This in itself brought across some followers.

8. I spent some time making a really good post for the new account. A carousel introducing myself with text on the images (all things the algorithm apparently likes). I know I could have just been putting this sort of effort into the old account and I might have seen better results there, but we’re here now.

   

   Part of the first carousel I posted to the new account

9. I messaged everyone on that second list, the people who were significant to me, explaining I had a new account and asking them to join me. Crucially I did this around the same time as posting that introductory carousel. That meant that when my friends saw my message and followed me, the algorithm saw my account getting attention and pushed that carousel post out to more people. Around 50% of the people seeing that post were not followers (a huge percentage compared to normal) and I gained a lot of followers that day that I don’t think had previously followed me. It didn’t occur to me until the next day, that I could use the old account to directly share the post from the new account to the people I was messaging. Sharing the post would in itself help give it more traction.

10. I followed another dozen people from my big list of accounts. Some of whom followed me back. I also clicked on the profiles of my new followers. Part of me felt obliged to follow many of them back, particularly those that were new and didn’t have a large following, but I didn’t. I only followed those I was genuinely interested in. I felt a little guilty about that, but here’s the thing: It’s better to have fewer followers who are actually engaged than larger numbers of followers who don’t interact with your posts, telling the algorithm your posts aren’t of value. In the long run I wouldn’t be doing anyone any favours if I followed them back just out of curtesy. Interestingly, at this point the algorithm started suggesting accounts to me that I had never come across before, that were hidden to me when I was using the old account and I found some great new artists.

11. I followed the 5:3:1 rule. I don’t know how much weight this one carries but I read that for every five posts you like, comment on three and expect one new follower in return. Whether or not it’s true, social media is a social network after all so it’s a good rule of thumb. It’s actually harder than you’d think to implement though. It’s so easy to scroll and double tap on a post, after all, liking someone’s post is a good thing. But stopping and finding a worthwhile comment can be more difficult. I still try to stick to this one though, not so much in order to gain followers but simply to support fellow creators. And as a little aside, the words within comments can also affect the post’s algorithm standing. Heart eye emojis are pretty meaningless to the algorithm, but sprinkling in some keywords along the lines of “beautiful use of watercolours” or “such a cute cat illustration” may help more people see the post.

12. Rinse and repeat. I posted every day that first week, including some older artwork that I’d previously shared to the old account, but always alternating it with new images. And doing all the usual things, using a couple of broader but relevant hashtags #illustration #kidlitart etc. a couple of much more specific tags #naturalhistoryillustrationforkids #procreateillustrator. All the posts I shared that week got twice as many views and twice the engagement any on my old account had been receiving. I posted stories too but always trying to add value, not just check out my new post stories.

    

    An almost equal split of followers and non-followers were seeing my new account, compared to no non-followers on my previous account’s posts

The save function is your best friend

What about improving the Instagram experience as a consumer wanting to keep up with your favourite creators but not wanting the endless doomscroll through wannabe influencers trying to sell you their Instagram success courses?

That’s where the save, or bookmark, function comes in. I’d always used this function on my old account. You can save to different folders so I had, for example, a collection of videos that made me smile (pandas being dicks mostly), a folder of well-made reels that I might use as inspiration for my own reels, and a folder of my favourite posts, just beautiful photo or artworks that I enjoyed looking at.

But more recently I found an even better use of the save function. I started saving one post from all the accounts I cared about the most. They might be my favourite illustrators or they might be old uni friends who don’t post very often, but these are the people I want to see when I go to Instagram and many are ones that get buried in my feed and go unseen. Don’t get me wrong, I still visit the home feed, but the second it gets irritating (which is usually very quickly), I click out and go to the saved folder where I have a handy catalogue of all the accounts I care about. Now when I have a few minutes to kill on the app, I can dip into that curated list and catch up with the accounts I want to see. And engage with them of course!

I managed one month of posting five days a week. Now I’ve definitely lost momentum. It’s the school holidays so I don’t have as much time during the day. And I’ve been spending what time I do have on finishing some dummy books ready for submission. As a result, I haven’t been creating new art that I could share online. I’ve slipped to posting three times a week and many of those posts are of images I’d already shared in the past on the old account. This will change in a few weeks when the schools go back, and I’ve got my sh!t together. The other thing that’s changed is the content I’m seeing on instagram. When I first started my new account I was so excited by all the art-related accounts in my feed. Now I’m seeing a lot of “How to grow your instagram” type posts—most of which are nonsense, and there’s an infuriating amount of adverts, almost all of which seem to be for ITV at the moment. How do I tell the algorithm I don’t watch telly?

While Substack is still my favourite online hangout, I’m enjoying Instagram a lot more these days and that’s the biggest change I’ve noticed. So, absolutely no regrets about ditching the dead horse for a new one. If you want to give me a follow this is my new account.

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And if you’ve found any value in this post and would like to show your appreciation with a gut-healing turmeric latte you can do so here:*

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*Disclaimer: Turmeric lattes are nice but they won’t heal your ulcerative colitis. I am currently relying on long-term steroid use and mirikizumab infusions to keep mine at a manageable level.

Neither of which are working.