The Coming Fall of Instagram

It’s no secret that Instagram is on the decline along with it’s partner Facebook. According to sproutsocial.com, the user engagement here is declining but the users signing up is not.

It may seem like that is just the cycle of things but I believe there is a very specific trend in the failures of social media companies.

Not all social media platforms have to follow this trend but it seems as if all public ones do. The focus on profits seems to be destroying their business as it does with many late stage large companies.

Let’s get into the signals that are signalling that Instagram is going to follow Facebook into the depths.

Signal 1: Rise of ads= Fall of business

Let’s be clear here, I’m not saying that Instagram shouldn’t use ads or make money, I’m simply saying that the excessive use is a signal.

We’ve all noticed that since the beginning of Instagram the ads have increased. As Meta tries to boost profits for shareholders there simply need to be more and more ads as user numbers have trouble growing over a huge base.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

— Mark Zuckerberg

As you will have also noticed with Facebook and Snapchat, the ads went from one ad per about every 5 stories to one every other story. They also increased ad frequency in the newsfeed.

This is not inherintly a problem in any company, except with Instagram and Facebook formats it starts becoming extremely disruptive and provides a poor user experience over time.

Signal 2: Harassment

This is a big one, the harassment of users has long since been a tactic for Facebook and signals the decline of user engagement.

Harassment happens when the company has become so focused on shareholder profits that they must increase profits at any cost. Facebook did this through more user engagement and thus implemented this strategy.

Instagram will now shove push notifications in your face to get you on the app and the more that user engagement declines the more they do this, which leads to a death spiral as it creates horrible user experience.

The notifications turned from being “So and so liked your photo” (Which is useful) to “Your friend of a friend of a cousin of a friend liked someone else you don’t knows photo”.

This form of harassment of the user is slowly killing them but it won’t show in user sign ups, it will show in user engagement which it is already doing.

Signal 3: We can be everything!

Instagram had great success in killing a large part of Snapchats business by adding stories to their feed. The issue is that this was rather a small change on your screen but also very useful.

This made Facebook think that they could kill any competition by simply replicating their product.

Pinterest came on the scene and what did Facebook do? They added shop to Instagram. A shop might I add that is disruptive to the flow of the app unlike it is on Pinterest and thus, could not kill Pinterest in any way.

Next, Facebook’s nightmare came along; Tik Tok. Tik Tok took the spotlight as they came on the scene with users becoming addicted to the new form of social media.

Facebook then tried to throw in Reels to their feed but again, there was an issue. No one was going to Instagram for that purpose and as you’ll see in the next Signal, they have a drastically worse algorithm.

Now Reels is simply reposted Tik Toks and very few people actually care about the feature of the app. They’re simply trying to be too much.

Signal 4: The Marketers Nightmare

This one is right out the capitalist playbook section 1 and the steps are as follows.

Steps —

(1) Make sure your first few groups of users gain tremendous amounts of follows by letting the algorithm feed them.

(2) Increase the faithfulness of users by keeping system the same for a few years

(3) Now that you have the faithfullness of your users, take the juice out the algorithm so that whenever anyone wants success on your app they must pay for your ads.

The problem here is that when an app like Tik Tok comes around and users can get seen just based on the quality of their content; why would anyone then use your app?

Tik Tok is stealing user engagement from Instagram because not only do users feel like they don’t have to pay but brands do as well.

Brands can create fun engaging content, and then have their content seen by millions with spending a dime, much less hundreds of thousands on Instagram.

Summary

Everyone knows Instagram is falling off a bit but these signals show it to be true. Meta is only going to accelerate their death with a horrible user experience and all the countless blunders they have made.

Look to have competitors rise up and steal Instagrams cash with simply better products like Tik Tok.