Instagram follows Facebook in reducing organic reach​

Want to reach your audience in Instagram? Now you’ll have to pay.

There’s a rolling decrease in reach across Instagram accounts.

While there’s yet no official announcement regarding the changes and the behaviour can’t be seen in every account; the decrease is beginning to hit both individual and business/creator accounts across the globe.

Background

Since June 2019, Instagram users noticed a considerable decrease in performance, both in reach and engagement.
An article published on The Drum “Agencies voice concerns that Instagram is killing organic reach“ states:

“Scores of Instagram users and agencies recently took to the social network to voice concerns over a sudden dip in engagement on their posts. Speculation around an algorithm change was dispelled by an Instagram spokesperson, but it’s left a question mark over what caused performance drops.

One influencer marketing agency told The Drum that over the last few weeks initial data across a couple of clients had shown “a reduction in impressions and engagement when you’d expect it to be similar”.

Comms consultant Ste Davies speculated: “It seems that the Instagram algorithm is going the same way the Facebook page algorithm did in 2014. The golden age for engagement is over and they’ll be ramping up the monetisation from now on.”

This is in parallel to the changes in Instagram that prioritize ad placement.
For example, Facebook doubled the amount of ads shown in June and at the same time, Instagram added new ad spaces in Explore, among others.

The Facebook page algorithm?

This behaviour happened in a similar manner in Facebook pages.
Research by Hubspot states that in 2012, page managers learned that they only averaged reaching 16% of their Facebook fans.

By 2014, that number dropped to 6.5%. Then dropping to almost 2% by 2016.

And Instagram?

Trust Insights analyzed 1,430,995 posts, from 3,637 brand profiles (Stories not included) to gauge the engagement rate.

They found that “The maximum average engagement rate year to date for this selection of branded accounts was 1.54% on April 15, 2019. The minimum engagement rate was 0.8% on June 23, 2019.” As per the article.

We can see this behaviour in a similar analysis of 150 influencers from the fashion industry:

In which Trust Insights found “A maximum of 4.3% engagement on February 17, 2019 to a minimum of 2.4% on June 20, 2019, representing a 44% decline in engagement for the same period of time.”

Finally, another sample from 4k medical aesthetic accounts also saw large scale declines:

Finding that: “Engagement per post in July 2019 was down 23% from May peak. Mid-month August results are down 38% from May.”

The behaviour has been going on for almost four months and appears to be ramping up, with hashtags also decreasing in effectiveness to reach new audiences.

Since there is no official announcement from Instagram, the behaviour can be seen within these samples and appears to be driven by the need to create ad space.

The fact remains that organic performance in Instagram is decreasing across personal and business/creator accounts alike, which means less engagement and less likes with  Instagram following in Facebook’s footsteps.

What can we do?

As reaching new users will be harder without paid ads within Instagram and visibility across current followers will decrease, there are few options excluding paid ads:

• Share posts between platforms (Twitter)
• Share Instagram posts as Stories.
• Emerging platforms such as TikTok may offer newer niche audiences but limited variance of audience type.
• Adjust performance benchmarks if the account only has historical benchmarks proportional to the drop.