Happy Sunday!
Alongside the goals I set myself for this year (which you can read about here) I wanted to be a bit more proactive on social media and connect more with my followers and friends. I have a love/hate relationship with social media often going on splurges of activity before getting frustrated and despondent, vowing never to use it again. I have cut down most of my activity on Facebook and twitter, these platforms seem to offer very little return for the amount of time one spends on them. Facebook is still useful to catch up with friends and the groups are a useful feature. The one that still holds my attention is Instagram. I like the level of interaction and it is great for inspiration and a good platform to discover new photographers. With Instagram consistency is key and this year I was planning to post more regularly and worked out a plan to make my activity a bit more regular and coherent, rather than sporadic bursts. One of the biggest changes, aesthetically, was to add the white border around the images, which kind of makes the whole feed look a bit nicer. I also had a play around with the hashtags I was using. Those of you that use Instagram know that hashtags are a good way of getting your work seen, especially if you don’t have masses of followers.
Now this is where I came into problems. Over the last year my average number of likes on my images had steadily growing to around 40-60 per image. Suddenly one of my posts only managed single figures, which I attributed to perhaps posting at lunchtime. I then posted another image in the evening and that managed a grand total of 1 like. Confused, I did some research. Now apparently Instagram covertly operate a shadowban policy. This means if you behave badly or break their terms of use they can limit the visibility of your account, and they do this without telling you. There are a number of vague reasons why this might happen, from using the same hashtags over and over again to using bots to get likes etc. I believe the process is in place to catch people using automated systems.
In my case it was all to do with one hashtag. I had started using #streetphoto, but it had apparently been blacklisted after it had been reported as being spammed. This then resulted in my posts being hidden from all the hashtags I had used. This essentially reduced my visibility by nearly three quarters. Its a strange system and there seems to be a lack of clarity over how the shadowbans work and what can cause it. I’ve gone through and deleted that tag from all my images and things seem to be getting back up and running. I am having a break from posting for a few days to see if that helps. The strange world of Social Media.
If you are experiencing a similar issue there is a good article on the Later blog which details how to avoid it and get things back up and running.
If you are on Instagram and you like my work give me a follow.
Till next time.
Playing in the background today is the Jazz Rap playlist on Spotify