As many of you who follow me on Instagram have maybe noticed I’ve been a lot quieter as of late. It started at the beginning of the pandemic I started to question whether sharing my outfits or suggesting people buy things while many were losing their jobs or wondering how they were going to afford rent was the right thing to do. Then my focus shifted to my long-distance relationship, when I was traveling I wanted to keep my focus on quality time rather than blogging, and content creation. Something that when at home takes up a lot of my time.
With that being sort of the catalyst, I found myself sharing photos, and curating my feed less and less. Then I feel like I noticed a shift in Instagram’s intentions, trying its hardest to compete with TikTok and be a shopping platform has flipped every reason I loved Instagram on its head. I loved feeling inspired by the photos on my feed. I liked following friends and other creators to see their daily inspiration and I noticed I was seeing less and less of the content I enjoyed.
When your business or dream career are so tired up in metrics on a social media platform, all you can think about and stress about is the number of likes and the number of followers you have. Unfortunately, that is how brands measure your success or worth. Not how genuinely you show up on the platform, how creative you are, or how passionate you may be about their brand. That sucks.
Even to this day, I dread creating a post on Instagram. I sit staring blankly at the caption box trying to come up with the right words to say to express myself. When a post gets maybe 20 likes it’s hard to want to post when this is how you present your brand.
Sharing on Instagram has been hard on my mental health because talking about how down I am on Instagram is all I want to say. So instead I took a step back. I’ve pivoted my energy into why I started on the platform, to begin with, and that was to share my daily outfits. I’ve been sharing Get Ready With Me videos over on TikTok and it’s been so much fun. I don’t have many followers and get that many likes, but it’s still fun. And I feel like the platform not only does a better job curating your “discover” feed to content you actually enjoy but it also doesn’t make likes and comments as much of an emphasis.
I don’t feel that pressure to curate my feed or worry when one video does worse than another, I simply post whatever I want, whenever I want and it feels so good. So until I can feel that freedom with Instagram I’ve tried to keep my distance and only post when I truly feel compelled.
One of these days I hope the Instagram (Facebook) programmers will realize the negative impacts their work is having on the creators. Even if you’re not an influencer or content creator have you felt like you spend less time on Instagram?
