23 Jun Life after Being Suggested User on Instagram

Well, it’s been about 6 months since I was featured as a user and numbers have steady fallen from it’s peak of 27K to currently 23.2K. I expect it to continue to drop gradually until we get back to the pool of real fans who are genuinely interested and engaged with my content.

So here is a six months stock take of the mad increase in fans. Some thoughts

The Bad

1. Clearly, the mass pool of fans that have increased in the weeks I was featured are not all genuinely interested in my posts. Engagement is low for the huge number of fans – this affects my otherwise pretty healthy engagement that I had painstakingly actively built. As with Facebook fans when you sprinkle investment in, you get a whole lot of new fans – but not all of this base are targeted and your engagement usually suffers.

2. As the fan numbers continue to drop at a slower pace, it is clear that either i) The fans are robots and their accounts deleted ii) People that initially started following me have lost interest in my diverse range of topics I cover on my feed.

3. SPAMMED: I am getting tagged in all sorts of spam and getting plenty of spam comments that takes time to clean up and keep my profile.

The Good

1. I have been getting paid requests to endorse products, none of which I have taken up, because thankfully I have a paid work that allows me to only support brands that I love.

2. Meeting a bigger community of people with similar interests and as mutual followers which has greatly expanded my circle

3. Where like minded individuals in my case visiting Macao or who live in Macau connect with me in real life over a common interest – food & architecture.

So, wait how did I get featured as a suggested user to begin with? I was on a month of medical leave in December and had time to recalibrate my own digital strategy since I was always so busy working for clients, I never had time to work on my own channels. Here’s a few things I switched out and then I got featured – and one of the main things is probably because I started to post 3-4 times a day to hit every continent’s peak posting timezones. You can read all about the 6 key changes I made here.

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