Instagram What’s Working: Consistency and the Long Game!

This is Part 4 of a 10-Part series. Find all the links here.

Understanding these two key aspects of Instagram gave me clarity on why some accounts seem to do better than others. I have a little bit of a different take on consistency, but I think the real gem here is one interesting stat you’ll find under The Long Game.

Consistency

What I mean by consistency might be different than what you’ve traditionally heard about posting consistently. General advice is to post consistently, whether that’s every day or once every three days, and that posting consistently is better than posting inconsistently. That’s probably true, but I definitely go through periods of inconsistency, and I can’t say that I notice a huge difference. In fact, usually after I return from a break, there seems to be an uptick in engagement.

What I mean by consistency is consistency in your message, visual content, and branding. There’s no one right way to do this, but for me that’s high-quality images and videos, speaking in my own voice about the things we do/love/offer, and storytelling through images.

While I personally opt for high-quality images (you can read why here and 3 key elements here), there are plenty of successful accounts in a wide array of content genres. What’s important is being consistent with who you (and your business) are! It creates that know, like, and trust factor. When you show up on someone’s timeline, they should know it’s you before they even see your handle!

The Long Game

Instagram is ALL about the long game.

While I don’t subscribe to posting on a perfect schedule (though I do my best to post frequently), I do subscribe to consistently showing up. You have to keep showing up! When you’re just starting out on social media, it can feel so defeating. You spend all this time on a great post and it gets 2 likes and one is your mom (been there). My only advice is to not sweat it and move on. Don’t dwell on what doesn’t work, just keep on keepin’ on and when something does work, do it again.

Why? Because Instagram is all about the long game. Let’s try something to demonstrate this. If feel like you’re not gettin traction, while other accounts are, look at one of your favorite accounts. Now look at how many posts they have created.

Let’s use Floret as an example, because everyone knows this flower farming legend. You might first see a whopping 1M+ followers, but I’d invite you to check out one more stat, which is the amount of posts. At the time of this writing: her account as 4,916 posts. For simplicity, let’s just say Erin posts one time per day. That’s 13.5 years of consistently posting one time EVERY. SINGLE. day. That’s what I mean about consistency and the long game.

Now, for reference, look at your own stats. This isn’t to shame any one of us into: post more! post more! post more! It’s to hopefully shed light on the possibility that it’s not your content but simply that there hasn’t been enough possibilities for people to see your content. Instagram is all about the long game. The more times you post, the more possible engagement. The more engagement, the more people times posts get shown. Much like compounding interest, it’s a snowball effect.