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BBP 122: Debunking the Instagram Algorithm Myths with Cat Griffin

Shownotes:

In this episode of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast, Cat Griffin unveils the secrets behind Instagram’s elusive algorithm, arguing that it’s not the enemy but rather a responsive tool designed to promote genuine engagement.

She debunks common myths surrounding follower growth, emphasizing that creating valuable content for a true audience is far more effective than chasing trends or engaging in superficial tactics like follow-for-follow threads.

You’ll will learn the importance of authenticity over curated aesthetics and discover practical tips for making their content resonate. With insights into repurposing content and understanding how Instagram distributes posts, this conversation is essential for anyone looking to elevate their social media strategy.

About Cat

Cat is a dynamic and multi-passionate entrepreneur who embraces collaboration, infuses fun into business, and fearlessly tries new ventures. Her business journey began somewhat accidentally when she grew an Instagram account to a 100k following.

Drawing upon the knowledge and strategies she acquired, Cat combined this with her passion for teaching to develop an array of tools and courses to empower entrepreneurs in leveraging the immense potential of social media for their own businesses. In addition Cat has expanded her business portfolio to include hosting a series of collaborative events annually. These events foster connection and growth among entrepreneurs at all stages of their entrepreneurial journey.

Visit Cat’s Website

Understanding Your Instagram Strategy

In the quest to grow your presence on Instagram, many creators find themselves battling the endless shifts of the platform’s algorithm.

However, it’s crucial to understand that the algorithm is designed to work in your favor when you focus on creating content that resonates with your audience.

The Myth of the Algorithm

One prevalent myth is that the Instagram algorithm is working against you. In reality, it’s responsive to user behavior. If you create engaging, valuable content, Instagram will show your posts to your target audience.

The key is to avoid chasing trends or “fake engagements” like follow-for-follow strategies, which can lead to a reverse snowball effect in engagement.

Creating an Evergreen Feed

An evergreen feed can serve as a powerful tool, especially if you’re not consistently active on Instagram. This could be a carefully curated grid of posts that showcase your personality and offers without needing regular updates.

While an appealing feed might attract initial attention, it’s the content within that keeps visitors engaged.

Optimizing your bio and highlights is just as important as the grid itself. Make sure they reflect who you are and what you offer. This can be your opportunity to create a lasting impression on visitors who are learning about you for the first time.

Repurposing Content Effectively

Don’t hesitate to repurpose your content! Many people need to see your message multiple times to truly grasp it and take action. Utilize Instagram insights to identify which posts garnered the most interest and consider resharing them periodically.

You can take advantage of anniversaries or throwback posts to breathe new life into valuable content that deserves a second chance.

Bottom Line

Ultimately, focus on creating content you love while ensuring it provides value to your audience. Don’t concern yourself too much with keeping up with every trend.

Choose what works for you, be it reels, stories, or good old-fashioned feed posts. Authenticity and passion in your content will resonate far more than a perfectly curated aesthetic.

Remember, the best growth comes from nurturing genuine connections, so keep creating, and let the algorithm take care of the rest!

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Transcript

[00:00:00].17] – Liz Stapleton

Hey there bloggers and content creators.

[00:00:09].18] – Liz Stapleton

Welcome back to another episode of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast. I’m your host, Liz Stapleton, and today we’re diving into the mysterious world of Instagram algorithms and content strategy. So grab your favorite drink, get comfy, and let’s get started learning from Cat Griffin.

[00:00:22].20] – Cat Griffin

All right. So now I want to just go through a few myths and debunk them for you. So we hear a lot about it’s the algorithm. The algorithm is not working for me. The algorithm hates me. The algorithm’s changed. And firstly, the algorithm doesn’t have any major changes that often.

The algorithm does shift and makes changes, but this is in response to people’s behavior rather than it being effectively reprogrammed. The algorithm is responsive. And the algorithm Instagram isn’t working against you. Instagram doesn’t want the algorithm to work against you. Instagram wants people to be happy on the platform, which is why if you start trying to fight the algorithm and you start trying to chase getting followers and getting likes and doing the things you think just to keep the algorithm happy, that’s when it does start to work against you because it starts to get confused.

If you focus on creating content Instagram, which is what your target audience wants to see. It’s valuable content, it’s engaging content for your target audience. Instagram will show your content to your target audience. It will show content to people it thinks will like your content, and you will organically grow.

[00:01:54].00] – Cat Griffin

If you start trying to force that, you start to get confused, which is I’m going to jump number four, why follow for follow threads are not a great way to grow. So when you share a piece of content on Instagram, Instagram will share that content based on a few factors. It will share it to around 10% of your audience initially. And the audience it shares it with are people who are recently active on the platform, but people who have engaged with your content recently, and your new followers.

Because if someone has just followed you, Instagram thinks that, hey, they must love your content, right? They’ve just found your account, they’ve just followed you, they must love your content. So they will get high priority. So if you’ve done a follow for follow thread, and then you’ve done a thread maybe of liking people’s comments, any fake engagement thread like that. Instagram is going to think that these people are your target audience. They’re going to think that these people love your content because they’ve just followed you, they’ve just engaged with you. But the reality is a lot of them won’t be your target audience.

[00:03:13].15] – Cat Griffin

Even if you’re in a group of people that are maybe similar business people to you, are they your target audience, really? And the answer, most of them won’t be. And even if you do find a group of people that are 100 % your target audience, you’re not going to be the person for all of them.

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to have people follow you, people engage with you for the follow back, for the like back. Instagram is then going to show these people your content the next time you share something? ‘ And because you’re now no longer in the follow for follow thread, you’re now no longer in this fake engagement scenario.

These people aren’t going to engage with you because there’s no reason for them to. They’re not following you for your content. They’re not obliged to in any way. They’re just not going to engage back with you. This tells Instagram that your content is low quality because these people that loved you a couple of days ago now don’t want to engage with your content. What else should it think? So it won’t show your content any further and the reach of that post will be reduced.

[00:04:27].06] – Cat Griffin

And this becomes a reverse snowball effect. So as more and more people are not engaging with you because it will become more and more these recent followers that get shown your content, your organic followers, people who do love what you do, people who do want to see your content, won’t be showing your content.

Okay, off my soapbox with that one. So the next one is you don’t need to keep up with real trends. So I talked about this a little bit before. The way that reels work now is trends are not the be all and end all. It’s much more important to focus on creating content, firstly, that you enjoy creating and which will resonate, which will deliver value to your target audience. And shocker, you don’t even need to create reels at all. If you absolutely hate creating reels, and this is stopping you using the platform because you feel you should be you’re creating reels or nothing, then just don’t create reels.

There’s still feed posts. They’re still doing great. You can still use stories. You can create carousels. You do not have to use reels if you don’t want to. And then the final one is that you need to have a beautiful feed.

[00:05:50].07] – Cat Griffin

Okay, a beautiful feed might be a tiny nudge in getting someone to follow you. But if you think about when When someone lands on your feed, they’ve either got to your feed because they have seen content you’ve already shared and they’re interested, so they’re going to find out more, or they’ve been on your website and they’ve clicked the link through to your Instagram to find out more, or somebody has recommended you as a great person to follow, so they’ve gone to find out more.

By the time they’re actually on your feed, they’re already interested in you. So yes, a beautiful feed might make them stop and think, wow, this is a really nice feed. This looks great. But in all honesty, they’re really looking at what the content is and is that content interesting and relevant to them. So if you are naturally creative, you’re naturally artistic, you naturally are brilliant at putting together cohesive feeds, fantastic. Do that. But if you You have no idea about how to create color schemes and matching posts and all that, don’t worry about it. You don’t need to do it. Okay. Final couple of things, pinned posts.

[00:07:17].18] – Cat Griffin

So a couple of years ago, Instagram added the possibility of pinning posts at the top of your feed, and you can pin three posts. These can be Brilliant in two main situations. If you are running a specific sale or promotion, you can use these top three posts to promote that.

And day to day, you can use these top three posts a little bit like how we talk with highlights to showcase the best of your business. So again, you could have one which talks about you, what you do. You could have one which showcases your best services, one which showcases your testimonials. Or they could be three really, really great value pieces of content with really strong call to actions.

But you want three really strong pieces of content up here. Which are going to either direct people to where you want them to go outside Instagram, if that’s your goal, or they’re going to be really good incentives for people to follow you because, hey, this content looks amazing. And evergreen feeds. So we’re starting to hear quite a bit about evergreen feeds, and there’s two main functions of when you would use an evergreen feed.

[00:08:43].15] – Cat Griffin

Number one is if you only want to create reels, but you want to have a beautiful feed when people come and have a look at your feed. Now, I don’t recommend an evergreen feed in that situation because I don’t think it’s represented instead of who you are. So if you’re creating content that’s reels and people land on your feed and just see this very curated static feed, that doesn’t give them an indication of what content they’re going to get from you.

Personally, I feel it’s much better to not worry about having that beautiful feed and having those reels up there so people can see the content you create, the content you share, get to see who you are, and decide if you are right from them for them based on what you actually do, what you actually share.

And if you really want to make it a beautiful feed, you can actually put covers onto your reels. So it’s not like you can’t still have a curated feed when making reels. So my personal advice is don’t use an evergreen feed in that situation. But perhaps you want to take a break from Instagram, or perhaps you just never want to use Instagram at all.

[00:09:57].07] – Cat Griffin

Despite everything I’ve talked to you about today, you’re like, No, I don’t use Instagram. And an evergreen feed is essentially for a nine or a 12 grid, and quite often they’re a cohesive image or a puzzle feed. They look beautiful. And you post this once and you never post again. So you would use this to really showcase who you are, what your offers are. And you would do this in the instance that you don’t want to be active on the platform, but you know your audience are going to go and look for you on the platform.

These days, so many people, when trying to suss out a business or a person, they go to Instagram to find out more about them. So if they can’t find If you’re looking for anything, you’re taking away the opportunity for someone to get to know you better. So if you haven’t have an evergreen feed, this serves as a place where people can get to know more about you if they’ve gone looking for you. It doesn’t allow you to grow. It doesn’t attract new audiences. It’s a very, very, very tiny growth, if any, you will get from an evergreen feed.

[00:11:10].09] – Cat Griffin

It’s literally there for people who go and actively look for you. Now, most people, when they teach you evergreen feed, they will only talk about the content that you need in the actual grid. When I teach evergreen feeds, I teach it’s also just as important that you You have those highlights on perfection and your bio on perfection.

This is your one chance, after all, for people to be seeing the content you’ve shared. Make sure you’ve got the whole experience of the blending on your feed doing all the work for you, really letting them get a good feel for you and who you are.

And final quick point is I do want to say it’s okay to repurpose your content. So if you don’t want to be constantly churning out new content, then you can repurpose content. And it does help people if you repurpose content. If you think people need to see something multiple times in order to really get a good idea in order to take action. Then repurposing your content gives you the opportunity to reshare advice, reshare your message with your audience. So you’re actually helping them to take action on the advice that you’re sharing.

[00:12:34].20] – Cat Griffin

If you are reusing content or repurposing content, you can use your Insights on Instagram as a way to see what content your audience want to see again or want to see more of. You can also take advantage of things like anniversaries. I shared this a year ago. It’s still amazing today. Or throwback posts, similarly. You can use it to add a fresh look to something. Or if there’s current events, you can go back to an old post and give it an update of, I shared this last year.

This has changed, but the rest is still great. Or you can just simply reshare something and say, Hey, this is so valuable. You need to know this. If you missed it last time, I’m sharing it again so that you don’t miss it.

And don’t be scared to do this because do you remember what you posted six months ago? Probably not. And I can almost guarantee your audience won’t remember what you posted six months ago. So resharing, repurposing that content is not going to look bad at all.

[00:13:40].02] – Liz Stapleton

All right, that wraps up our whirlwind tour of Instagram, this and must know strategies. Remember, focus on creating content you love and your audience will find valuable. The algorithm will take care of the rest. Thanks for tuning in to the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your fellow bloggers. Until next time, keep creating. You can learn more about our incredible speakers in the show notes, so be sure to check them out.

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