Photographs

How I'll be using Instagram moving forward.

Synth Duster

It was recently in vogue (at least for a few weeks!) to leave Instagram and post about it on Substack or YouTube! There was a lot of talk about how you don’t need social media to be a “successful” artist!

I too made a video last week about how some platforms haven’t worked out for me as a musician and Instagram was one of those.

Admittedly, I started using it way too late to get any real traction as a niche independent musician and always struggled with making content as you need to make videos in order to post audio which was annoying as I wasn’t making videos at the time.

My main goal was to get people to visit my Bandcamp page and then later YouTube and Substack but those are hard conversions to achieve on Instagram which has always been one of the most external link adverse platforms!

Then came the final algorithmic decline — I wasn’t sure when or if anyone saw my posts, even my followers — hardly any views, likes, clicks, useless! I used it less and less and effectively stopped a while ago.

But then I got to thinking! 💡

Instagram was originally (before Facebook) a platform used almost exclusively by photographers to share their photography. No videos, no ads, no influencers, none of that stuff! And it still is a platform used by photographers to share their photography but unfortunately that is now a much more secondary concern! I was not on Instagram at the time because I was desktop based so my photo sharing app of choice was the doomed Flickr which was also pretty cool in tech and photography circles back then! (does anyone still use Flickr?)

And I like to take photos, often centred around holidays and finding images for album covers or posts, it’s just a very casual hobby, nothing serious — the only camera I use is my trusty iPhone SE 2020 and I have no immediate plans to upgrade!

So perhaps I could use Instagram to just upload photos, artsy photos with titles which are vaguely related to my work — no videos, no hashtags, no sales pitches, no marketing, no talking or opinions, no expectations, just photos — because it’s fun to share cool photos!

Like a ghost of a previous Instagram that I was never part of!

So that’s what I’m doing — and it’s very liberating! 📸

I wonder what would happen to Instagram if everyone did that, just shared photos?

Probably get shut down!