📰 Instagram Introduces New Updates to Improve the User Experience - Is Follow For Follow Dead?!

[Johnny]

follow/unfollow on Twitter is nowhere near dead.

True, however you’re missing a critical point. On IG you are limited to 7500 people you can follow and this will make all the difference in the world.

[Smylie]

I didn’t think people actually went right up to the 7500 following limit to be honest- I always thought people followed 3500 max at once.

[Smylie]

To follow someone is to interact with someone. The point of interacting with someone is to garner their attention. If you’ve targeted the people you’re interacting with properly, they’ll follow you not because you followed them, but because they like the content you are presenting. If you follow people just to get them to follow back, then you aren’t really building an active and interested follower base.

So, to your point, yes both platforms are different, but the reason why we follow people is to simply garner their attention or to essentially give them a notification with our profile showing up.

If you target people properly, the people you follow won’t care if you follow them back or not because they like your content regardless.

[mecca]

Great! I hope it stops the follow/unfollow tactic. If you really want to talk about what ruins Instagram - it’s not the developers (yet) it’s this marketing method. You get an alert if someone leaves a comment, so I must be missing something when you are saying that you ‘follow’ so that the account gets an alert.

[Alexnvo]

as long as there are people there…and there is a follow button…follow/unfollow will not die. it has proven itself in many areas besides Instagram. until instagram gets a share or repost feature…it will still live.

[Instadog]

Meh, it won’t affect anything and heres why…

IG Ecosystem has evolved a F/U culture. Unlike other social networks (FB, Linkedin, etc) - its not culturally appropriate to follow a stranger. But in IG its the norm. In FB/Linkedin I only change my friends list as I meet new people. But in IG its out of curiosity and boredom to follow/unfollow new accounts.

This change won’t challenge the F/U culture. It will speed it up. In return it will reduce loyalty… so the followback with be high, but so will the unfollowback when users don’t resonate with the account anymore (bad post, too many posts, spammy, financial-incentive based, etc)

[Ilobi]

Thanks for this.

I have seen this for a while now and whilst it does inform me who is following me, to be fair, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it. Like “you are not following me? UNFOLLOW” LOL.

With regards IG and their new updates…I feel meh about them. ALL I WANT IS FOR CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER BACK OR at least an option to choose.

I have been seen updates as old as 6days on my feed. I actually got worried that Instagram had penalized me (Like I was not worthy to see recent pictures LOL).

With regards the f/uf, if they did not make growing organically so damn hard, then people would not hack growth methods. Till then, some genius will keep figuring out how to grow on Instagram.

What they don’t seem to grasp is how much automation and growth due to that, or to users who utilize specific tactics like Follow/Unfollow, mean to the bottom line of their scale. Without accounts growing, they’re going to lose, people will move to the next popular platform when it emerges as better. Instagram is a platform of arrogance and image. If you can’t look the most popular or coolest, you move on to what let’s you feel that way. If you can’t grow your account to be huge, you’re not popular. Based on what they’ve done, they’re making the platform “less better” for anyone using it for gain.

SPOT ON

@wortime LMAO!!! My sentiments exactly!!

[Pezkaito]

Our Engagament will appreciate this, i prefer Users that like my Content and interact with it than people who follows me back only because i follow them and they are going to be ghost followers, less people to block

[SwagWaffle]

RIP IG I look forward to the platform that will replace it. IMO it’s snapchats turn to try and emulate IG.

[mcstutter]

good point!

I’m not that worried about this update. If someone only follower me because i’m following them (and not because they like my page) then they can unfollow me and my engagement will improve

[petcobra]

well yes but the point of follow unfollow is just exposure, who ever stays after you unfollow them
loves your content, and you pump up the jam like this all day every day

[ian]

Sort of, but not always. Many people just follow back and never engage or pay attention again, just becoming a ghost follower as the term goes, which for the most part is useless.

[petcobra]

yes ofcourse ian, like the people who become ghost followers, also the other group of people become fans
lets say you did follow/unfollow u got 10k followers, 3k will become ghosts 3k will leave 3k will stay 1k will become fans
better then not doing follow/unfollow and finished up with 500 followers/250 fans
am right or wat? or what? uhu waht?? yes or w a t
NOW SCALE IT UP AND PUMP UP THE JAM SISTER
like my best friend of fried hes friend wiz khalifa said, work hard on your booty and ride the dick harder

[ian]

Fair point, if your idea is to gain follower numbers and not worry about engagement. But I suppose you can also build engagement up from that point, and remove the ghost followers at the same time. At least that’s one theory.

[petcobra]

Sista you know it

[DaveNL]

I don’t really see how this changes anything

[ian]

It just dawned on me that this could also be extremely useful for those people who use bots and automation, by alerting you that someone has unfollowed you… you might be able to unfollow them more efficiently. I know I used a spreadsheet to track my followers, but this might be much easier now

[odegucci]

Great post

Personally I don’t think this is a huge negative though. In fact, it can actually be a positive IMO. Sure they can see if you aren’t following but they can see who follows you and that’s awesome, right?..

For instance, the fact that “mutual followers” is a plus; for new and return profile visitors. If you’re targeting your niche you’ll likely follow users who follow similar people or have mutual friends. When they come to your profile for the first or even returning time, whether you follow them or not — they’ll see that their friends are following you. Kind like a small form of “credibility”.

I think they’re doing everything that they can to discourage automation tactics.

All though I definitely agree this is true in general, I’m not sure this move by IG was really aimed at automation/bots/etc. IG was bought years ago by facebook for about 2Bili and they’ve been working on ways to make money with it since the beginning. I feel like this feature was aimed more at boosting, improving and fine-tuning the advertising aspects of instagram. Displaying mutual followers of an account (or let’s say brand, influencer, product) makes it easier to target, attract and influence users, mine data and so on. Same thing they did with the mutual likes (showing friends and mutual followings that liked a specific post).

Just my thoughts!

[Adlin_Kujur]

Hi,
It happened to me on July 17, 2018. My Instagram suddenly got disabled. I tried every thing possible way to get my account back but nothing happened. They also sent me codes twice and asked me to click a picture if me holding a sheet of paper which had the code and my details but NOTHING HAPPENED TILL NOW.
I had 14.6k followers and 3-4 years of hard work to build content as I am a social media influencer. I also NEVER violated the terms of Instagram Community.

If you can help me fix this, please do. Please.