The Future is Long Form
In the laundry list of announcements from Instagram lately about what they deem as best practices, this week’s announcement about views is the most important metric they use to determine whether your content gets views (Thanks, Mosseri).
The gist is that likes and follower counts are no longer as essential as engagement with your audience. The more engaged your audience is, the more views you get, bringing in more engagement, and around the virality wheel goes.
It sounds great in theory, but the subtext of what Instagram shared is that your account isn’t as important as how much you help keep people on the platform.
“If people are relying more on the system showing them what they want to see in the app, then you need to appeal to the algorithm to maximize reach.” - Andrew Hutchinson
This means we will continue to see more people creating short-form content for the sake of views to satisfy the algorithm, and if your content isn’t delivering based on Instagram’s needs, you won’t get seen.
The bigger problem is that viewers are drained of their energy to stick to content that isn’t a constant dopamine hit. Although many users complain about the mind-numbing memes and trends, watch hours are still up.
The Anti-Beast
People are growing tired of the memes, trends, and the Beastification of content has declined for a while. Viewers are trending toward content that takes a breath and isn’t driven by constant overstimulation.
An emerging trend that’s growing in popularity is more thoughtful authenticity, where people share in a way that’s meaningful, honest, and built for viewers to take a moment to pause and think about what they watched, heard, or read.
Last week, I talked about Blake of Today’s colorful stories wrapped around benign imagery almost perfectly relatable to most people’s lives. Blake’s Instagram is now my favorite account.
Bodybuilder Sam Sulek regularly posts barely edited 30-60 minute videos on YouTube that most viewers might find boring AF, but Sulek’s 3.6 million subscribers eat it up.
Lenny Ratchisky sold a company and started a Substack newsletter about building SaaS businesses. After only a few years, he’s writing weekly to nearly 800,000 subscribers who love him because of the casual and honest nature of his writing.
7-Second Videos Don’t Attract Collectors
Instagram’s short-form dopamine orgy helps them bring in more advertisers, but it’s not helping you find more buyers. The person looking to spend thousands of dollars on art and craft might be on Instagram, but they're not laying down a credit card because you spun a canvas around slowly.
Most creative goods are luxury items. Those luxury purchases require trust from your customers, but building trust with a 1-second infinite loop of you blinking is very difficult.
Memes and trends are fun, and if you want to play around with them, by all means, but if you’re trying to build loyalty and trust with your audience, they are looking for something meatier.
Press Publish
I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a big fan of newsletters. I recommend them to everyone, and I will continue to recommend them because they are the only publishing platform where you are guaranteed the ability to reach out to all of your subscribers.
Newsletters are a hot buzzword right now, and some believe we’re in a newsletter bubble, but the trending patterns are not slowing down, and in fact, you’re still early to the game even if you start today.
Videos, podcasts, and even blogging are all gaining momentum again because people are tired of finding valuable content in a series of 15-second Reels.
Instead, if you tell great stories, the world will beat a path to your door or at least a consistent disturbance of the grasses outside your door.
And though starting a newsletter, YouTube channel, or podcast will take a reasonable amount of time and energy, the reward for putting in that effort can have compound effects on your audience because while most of your Instagram posts seem to drop in relevance days after you’ve shared them, the long-form content lives on and has the capacity to stick.
And if you’re concerned about not having the time, maybe divert some from all that IG doomscrolling that seems to consume us all.
If you’re a creative pro tired of running the rat race of social media but getting no customers, clients, or sales, Join the Hungry, where we discuss marketing strategy, content, and customer relationships that last.
