Screen Time: On Instagram
Let’s crack open Instagram and see how it works. In yesterday’s blog, I did this with Facebook. Today I want to move on to a more modern outlet and one that may be part of your digital marketing strategy. While Instagram and Facebook are both owned by the same parent company, the way the platforms work are quite different. The game plan here is to take our knowledge of screen time and apply it to Instagram. We’re going to identify what Instagram likes, how users spend time on the app, and how you can use both of those things to your advantage.
Before we begin, right after I posted yesterday’s blog, Meta announced that they plan to change Facebook’s primary metric. Put simply, they’re going to start valuing the number of views a piece of content gets versus variable metrics like “plays” or “accounts reached.” Instagram made this switch in August, both in an effort to match TikTok’s structure. But here’s the reality: none of that matters to what we’re discussing. Screen time is screen time, no matter how you track it. Should you reassess your strategy to reflect this change, absolutely! Should you assume massive change in the larger flow of app usage and function, definitely not.
ANYWAY, let’s talk about Instagram. It’s hard to believe this app was built exclusively for photo sharing. Now a strange amalgamation of what it once was and early Snapchat, Instagram is one of the more robust social apps. Instagram switched to an algorithmic feed structure in 2016, but they remain as one of the more broad outlets. I noted yesterday that Facebook doesn’t have a real content identity.
“Ten(ish) years later, Facebook has become a content wasteland of reposts. Unlike TikTok and Instagram, Facebook doesn’t have a defined content identity. There’s videos, images, text posts, and everything in between. The site has been around so long that inactive pages have millions of followers and something like 30 million Facebook accounts belong to dead people. Facebook has become the social media equivalent of flipping channels on cable TV. Maybe you see something you like, maybe you don’t, maybe you stumble onto a foreign language channel with enthralling content.”
Step one to understanding Instagram is understanding what it’s for. Instagram has one of the broadest, yet somehow most defined content identities out there: visual. I like to say that Instagram is for your eyes, not your brain. Let me say that a third way, Instagram is for pictures and videos. Sometimes those pictures and videos have text in them, but the app exists to give you something to look at.
Case in point, let’s look at the Instagram user experience. When a user opens the app, they’re immediately greeted with the top post, image or video, in their feed. If they want to look at Stories, they click on little pictures. If they scroll through their feed and see suggestions, these suggestions will be videos. When they click on the Search/Discover tab, they’ll see more pictures and videos than they’ll see text box. Back to the main feed, every single caption is in a small font and automatically truncated. Cherry on top, url links are disabled basically everywhere in the app. Where are they enabled? In Stories when they’re shared within a picture or video. Yes, yes, also in the bio. Lay off dweeb.
Now within that defined content identity, there’s a wide range of options. You can post an image, a group of images, or a video to your feed. You can make a vertical video and upload it as a Reel. You can take either of those and share them to your Story filled with gifs and geotags. For today’s discussion, we’re going to condense those options into two groups: Posts and Stories. Posts go on your feed, Stories go in your Story. If those words are unfamiliar, think of it this way: Posts go on your profile and live there forever. Stories are uploaded to your “Instagram Story” and are only available for 24 hours. Put a pin in that, we’ll come back to it.
Ok, let’s talk screen time. A user can spend their time on Instagram in three main ways.
Scrolling their main feed.
Watching Reels
Flipping through Stories
Each of these three options provide a different user experience and foster a different kind of screen time.
Scrolling your feed doesn’t take long, but it’s high engagement. You’re more likely to like, share, comment or save posts from accounts you already follow or that Instagram’s algorithm can feed you.
Watching Reels generates massive amounts of screen time because of its rabbit hole nature. It’s not exclusively accounts you follow, so it doesn’t have a natural end like your main feed. For that same reason, engagement ratios are much lower.
Flipping through Stories is somewhere in the middle. You can flip through them incredibly quickly, but you also have to engage with the app to progress through them. You’re also more likely to accidentally click on an ad because they blend in more seamlessly.
Going back to our last pin, it’s crucial to remember where your content fits among these three actions. Anything that we’ve defined here as a Post will fit into the first two, while the third is reserved for what we’re calling Stories. You can share a Post to your Story, but it will only live in that part of the app for 24 hours. The first conclusion here should be to prioritize Posts over Stories. Better screen time, better engagement, higher priority.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore your Story completely. On the contrary, remember what I said about ads? Screen time may equal value, but ads equal money and that is always an app’s priority. Instagram has the most to gain if user screen time is dedicated to Stories. That means Instagram has every reason to favor accounts who post Stories regularly. Second conclusion, post to your Story as regularly as you can, even if it seems fruitless. It fosters community engagement and Instagram will reward you for it in their algorithm.
All the way at the top of this blog, we established that Instagram’s Ken job is Visuals. Let that be the guiding light of your content creation for Instagram. It feels simple, but it’s effective. Consider Instagram as a wholly visual medium and think about it creatively from that lens. Prioritize your visual creativity to your posts and post to your story as regularly as you can and you’ll see your numbers rise, guaranteed.
Two social media down, three to go. Tomorrow we’re going to shift away from Meta, put on a shirt with buttons and talk about LinkedIn.
See you then,
-MC
This article is the fifth in a series of blog posts about Screen Time. If you missed the first blog of this series, you can read it here. 