An interesting thread that I can sort of see from both sides of the coin as someone who grew up in the years were social media wasn’t a thing, but one of my brothers being younger grew up in the golden age of social media and leveraged it to the hilt. So much so it ended up helping him launch a few successful businesses but had a massive downside as well, including having his identity stolen and used to scam people worldwide out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. The B.B.C recently did a documentary on my brother’s experiences on social media which is still on iplayer at the moment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rs7s/hunting-the-catfish-crime-gang
For Instagram anyway it isn’t enough to post good photos or videos as nobody will see them, you have to build an audience to be successful on there. To build an audience means that you have to put yourself out there. This means lots of personal posts as that is what ordinary people actually want to see. While Instagram works okay for me, personally I don’t use it in the same way other professional photographers do. Instagram for me is just purely a vehicle for sending people to my website, I have no other interest in it. Recently partly due to my brother’s documentary I have had the opportunity to speak to people who are very successful on social media with millions of followers across the various platforms. All of them got successful by doing the same thing and living their lives on social media and sharing lots of personal information. For me personally that is not something I would be comfortable doing, maybe its an age thing, I don’t know, but the thought of posting videos of myself etc. make me cringe to the max.
Instagram in itself isn’t a good place to start from scratch on as a photographer today in terms of gaining popularity on social media. TikTok has overtaken it massively as the go to place to be for people within the under 30’s age group especially. Just as one example one of my brothers friends has a following of over 16 million on TikTok and just a few hundred thousand on Instagram. Both accounts were started on the same day and have exactly the same content posted to them.
For the o.p question has to be why due you seek popularity on social media? Unless you plan on leveraging that in some way there doesn’t really seem to be any point. I clicked on your Instagram link there in your forum signature and viewed your profile and it seems that you are trying to leverage Instagram to sell prints of your work. Selling landscape prints is very difficult even for people who have a large following on social media as we live in an age were most people see these types of photos as something they should be able to download for free. I am told that even the people that follow you due to the Instagram algorithm will only see 1% of your posts, you aren’t using hashtags etc either so very few people are going to be scrolling through Instagram and see any of your posts.
Please don't take this the wrong way but your account isn't very interesting as its just a lot of random landscape photos and reels, there is nothing there that differentiates your account from the millions of others which are very similar. The way you can make it more interesting for anyone that stumbles across it is to put yourself out there but be warned that has it own potential for creating it's own issues but comes as part and parcel of what you need to do to be successful on there.
The quality of work you post to Instagram doesn't really matter that much, most people can not tell the difference between good and bad especially on a phone screen.
For me personally I am a wedding photographer, lots of wedding photographers spend an insane amount of time on social media with multiple posts a day, trying to beat the algorithm and for many it works well and they book lots of work from these platforms. The ones that are successful put themselves out there. That isn’t for me at all, so I use socials purely for generating traffic to my website. Then hopefully once people reach our website, they like our work and how we do things and then get in touch. This also means I don’t need to worry as much as others do when the platforms they use become less popular. I have been around long enough to see other wedding photographers become very successful by promoting themselves on Facebook, then when Facebook died so did their businesses. The same thing is now happening with Instagram.
