• Last week on the Fohr account, we posted a stat showing how much in-feed posts had fallen since 2016. We're down to about two posts a week on average down from four just a few years ago, almost half. I know you're like, "Four and two is half, moron." The numbers weren't exactly four and two, I'm rounding. Scotch in here, so give me a break, but huge decrease in in-feed posts. If you went back further when we started this company or a couple of years after, right when Instagram got hot, you were looking at like 7 to 10 posts a week. Most people were posting twice a day. Influencers, a lot of them posting three times a day.

    We're down to two posts a week, give or take on average. Let's say it probably ladders up to 10 posts a month is the average across our whole platform. Certainly, the algorithm has chewed away at some of that, people feel like they aren't as willing to post because they don't want a post to not do well. Stories is probably the biggest culprit. People are just sharing those more in the moment, off the cuff post on stories instead of posts.

    Also, this stat, you need look no further to understand why Instagram is hiding likes than this stat. They cannot sell ad space for space that doesn't exist. If people are posting only twice a month, the fear I think the existential fear is that the feed stops being interesting, and people default to stories not the feed because there's so little posting happening in the feed. If that happens, the story posts just aren't as valuable. It just fucks up their whole model.

    Really interesting to see just how far in-feed posts have fallen. I then had our data scientists do a little digging and see, is there a correlation between how often you post and how quickly your account is growing? My hope was that the more you post it, the faster you would grow. That's not the case. There's essentially no correlation. You can look at this. You can't really see it, we'll put it up there. It doesn't sell anything really. There's no correlation between how much you post and how quickly you grow.

    What I will say though, while there is not a correlation really between growth and how much you're posting, accounts over a million followers are posting essentially every day, so quite a bit more than accounts that are not. Did that help them get there? I don't know. Are they doing it because that space is so valuable or because the community is so big? I'm not totally sure.

    I think as an influencer you be shooting for five times a week at least. I think without that, you start losing the muscle memory. You're not doing it as much. People aren't expecting it. I think that you need to also be making sure you're putting out enough organic stuff into the world that the sponsored posts that you're doing, don't feel like the only time you're posting in-feed is to do a sponsored post.

    That happened with blogs. Blogs got really uninteresting when they just became places where people posted when they had to for a sponsored post, because it was looped in within Instagram. That happens a lot. It's something, I think, Christina Caradona talked about before she moved to France that she missed posting on the blog, but she was only posting on the blog now when she had a sponsored post. She's moved to France and that's recently changed quite a bit. She's posting a lot on her blog again, which is great.

    But it becomes a ghost town for organic content, and then it becomes uninteresting, and then you lose your ability to make money on it. I think you should still be shooting for five a week. Once a day is even better. If this is your job, this is your job, post everyday. It's not that hard.
    Episode #175
    - Business owners, automation, in-feed post frequency and growth