After an analysis of user behavior on Instagram in the past few months, we noticed a drop in engagement on brand accounts. There are a number of factors that might have contributed to this shift, and we feel it is important to keep these points in mind as we head into 2021. We have outlined the 4 most influential factors below:

An influx of content competing for impressions

There are more posts to digest on Instagram with more content types, such as stories, IG live, shoppable posts, and the introduction of Reels. With more ways to engage with content, individual post engagement rates have seen a decrease.

The 2020 election

Instagram implemented several algorithm changes, such as removing the “recent” tab when viewing hashtags. This may have impacted hashtag strategy as only top-performing posts appear under hashtag searches.

Users were divided over the popularity of election-related content. For the majority of October and November 2020 users turned to social media for both news and news-related humor. On the other hand, Instagram users generally tired of politics taking up their social media space. 55% of people said they felt “worn out” by political posts on Instagram and were less interested in scrolling through social media at all. Moving into the holiday season, we expect this factor to decrease.

Instagram is testing different user interfaces

People might be experiencing the app in different ways, causing them to engage differently. In the US, there are currently around 3-5 possible UX configurations within the Instagram App as they test out new features.

Different versions emphasize certain aspects of the app, one of which has an entire page dedicated to stories. In addition, some versions are hiding the number of likes. When the hidden like counts update was announced, we predicted that this would have an adverse effect on the overall engagement rate.

Story performance vs. overall engagement

In an internal study across clients, we found that while post engagement rate is seeing a decrease, story performance (measured in reach and actions) has seen either growth or sustained performance. This tells us that Stories are rising in popularity and daily use across users since they appear to have been unaffected by the variables above.

We recommend using your Instagram Story consistently to continue to reach users that may have decreased their time spent in the feed, and to consider altering your feed posting cadence to decrease posting frequency and allow your star posts to reach peak performance before burying with another post.

What Can We Do?

Given the data supporting story performance and the various new methods of reaching users within the app, here are our recommendations as we consider 2021 strategy:

Increase Story posting frequency to have 1-3 story frames posted each day.
Decrease Feed posting frequency to every other day, allowing post performance to ramp up before burying with another post.
Boost your top-performing organic posts to amplify your best posts to new audiences.
Experiment with new content types, including Reels and IGTV. Keep in mind that third-party platforms reporting on overall engagement rate, impressions, reach, etc do not have access to any Reels or IGTV insights reporting, meaning that if you do increase your Reels/IGTV posting frequency this will result in what looks like a decrease in these KPI through your third party platform. Don’t be alarmed, and instead compare your IGTV and Reels performance to your average Feed post performance.