SwipeTown Academy

Since Instagram adopted a news feed positioning algorithm based on follower behavior (between mid 2018 and early 2019). Verified! Publishing Many Times A Day On Instagram Negatively Affects Engagement.

I have been studying the impact on engagement of the number of daily publications, and determining whether it is the same to publish once a day or 10 times a day and what it might mean to publish “a lot or a little”.

It is important to note that the first thing I discovered is that the Instagram algorithm does not reward, penalize or rank you for publishing too infrequently or too infrequently.

What it does do is exchange and intersperse your publications along with those of other users with common followers, which obviously impacts on reach and engagement.

I have been observing for a long time, among the customer accounts I manage, that if I published too many posts a day or if I did it too fast, then Instagram gave the accounts different positions in the ranking, which affected the engagement of each account.

As the results seen in isolation seemed contradictory to me, I spent almost a year collecting data and performing tests to examine Instagram’s actual engagement based on daily publications, compared to before and after the big algorithm change.

Using my advanced analysis tools I was able to collect, during six months of each year studied, data from 48 small and medium sized businesses with Instagram accounts focused on the following sectors:

• Fashion, footwear and accessories
• Restaurants and food at home
• Fitness, sports and healthy eating

I was able to quantify and compare the amount of “like”, comments and “share” my clients received in all publications, based on their daily publication frequencies.

I separated these data into two large groups: those collected before the big algorithm change and those collected after the big algorithm change.

About the sample studied:

The average number of followers of all the accounts studied (together) is 142,000, with a range from 1,000 followers to 600,000 followers.

With what I can say, with property, that I have studied a wide spectrum of followers of all kinds within those three big sectors.

These were the results:

Engagement results vs. daily frequency of publication.

The relationship between the frequency of publication and the reduction of the engagement rate is almost directly proportional; which indicates that: the more publications, the less engagement.

And it’s not that much of a difference, but nobody wants to see their engagement rates decreased, right?

And I said “almost”, because you will see that the accounts that made only one publication a day, has a slightly lower engagement than those that made two publications. Interesting! right?

So it is proven that making two publications a day results in the best engagement rate, although doing it only once a day has a very similar result to publishing twice.

After reviewing these facts several times, I saw that the reading was more than evident: Publishing between once and twice a day can be considered as the optimal number of publications to achieve a better engagement in the mentioned sectors.

This is very applicable to any other sector, as I don’t think it will vary much.

Results of the Engagement Performance of images Vs. videos

1) The images received more interactions than the videos both before the big change of algorithm, and after the big change.

2) There is a big “drop” in engagement in images when changing the algorithm, which tells us how Instagram has caused all of us to lower our engagement rates in a general way, affecting all accounts equally; that is, celebrities, not celebrities, influencers and strangers. The bad news is that the trend is still down.

As you can see, and whatever the “experts” say, images attract much more engagement than videos.

As a conclusion, publishing too often in Instagram will make your publications have fewer interactions, especially if you focus on the videos and if you have already seen that engagement is decreasing on its own, it is better not to make it go lower.

You must emphasize all the actions that can contribute to increase the participation of your followers, is the only way to stay visible in this increasingly complex social network.