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“Instagram has a clear incentive to lower organic engagement rates on business accounts because they want businesses to pay to reach people.” Is that true?
Is that true? We are a collective of DJs who organize parties, we would like to switch to “Business Profile” to use the full features of Hootsuit but we read this and then we’re not sure if it’s a good move!
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1 Reply
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Hi! The answer is yes and no.
Social networks are incentivized to provide value to advertisers. But they’re also incentivized to keep organic engagement rates high. That’s because the organic engagement allows them to collect data that they sell to businesses.
To put it another way, data is the core product produced by social corporations. Organic engagement is how they collect data. They then sell that data to businesses in the form of audience targeting.
All that said, consumer attention – the goal – is obviously limited, and within those limits you have to ensure your advertisers receive value through impressions while also ensuring engaging organic posts generate data through interactions. So you might give a paid post priority in the algorithm and user feeds over an organic post that does NOT generate interactions.
Meta takes this a step further and also rewards advertisers for generating interactions on paid posts, which allows Meta to collect more data. If your paid post is emotionally engaging and it generates interactions, you pay a lower CPM.
The best way to succeed without paying is to post content that emotionally engages the audience and generates interactions. To your question about moving to a business account, I oversee social for a U.S. news corporation with dozens of large branded business accounts and thousand of journalist accounts – I haven’t seen any evidence that having a business, creator or personal account impacts post interactions.
And with all that said, rumors have obviously been floating around lately about Twitter actually taking steps to de-emphasize organic Tweets in favor of paid. But there are a lot of rumors around Twitter right now. Only Elon knows the truth lol
Hope that helps!
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Yes that’s true, I guess the question is do you trust Instagram aka Meta to act with integrity and not do that?
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Ibwork in a e cigarette business, we can’t legally pay for commercials or anything.
Thz market isn’t as dependent on social media as other markets, but it’s still gonna be a challenge
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I wouldn’t say that’s particular to any type of account, rather in general. They want people to pay for reach, I mean, look at Facebook now as a prime example
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My experience suggests this is true. I worked for a non-profit that would occasionally buy Facebook advertising. Every time they ran an ad, our organic traffic would drop afterward and take several months to recover. On my personal business account, I pay for ads regularly and experience a much higher organic traffic than I do on accounts that are purely organic.
That said, I think social media sites are justified in encouraging businesses to pay for advertising. That is how they fund their sites and without that revenue, they can’t keep the site up and running. Since you are using them to make money, why not pay for the service? You can run ads for as little as $.50 per day. If you can’t afford that, you may not have a viable business plan.
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Not too sure on the lower engagement rates but with a business profile you’ll be able to see where your posts are being liked from (country, age, gender) and be able to set up automated responses
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Not surprised.
All the popular accounts aren’t “real” like when you make an account and get followers. They go directly to meta (instagram head quarters) and work together.
Especially the influencers, they are there to make instagram look used Especially wjen tiktok got popular
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