Reasons to stay on Instagram
A flurry of 'I'm leaving Instagram' posts on Substack has made me reflect on why the app still has a place in my life
In quick succession last week I read Substack posts from
and about their reasons for leaving Instagram, or considering doing so.Their pieces are so beautifully written, disarmingly honest and moving that I started to question my own commitment to the platform. I recognised much of what they described in my own experiences of using Instagram, as well as in the conversations I have with writers in my community.
Should we all be leaving? I thought. Are we mugs for staying? Worse, am I peddling snake oil by insisting Instagram still offers opportunities for writers to reach their readers? Is my livelihood about to crash and burn? Have I been hoodwinked by Meta itself, sucked unaware into upholding the capitalist agendas that underpin it?
After much reflection, I decided, no, we don’t all have to leave Instagram. Not because these writers are wrong about it, or have overstated the damaging nature of the relationships we may form with it, but because I believe there is an alternative.
It’s an alternative I’ve arrived at through both personal and professional experience. I’ve been a social media manager since 2017, working on my own personal account alongside running accounts for small businesses. As a result, in the late 20-teens, I developed a powerful grab-phone-open-app reflex every time I had to think a little harder than usual, or was confronted with something I wanted to escape.
I’ve experienced the dopamine-highs of watching posts and brand campaigns go viral, and the subsequent irritability when that short-term buzz fizzles out. I’ve added to the agitation with periods of acute comparison-itis and I’ve fallen into doom scrolls and rabbit holes too many times to count, especially during historical inflection points, of which there have been many in the last few years.
It never occurred to me to ask what my end goal was as I poured my time, energy and creativity into the pixels. For a while I was in denial about, and then ashamed of, how deeply attached to the platform I had become; how much I needed the validation its interactions offered me; and how powerless I felt to resist its demands.
Until I realised this wasn’t my fault.
Our brains and bodies haven’t evolved as fast as the tech, and the tech is exceedingly good at feeding physiological responses that we act on before we can consciously process what they are.
This was the first step in creating for myself what Cal Newport, in ‘Digital Minimalism’ calls ‘a full-fledged philosophy of technology use rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.’
It was the first step in realising that Instagram is not a neutral space, onto which users place our ideas, thoughts, opinions or art, like a plate waiting for food. It has its own (human and structurally driven) agendas that exert pressures on users - on us.
Our attention is its currency - it’s what it sells to advertisers to make money - and the platforms’ creators have devised all manner of bait to hook us into the app.
The app acts on us, influencing the ways we behave and what we’re interested in, and in us, by triggering physical and psychological responses that make the scroll feel inescapable, even though we know we have the rest of the day - the rest of our lives - to get on with.
For years, we’ve responded passively in the face of this influence, while feeling ashamed or frustrated with the amount of time and energy we devote to these tiny screen in our hands, like we’re the ones to blame for our lack of self-discipline or willpower.
As we’ve learned more about the implicit imbalances in our relationships with Instagram and other social media apps, rejecting the platforms entirely has become a legitimate and understandable choice, especially where addiction, fixation, or mental health conditions come into play.
I’m wary of prescribing total abstinence however, or even worse, the moralising of spending time on social media. In particular I have in mind disabled people for whom social media may offer a route to connect and engage with an outside world that might be inaccessible to them. And while the dopamine-loop and rich potential for fixation of social media might be difficult to navigate for neuro-divergent people, socialising at the distance of a screen can feel safer and less depleting than being out in the physical world.
More generally, writers have always needed to find ways to get our work into the hands of our readers. We’ve always had to work in some way to find our audience, and if writers in years gone by have had more support with marketing it came at the cost of doing business with gatekeepers who may well have refused you entry.
Social media - and Instagram as my particular areas of interest and expertise - bypasses those particular gatekeepers and while it doesn’t come for free - unfortunately there is no way of promoting your work that requires no commitment of time or effort - it does present writers with opportunities.
The opportunities on Instagram for writers
The relative accessibility of Instagram and other social media is a key strength that makes it worthy of consideration. Why wait for someone else to find your readers for you, when you can find them for yourself? Why wait for someone else to tell readers why they should care about your book, when you can tell them yourself?
Instagram can act as word of mouth with a megaphone, and I’m not just talking about the books that go viral. Imagine having a community of a few hundred people who not only want to read your book, but also want to tell their online and real-life friends about it. Some of them will go on to become your readers, and in turn will share your work with their own circles of influence. The ripple effect of the Instagram eco-system can reach far further than any single post of your own ever could.
Don’t under-estimate the opportunity Instagram presents to remind people you are already connected with about this thing you are doing. Writer,
told me she makes a point of mentioning her books in some way every day on social media - not always in content that has taken a long time to create - because she knows there will be people who’ve read her book who could review it, while other have it sitting in their tbr stack and might bump it up their pile in response to a nudge.Fostering these threads of online connection can also provide a path to a reciprocal and creative relationship between writer and reader. In the oral tradition, the audience would have been able to enter into dialogue with the story-teller, and the story itself. They would not only listen, but contribute their own understanding of what they were hearing, and how it related to stories of their own. Instagram offers an - albeit imperfect - replica of this dynamic. We bring stories to our community who tell us theirs in return, thus shaping and influencing the future stories we go on to tell (I thank
for this insight).The fact that this dynamic comes under strain if our audience becomes very large is a clue to a defining feature of my Instagram philosophy: size isn’t everything.
An alternative to dominant Instagram culture
As befits the capitalist structures and systems we’re all entangled in - that also underpin the agendas of the creators of social media (including Substack, I would like to add, perhaps a little mischievously ;-) - the pursuit of growth and Big Numbers have come to dominate online culture.
Our status as decade-long guinea pigs has conditioned us to perceive followers counts and likes - more recently video views too - as proxies for authority and value.
But what happens if we, armed with our decade’s worth of experience, and fortified by the science, start to make demands of our own?
What if we wrest back control of our online lives and engage intentionally with Instagram, cognisant of its pitfalls, while exploiting its tools?
What if we de-couple our use of Instagram from the pursuit of growth, and instead use it to connect, learn and collaborate?
What if we measure our ‘success’ on Instagram in the quality of the relationships we build, the conversations we have, the new ideas we come across (and choose to investigate further offline in… books ;-)?
What if we recondition ourselves to believe in the value of our work to our readers, and reject the notion that Instagram metrics determine this?
What if we reject the me-me-me culture of Instagram and instead support and uplift other writers, review their books on our accounts, share their pre-order links, commiserate when things don’t go to plan, and celebrate their successes?
What if we use the tools Instagram provides to bring together people we admire and respect (regardless of the size of their audience) with the members of our community who we know will care about what they are doing?
What if we centre our readers, what they care about, and what we care about, when we’re creating our posts, rather than prioritising what ‘pleases’ the algorithm?
What if we share - our expertise, our ideas, our opinions, our communities, our platforms - with one another (not our lives though - I’ve written before about the importance of boundaries when using Instagram, and how internet culture has warped our understanding of what authenticity is) instead of crooking our elbow around them like we’re guarding a primary school spelling test?
What if we behave like the community we say we are craving?
I recognise the wishful simplicity of some of my ‘what ifs’ in the list above. Personal experience tells me Instagram can act as an amplifier of insecurity or feelings of inadequacy and this requires careful, sensitive handling.
But I’m not here to convince anyone to use Instagram (I’ve written in the past about how social media is a bit like running a marathon - for some people it makes perfect sense, for others it just… doesn’t).
I’m here to gently suggest we don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done, or even the way Instagram wants us to.
We can create our own code of what matters to us on Instagram and use that to guide every interaction we have with the platform: how often we post, when we post, what we post, how we ‘measure success’, how long we spend on the platform and what we do with that time.
This code will be individual to each one of us, which is partly why I’ve avoided making a list of practical tactics you should use. Rather than prescribing a specific approach, I wanted to start with the questions I revisit occasionally when I need a reminder of how to engage intentionally with Instagram.
When I need a reminder of how to keep Instagram in its place.
Next week I’ll publish a ‘toolkit’ of tactics that help support me with this approach, with the caveat that these are not a silver bullet. They’re based on my experience so you should read prepared to take what is useful to you, and leave the rest. See you next week!
I've given (probably far too much) time to this conundrum, reading and reading articles on quitting, limiting, or embracing Instagram. I often give too much time to it, in the form of scrolling, and when I make content there, I still feel like it eats too much time, but most of the writers I mentor have come to me from Instagram and so I feel it would be silly to quit. Essentially, the problem is my own willpower and remembering what I go there for and what I don't. I imagine a lot of people feel the same way!
"I need a reminder of how to keep Instagram in its place." Love this line! Wish I knew how to keep Instagram in its place. I left the platform 7-8 months ago and haven't really looked back. But I'm willing to explore it again this year, as most of my readers are on Instagram. Looking forward to reading your toolkit Nicola! Thanks for this thought provoking piece.