IG Promotions

Have you ever spent money on social media? It's weird, but for the sake of learning I did it, and ran my first IG Promotion. I watched/read a handful of videos and articles before pulling the trigger. I didn't find any conclusive evidence against doing it. Everyone had results. So I wanted to test it out myself.

I first noticed the "Insights" tab after switching to a business profile. Basically it allows you to see different pieces of data such as how many people saved your post, sent it in a DM/story, how many users you reached, and other cool stuff like that. It's the marketing major in me. The stat that helped push me into doing it was seeing how many people were visiting my profile/seeing my post outside of my following.

It wasn't a lot:

Another stat I noticed, from older posts, were the hashtag visits. Especially after studying hashtags and post times. It made me think of what really helps posts gain exposure to those outside of your bubble? I'm still not sure. There were instances in 2016 where I'm 99% sure my hash tagging helped some of my posts get 300+ likes, and times like now where it's futile. Especially with how IG handled hashtags during election time(they didn't allow recent hash tagged posts show up). I don't want to say the conclusion is random, but that's what my assumption for now. Anyway, this led me to trying promotions.

I picked a post that made sense to promote. I wasn't just going to promote a picture of myself... that felt too narcissistic. I needed to do it with a post that would appeal to people. For that I chose the one where I launched my print shop. It seemed right, and gave people incentive to look at what I have to offer. Like what would they get in return for visiting my page?

A link to my offerings.

In the images above you can clearly see the difference after the promotion. The promotion bases budget on reach, and you can pull the plug at anytime before your duration. The budget gets spent as the days/reach go on. Along with budget, you can also customize things like what your goal is, or who your target audience is.

I didn't want to spend too much so I left it at $30 over 6 days, and I just wanted people to visit my profile. The results were as advertised: likes, saves, and reach shot up about 275%. However, I only gained 8 followers and not much extra comments from outside my following.

There's still other numbers to understand and how they work, but I think I have the gist of insights on IG. Hopefully I can utilize my findings to my advantage. Would I promote again? I'm not sure. I don't really care to spend money on this lol. Who knows? Maybe I will do one of my self portraits. Models promote themselves, and maybe that's how they get exposure(not saying that I'm a model lol).

The question still remains though. How does exposure work on IG or social media in general? What's the algorithm? Is there a science to it? Is it random? Let me know if you have thoughts on the matter. I'd love to hear them.