ENGAGEMENT. That word that we all love and hate.
Over the past year and a half engagement pods have been on the rise as a way to help influencers and brands gain more traction. With the ever changing instagram algorithm, having more engagement within the first ten minutes of your post helps your post rank higher up. When I say rank higher up I mean that the post will be seen by more people allowing you to receive more engagement.
It is an ever changing game that us as brands and influencers need to get used to.
I was in a good amount of pods for probably about a year and it just got so exhausting. I would be at work during the day and continuously get these notifications of ‘new posts’ that I had to catch up on to comment. It was too much. I was playing catch up every single day. I could never stay on top of the groups new posts and honestly don’t know how anyone did unless you were staring at your phone all day. So slowly but surely I started leaving the pods.
I questioned my decision a few times as my engagement took a bit of a tank, but that was also related to my lack of posting. Engagement has several factors and posting consistently is a huge factor as well. So I took all of this into consideration and continued to stick by my gut decision of leaving the pods.
I also was thinking about my brand in the long run and it got me to think. ‘I want REAL connections, not these phony connections that I HAVE to have because were in the same pod. Like seriously, no. That isn’t REAL. None of it was. The comments ‘pretty picture’, ‘I love your dress’, ‘perfect edit’..STOP.
It was driving me insane. The comments weren’t genuine, they weren’t genuine friendships (though I did meet some great people through them- I don’t want to discount that) and I was done.
I wanted to ORGANICALLY (a term that is getting lost) interact with those I WANTED to interact with. If I really wanted to see someones post, guess what, I turned on those notifications and you can do the same.
An organic relationship is so much more important than those superficial ones that we have in the pods. At the end of the day, who is going to support your brand? Will it be those from your pod who need to comment on your post, or will it be the relationships that you built through organic interation?
xx,
CLB
