I fixed my Instagram feed! And you can too
It took some time, but now I can zip through my feed in just a few minutes, which means better engagement with posts I really enjoy. Let me tell you how…
First, a small background. For months, I’d open Instagram, doom scroll for a couple of minutes and then give up, close the app, only to come back to it 5 minutes later and do the same thing. It was driving me mad! So I looked at the, more than 600 accounts I was following, and went through them individually, looking for dead accounts, accounts I’d just hit follow because they followed me, and accounts that either no longer interested me, or had posts that I didn’t feel were relevant to my own feed, and hit the unfollow button. It had a small impact, but not really the impact I wanted.
So I took it a step further, and created a spreadsheet (who doesn’t love a spreadsheet!?). Over the course of a few days, I went through every single account (again) and the ones that really stood out to me, I added to my spreadsheet. This was going to be a sheet of accounts that I wanted to see regularly. Once I’d finished this, I then unfollowed EVERYONE! Literally, every single account that I was following, I no longer followed. Now, a few people reached out and asked why I’d unfollowed them, but in most of the cases, I was genuinely going to re-follow these people, so I explained that I was making some changes which would allow me to engage with their content better.
Then came time to re-follow the accounts on my list. Again, it took some time, but that was understandable to avoid being blocked and classed as a spam account. But, I now follow less than 100 accounts. At the time of writing this, I also don’t follow back yet. I will do to some accounts, but not everyone. You see, if people want to follow me, there’s nothing stopping them. However, just because someone follows you, doesn’t mean you have to follow them back. You have control over your social media accounts and if someone decides to follow you, it should be because they like your content, not because they feel obliged to, because you followed them.
The bonus to this for me, is that I can now skim through my feed in around 5–10 minutes, liking, commenting, sharing, and then also watching everyone’s stories. I literally get to a point where I have no stories to watch or engage with, which makes me happy, because then I feel like I can put Instagram away for a few hours and focus on my own family, work or wellbeing. Honestly, it’s the best feeling removing what feels like pressure to be sitting on Instagram just to get more engagement, because really, that’s what they want, but might not be what you want.
