Hey everyone. It's Ergo Josh.
And today I want to talk about Instagram and why it's algorithm tends to reward
people who tend to post to the same thing every time,
instead of people who post variety content with more likes and more
followers. So I'm going to keep it real.
I know that we all have a lot of frustrations and dislikes over the
Instagram algorithm. I mean,
ever since it switched over from the consistent chronological order that we all
knew and loved, it's now a mess.
And we feel like we never get seen. Instagram clearly prefers daily uploads,
and it rewards that all the time, the more you upload,
the more exposure you get.
It's really hard to compete with people who can post often like photographers.
They can really just make content at the press of a button,
people who make memes and do tic talks and stuff and repost them.
All they really need to do is add text. And there you go. But as artists,
we usually have to slave away for hours and hours on end to get a pretty
image that we can finally post. And then when we do post it, it's because,
you know, not chronological order.
So eventually it's gone in what feels like a flash.
And then at the end of the day, if you don't post the same thing consistently,
you tend to get forgotten and you just get squashed by the algorithm.
And we're all super salty about that and with good reason.
But I'm here to tell you that regardless of its flaws,
the Instagram algorithm is really working as it should be,
and we really shouldn't be worrying about it too much. Instead,
we should try to understand it more so that we can structure our own lives
around it properly and not suffer as much.
I'm going to tell you why the Instagram algorithm and a lot of algorithms tend
to reward really strict consistency and why you shouldn't let that stress you
out.
And you really shouldn't criticize it that much because at the end of the day,
it's just who we are.
So I have this analogy that will hopefully explain everything that I'll go into
more detail a bit later,
but it's just the simple analogy of the boss and the employee.
If I complain about the algorithm,
I'm basically an employee who wants the same income of my boss,
but without doing any of the work that my boss does now.
That doesn't seem to make any sense, right. It's completely ludicrous.
So again,
we're the employees and let's think of the followers as the income.
Then let's think of the job as the artwork. Now you might just think, okay,
I just need to do a better job so that I can replace the boss and then I can get
the boss's money, right? But it's not that simple.
The boss does a different job entirely than what we do,
and that's why they get paid more - because that job is needed more by the
company itself.
So let's go ahead and get away from that analogy and bring it back to what we're
really dealing with here - artists. At the end of the day,
us artists on Instagram can have all the cake and eat it too.
Like in the analogy,
the goal of the Instagram algorithm is to get as many people as possible to stay
on the app for as long as possible.
Therefore it's simply caters to what people's true actions are,
and it doesn't make any assumptions. And it doesn't really have an agenda.
A lo you know, sometimes that's pretty questionable,
but the Instagram algorithm is really just focused on trying to get people to
stay and use the app.
And just like in the job example or the employee and the boss,
the boss's job tends to do a better job of keeping people on the app than the
employee. So because of those things, when you look at us in the art community,
and you look at artists who have the most followers,
you start to see a pretty similar pattern. This pattern isn't new,
and it's not special.
And it sure as hell is not a hidden or secretive thing.
It's simply that the algorithm caters to people who do a lot of the same thing,
very frequently. If you do different things all the time,
then you don't really get suggested that much or get as many followers. Now,
the thing is, is that the algorithm is led by our collective decisions. Yes,
the algorithm can make you grow if it shows your work to more people,
but it only picks people to show based on the higher chance that more people are
going to like it.
So you should really think of it as directly interfacing between the masses of
people on Instagram. And just try to forget that the algorithm is even there.
really.
So this entire concept is visible and everything in the art world.
Let's look at a video game studio. for example. If you're a hired to be,
you know, let's say a 3d modeler,
you need to model the characters that have been given to you from the concept
artists.
You're not going to be modeling them with a real clay or whatever program you
select. Sometimes you might have some leeway with that,
but likely they're going to have a pipeline that they want you to stay in to
maximize efficiency - and you can't just model your own characters as well.
You need to do exactly what they need you to do in order to get paid.
You need to design what,
they need you to design and you can't just make up your own IP.
And you definitely cannot constantly be changing your own style because they
most likely hired you for a very specific one. So in life,
the whole thing is really that we earn value by convincing other human beings,
right? Because we don't get money from animals. We get it from humans, people.
And at the end of the day,
we convince other people to give it to us by giving them some sort of value.
What we've got to realize is that our followers are people too.
They're like mini investors. Their value currency is their time.
And they choose to invest it in certain places. As they see fit,
just like real investors with real money,
they choose based off of what's the highest expected reward.
And they also choose based off of consistent history of good performance.
So followers basically give out, follows likes and subscriptions,
et cetera, as a way to give their time currency to different creators.
So to try to illustrate this, imagine a group of people,
all walking around in the home page or the explore page,
and they see a piece of art. They really like,
they follow it back to your account and they look through they're like, Hm,
okay,
let me decide if I want to invest my unique home page in this
person or invest. Yeah.
Just invest in this person so I can get their content on my homepage.
And they look through your page and they look through your posts.
If your art lines up with what they found and is consistent and similar,
and they get the same pleasure and enjoyment out of it, then they'll be like,
wow. Yeah, I'm going to subscribe.
I want to give this person a piece of my time and energy.
Every day I scroll through Instagram because I want to see what they've got.
I want to see what they are doing. I want to stick around. Now,
imagine they find a piece of artwork that they really like.
They go back to your page and nothing else looks like it.
Or let's say the last thing you posted was three months ago.
They're not going to follow because they're like, ah, well,
I'll save this one post right here. I'll give it a like,
but I'm going to move on. I don't want to be bombarded with a random stuff.
I don't know what to expect. And that's exactly how people are.
If you pay attention,
you can look at the amount of people who visit your page daily and weekly.
And you can compare that to your followers daily and weekly.
And the higher that percentage is the more likely you are doing what I'm talking
about in this video,
where your likes are high and your followers are high because
everyone is seeing a very consistent theme across your page.
And they want to stick around to get a little piece of that,
to include in their own personal homepage.
As much as we like to criticize the algorithm for encouraging this behavior,
this is just human behavior magnified.
And this is just how things are.
People want to curate what they see and they don't want to see what they don't
want to see. Look at ads.
How many of you have ad-blocker on probably a lot of you because you don't
want to see ads constantly.
You want to see the content you want to see constantly,
...But I know you don't have those enabled on my channel, right?
I appreciate it. Thank you. :)
I want to quickly add a disclaimer here,
because I know a lot of people are going to feel extra disappointed at this
point in the video,
because they don't want the pressure of being so consistent and that's fine.
You don't have to, you don't always have to be consistent at all.
This is for people who want to get value from their audience,
a K money to support them significantly.
At the end of the day in some form or another within their career,
if you're a young artist or beginning artist or someone who isn't trying to
create a business out of this or entrepreneurship thing,
you don't need to be using Instagram as a business tool.
What you should be doing is focusing on trying to build meaningful relationships
with other artists around your skill level and interests, impatience,
and anxious. Decision-making breeds, ignorance,
and eventually creates meaningless failure,
which is failure that you don't learn from.
If you want some form of recognition that is normal. But again,
I advise you to balance your motivations. Like I mentioned,
in my last video about art blog.
So people who are not really doing Instagram intentionally like this and are not
really sure of what they want will constantly change what they do with every
single post. And trust me,
I know this because I've done this for the most of my career.
And then all of us end up getting lost and confused at the end of the day.
So do this only,
if you want to build an audience that can support most of what you do with your
artwork,
take Instagram approach Instagram with the intent to build an audience based off
of being consistent. Only if this is your goal. However,
if you're focused on working in the industry, instead as a, you know,
typical job in the art industry,
I wouldn't waste your time trying to build a huge audience on Instagram this
way. And here's something interesting. You probably haven't thought about.
There are thousands of people working in the industry that we never hear about
because they're busy working and they're not posting.
We all know about the artists that have a lot of cloud and millions of followers
in the art community.
And we've also heard of artists that have a lot of amazing projects that they've
worked on, but at the same time,
have tiny followings on Instagram and social media. But here's a question,
try to think about how many junior concept artists or junior
storyboard artists or even junior animators are working in the industry
today that you follow on Instagram is probably none or very
little of them because you simply don't know them.
They're probably busy working and they likely don't have time to post for
themselves as much a well known concept artist and YouTube,
or I really respect is Feng Zhu. He does a lot of incredible,
helpful live streams and videos on teaching other artists who want to get into
the industry.
And he always says that a lot of the art that you'll see on these platforms are
done by professionals who have worked in the industry for years.
And they have fun at the end of the day, doing art work for themselves.
They end up posting this artwork and it ends up being adored by all of the
artists who are on the platform that see it. And then we all end up thinking,
I need to do this in order to get into the industry. Now,
I'm sure you can see why this is completely wrong and backwards because we're
not looking at the people who are directly ahead of us.
And hopefully this will show you how deliberate you need to be about building an
audience and how it is not absolutely is not the only way to make a living
in art.
So if you're the type of person whose main goal is to work in the industry
somehow, and not just support yourself from an audience,
then please don't try to reinvent the wheel. Just look at your trajectory,
look at the people who've done it before and follow them. Hopefully,
if you're good at finding people who have done the thing that you want to do,
you will a be able to follow their footsteps,
close enough to where you save time.
And then you can begin to find your own niche in this world.
So if you want the followers, the likes and the subscribers, and you know,
you're trying to build an audience, that's going to support you one day.
You now know what to do. And to be honest,
we've always known what to do because work is work and that's never really
changed. It's just a fact of life. If you want to reap, you must.
So this is why there will always be some people with 10,000 followers,
even fewer people with a hundred thousand followers and a very tiny circle of
people with 1 million plus followers,
because who wants to force themselves to be consistent and paint something
similar every single time with their work.
If it comes natural to you to do this,
then you're probably one of the lucky ones. But in the case of the most,
it's just the way that they've ended up because they have been through the
entire journey of exploration already. Again,
if you want to have fun and explore your own art journey right now at your own
pace, that is completely fine. Go do that,
but do not expect to get paid. AKA,
get tons of likes and followers for doing it. That's simply the way things work,
having tons of followers and having tons of likes gives you an ability to make a
living for yourself on these platforms that is work.
And you have to be able to think about how to strategize and be successful on
these platforms in order to grow and actually earn that income,
AKA followers, AKA sponsors, you know, everything works that way.
A lot of people think that, oh,
I need this because I need to get into the industry.
That's not necessarily true at all. Like I said before,
there's a lot of people working already look for the people who are in junior
positions and notice that it's not because they have a ton of followers.
The only way to really do both have fun,
explore your artwork and also make a living out of it is to be
super fun and exciting,
or just super hot while doing it. And speaking of hotness,
I'm not going to be specific, but on Twitch,
you can see some really good examples of that. I mean,
there's some people who can literally get paid by thousands of people to sleep
on camera, not me though. But you know, now that I think of it,
as a matter of fact, there are people doing that in the art community too.
So I shouldn't even say that you have to be super hot to do it because let's
just look at, Jazza not not saying though that Jazza, isn't really hot, (Pause)
but Jazza does different things every single time in his videos.
But I would bet you that most people are not going to watch his videos for his
incredibly unique and particular unique sense of
taste or whatever in his artwork.
People are going to watch his videos because they're fun. He's fun.
He's likable. He's got a very large,
brilliant personality and extraordinarily large fun projects that he works on
that are different every time in his videos. So with all that being said,
I challenged somebody watching this video to be the first art hot tub stream
on Twitch. And please let me know about it. If you do,
I've thought about doing it myself,
but there's no way I'm going to get a hot tub anytime soon,
but all you really need is a waterproof iPad case. And you're good to go. Uh,
if it was me though, I would probably just draw my waifu,
who to hang out in the tub with me, probably end up being Samsung Sam.
That would be heresy though. Right?
So if you want to build an audience that supports your art career,
please give them what they want.
But remember not everyone is an artist and not everyone likes
art. Think about what people who like artists and like art,
but don't create art actually want. And please make sure to feel free,
to do whatever you want and go where your passion lies.
But just remember that people are people,
they are human beings and you have to respect their time and their wants and
desires. If you want their support.
At least when you stop thinking of follows and subscriptions as some free
kind gesture that people just give out to be nice.
And you start thinking of it as someone making an important decision to invest
in you,
because you found a way to convince them that they're going to get something out
of it.
Then you will be on the right path to building an audience that can support your
dreams. So that's all for today.
Thank you so much for watching and I will see you all in the next video.
Peace. Now, for those of you, who've made it to the end -
You are awesome. Thank you so much.
And you will be rewarded because in the next live stream,
I'm going to go through many examples of the accounts I talked about here.
And I am going to also pick at random different accounts from
the people who made it to the end of this video.
All you need to do is comment your handle in the common section of this video.
Just comment your Instagram handle, not the at sign. Don't talk about it,
just comment your Instagram handle and leave it like that. (If you don't have Instagram sorry, but that's the whole point xd)
That way only the people who made it to the end know what's going on.
And I know what to look for,
and I can just scroll through and give you a free critique during that live
stream, which will probably be, you know, the day after this video was uploaded.
All right. Thank you guys so much for sticking around and I'll see you tomorrow.