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The Seven New Laws of Instagram
Instagram, in front of our eyes, has Meta-morphosed. It has gone from a platform based on photography to a platform based on video. But the shift is much more then a bias toward one media format over another. It’s an entirely new way of using it that yields different results for a creator.
As a photographer, I’ve bemoaned the loss of what Instagram once was for our industry, but as a content creator, I finally found a successful formula for posting on it that I can enjoy. My numbers over the last month are all positive. My work is being seen by thousands of people, many of whom are outside my network. And it all started with bears.
While on a family trip last summer, we did something special: we spent the night in a cabin out in the forest where you can observe wild Brown Bears. A simple video I posted on Reels the next day of a mother bear and her cubs emerging from the trees was played over 16,000 times. It seems almost obvious — it’s an event designed to wow and amaze. But when I looked at my other content that had not done as well, I realized just how specific the Instagram algorithm is about what constitutes a successful piece of…
