The home of influencers, brands, small businesses, friends, family and everyone in between! Instagram has soared past expectations, now boasting over 1 billion monthly users. Our own personal internet-based photo album has changed the social media game, humanity, and our everyday social spaces and interactions.

With only 10 years in the game…yes you heard me only 10 years! Instagram is continuing to morph to ensure it is a vital part of our everyday lives. We’ve rounded up ten things that have changed the way we live thanks to Instagram.

1.     A CV to The World

First impressions have always mattered… But now more than ever the first glance at Instagram profile matters. Our profile has become an album of our ‘best selves’, complete with happy smiling selfies, dog pics, bikini pics, motivational quotes, mouth-watering food porn and inspiring travel posts.

Our ̶F̶a̶c̶e̶T̶u̶n̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶P̶h̶o̶t̶o̶s̶h̶o̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶t̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ best self is put forward into the vast abyss of Instagram, as Insta is all about the visual experience. We aspire to impress our followers with our ‘aesthetic’, visually pleasing photos, and Insta palettes. This has shown an increase in users’ social status, follower count and in some cases, their bank account.

2.     Changing the Way we Socialise and the Places we Socialise in

‘Doing it for the gram’… if it’s not on Insta it didn’t happen.

Social spaces have changed to be more aesthetic ‘gram-worthy’ places. Restaurants and cafes now take more time in their design phases, to make their venues notably more ‘Insta worthy’; stores gift, entice and pay influencers to visits, and museums/events curate singular spaces for the perfect shot. There’s big business in creating these Instagram Worthy spaces, Forbes reports that “72% of users report that they have made fashion, beauty or style-related purchases after seeing the product on Instagram.”

Before a night out customers look at the restaurants/cafes Instagram profile to see who’s been there, which meals and drinks will score them the most likes and if there’s a feature wall for the much needed selfie.

This phenomenon has found its way into the way we travel, with users hunting down Pins to scenic locations such as obscure cliff tops, flower fields and remote beaches for the perfect pic.

While our habit to Pin and mimick our favourite influencer may have helped the travel industry and local communities reach wider audiences that may never have thought to visit before. It has also led to concerns around the destruction of wilderness, pristine locations and historical sites too. Notably, Joshua Tree national park was recently inundated with visitors after the rise of Insta-travel, with ‘grammers tracking down the endangered Joshua Tree which has led to trampling the park (and the tree) to near extinction and an estimated 300-year recovery time.

3.     Big Business for Small Business

Small businesses have used Instagram as a way to directly gain feedback and connect with their customers since the beginning. It just happens to also be a place where you can score “free” advertising too… Using branded hashtags (e.g. #SocialCut), @tagging and checking into locations is widely encouraged by brands and storefronts alike to gain covetable ‘authentic’ public endorsements from their customers. Which, in turn, can lead to HUGE $$$ consumer dollars spent.

More recently, the platform itself has extended a hand of solidarity during COVID-19 to help support small business through their #shoplocal and new sticker ‘Support Small’. Their sticker application is an Instagram story backdrop, where you can tap on this icon and choose a small business that you want to recommend on your story to offer them support. This sticker is a quick advertisement to your followers of your favourite small businesses and gives them a preview into the business account. Public Instagram accounts can then be selected by IG to be displayed on the ‘Support Small’ Instagram platform story.

4.     Influencers 

Back in 2010 bloggers where popular…but Instagram gave way to a new breed of bloggers…Influencers.

With a platform where you can create bite-size content, Instagram has become the perfect incubator for the spread of content, allowing followers to like, comment, share, save and RAVE about you! Instagram has propelled the ‘Influencer movement’ and turned these popular online personalities into celebrity-like icons.

The next phase? Well, virtual influencers… Duh! These digitally created animations live on Instagram alone, see Shudu Gram and Miquela Sousa. The virtual Influencers are the real deal - snatching up record deals, collabs with Calvin Klein and IRL celebrity boyfriends. This blur between our digital and physical world is changing our lives culturally by turning Instagram models/Influencers and in some cases animated characters, into our next Gen’s role models.

5.     Shoppable (aka Data Enriched) Posts

After about 5 years, Instagram knew we were hooked. They’d already rolled out sponsored posts allowing people to click through to their favourite product and delivered some unreal ROI’s that outpaced any other advertising platform seen before. They knew they were onto a good thing, so it was time to introduce ‘Shoppable’ content. Shoppable Instagram posts are the new normal for businesses looking to reach their customers directly, without ever leaving the Instagram platform. By shopping directlythrough the app, money isn’t the only thing shoppers are parting with, Instagram no longer has to rely on web savvy businesses to install pixels correctly on their sites to snatch up highly valuable (and saleable) retargeting and remarketing data on a user.

6.     Copycat Moments

In social media marketing, videos have proven to be one of the most effective techniques of capturing user’s attention. After Instagram’s success with their stories function, that was taken from Snapchat’s main function ‘Snapchat Stories’, doubling in the number of users as Snapchat (DMI, 2020). Which came about after Snapchat rejected Facebook’s (IG’s parent company) attempt to buy the platform.

Want even more tea? Basically, Snap Inc. (formerly Snapchat) got so pissed about the blatant rip-off, they started paying their lawyers to keep tabs on the anti-competitive behaviour of FB and dubbed the task force internally “Project Voldermort”. In 2019 when the FTC started probing into anti-trust allegations against the Facebook, Snap handed over all of their findings (and grievances) directly to them.

Insta has since launched IGTV which started as a stand-alone app and was essentially Instagram’s direct grab at YouTube’s audience and Reels as a response to TikTok’s recent success.

7.     Given and Taken Power Away from Cultural Movements

Instagram has become the ‘go-to’ destination for people all over the world to share and connect with others who share similar ideas and beliefs. More recently, Instagram has become a “destination for the protest movement” (Ho, S & McCausland, P. 2020). If you haven’t been living under a rock, you may have noticed the #MeToo movement, the #BlackLivesMatter movement with Instagram users posting black squares to their Instagram profiles. As well as the #ChallengeAccepted global hashtag for a women’s rights campaign in Turkey, which had women across the world posting black and white selfies.

These movements used the global access Instagram has an educational strategy to inform users world-wide of injustices in their communities and cultures. As the “vivid impact of photography has helped better illustrate social activist causes from an emotional standpoint” (The Gramlist, 2020). As well as organisers of campaigns, movements and protests, Instagram has become the platform to “educate…broadcast their experiences and strategize about where the movement goes next – sometimes literally…[providing]…live updates on protests and marches” (Ho, S & McCausland, P. 2020). 

This seems to be a positive step in the right direction for Instagram. However, with fewer users actually reading captions to understand where these movements originate from and just jumping on the bandwagon to be relevant, movements are losing steam in our increasing click and forget culture.

 8.     Kept Experts Constantly Guessing

Wonder why you sometimes miss your friend’s posts on Insta? Yeah, us too! Instagram created an algorithm for their app that changes quicker than you change clothes before a girl’s night out.

The main purpose for this algorithm was for it to shift through all the posts of the people you follow so that you see the “images created by people you care about most” (Harper 2020).

Dictating the order, you see posts on your feed. However, this has created a more competitive environment for those advertising on Instagram as “if users follow a lot of accounts, you’ve got more competition for the top spot in their feed” (Gotter, 2019).

With “90% of Instagram accounts following a business” (Cooper, 2020), businesses, celebrities and influences need to keep on their game to ensure their followers are seeing their posts, Instagram Lives and stories.

Basically, IG is here to keep everyone on their toes and totally in the dark. A few other notable WTF moments, waking up to no visible likes on posts, shadow ghosting’s “is it/isn’t it real” moments (it’s not BTW), and the 7-day stats window (not new, still super annoying).

9.     Information source for users

Remember a time when the tv used to be our main source of news and information…or something as BC as a newspaper! *gasp* Nowadays users have been using Instagram (and social media) as their main source of information for current events, with “use of Instagram for news doubled since 2018” (BBC, 2020).  For good or bad? We’ll let you decide.

Millennials are the main culprits of turning to Instagram as their source of truth, mostly to find out more about the things they’re passionate about. “Climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the coronavirus have all seen massive engagement on the platform” (BBC, 2020). There have been rising concerns of misinformation on social media platforms and the echo chamber effect. Many are calling on the platform to self-regulate and promote reliable content as a priority.

10.  Hashtags

After the launch of Instagram in 2010, hashtags were debuted in 2011 so “users could organise posts around events, places, or topics” (Popper, 2017). From there hashtags became part of the collective vernacular of Instagram users, allowing hashtag’s like #MeToo become a part of the cultural conversation (The Gramlist, 2020). They’ve more recently been used as a tool to get more engagement on your Instagram posts, with “at least one Instagram hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement” (Chacon, 2020), as they allow users to find posts around specific content. 

This article was written by Emma Langfield, our newest SC recruit who has a passion for all things IG-worthy and a love for telling a great story!