What is the Psychology of Instagram?

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What is the Psychology of Instagram?

Now that we have discussed all of the tools and options on Instagram it is time to talk Instagram psychology, because you need to understand who is using it and how they are using it.

First, who is using Instagram? According to the stats, there are over 400 million active monthly users on Instagram. They are evenly split between men and women, but about 80% of users are under 35 years old, and more than 75% of their activity is on mobile. If your target audience isn’t mostly under the age of 35, and if your website’s mobile experience can use some work, you should probably not spend a lot of time on Instagram.

If you use Facebook you will understand the mentality of an Instagram user, constant scrolling. You can walk onto a bus and you will see everyone staring at their phones scrolling down to their feeds. (In a country that the majority of people take public transportation, it’s a little scary to watch this.) You know that you will usually not stop unless something catches your attention, so you need to catch your audience’s attention with as many posts as you can.

We already spoke about the size of the images that you should be posting, but what should the posts be of? When we spoke about Facebook ads you may remember that Facebook had a rule against running ads with more than 20% of the image having text, why? Because Facebook knows that people will read the text, and may be reading something they don’t plan to read. Knowing this, we can understand that the average person will begin to read text subconsciously. Meaning, as opposed to the small text underneath each post, if someone sees text on an image they will start to read it, before they notice they are reading it. So, people will give more attention (without knowing it) to images with text on it. This is why memes, quotes, and text based posts do so well, because they get your attention. Another way to get people to look at your posts is to put make it contrast. Use colors or images, that stick out so that when people are scrolling they won’t scroll right past your boring image. So, make sure to have interesting and captivating images, either using text, images, or striking contrasts.

Also, just like Facebook, Instagram has auto-playing videos. These videos can only be 15 seconds long (video ads can now be up to 60 seconds), but they auto-play if a person hovers over the post. Also, just like Facebook, you need to click for sound, so assume that the user will be watching your video in silence for the first 3-5 seconds. Make sure to make your video entertaining at the very beginning or your followers will scroll right by.

This brings us to the conversation about timing. Remember that with Facebook timing doesn’t matter as much, because if the person would be very interested in a topic they will see your post no matter what time it is posted, and won’t ever see it if they would not be interested in it. With Instagram, your audience sees their posts in the order that they are posted, newest first. So, timing is crucial for Instagram. You need to truly understand your audience to see when they are on most often, so that your posts get to as high on their homepage as possible. Before Facebook had an algorithm marketers spoke of posting in the morning when people wake up, at lunch time, and after work/school time, and those being the best times to post during the day. This makes a lot of sense for Instagram, but your audience could be different, or in multiple time zones, so make sure to test different times and days to see what works best for your audience.