Instagram has become my favourite platform. Every time I log into Facebook all I see is a wall of poor quality shared posts ranging from random truck videos to fake news.
The relative quiet on Instagram, knowing I'm going to be getting only photos is serene.
One major win for Instagram (Besides the just-pictures you mentioned) is that following isn't a mutual thing, so there's no social pressure to be 'friends' with someone even though you're not interested in the content they generate.
My facebook feed has officially jumped the shark as of the last 6-12 months. I blame the 2016 election and Facebook IPO. At this point almost every single article in my feed is an advertisement (some overt, some not). The few posts that are actually from my friends are politically charged links they share. It seems that 80% of people do not share content on Facebook, but the 20% of people who do, share it multiple times per day. Even though I have ~1500 friends on Facebook (all personally known over the past 10 years), I see posts from the same ~25 people, most of whom I hardly ever interact with, every single day.
The only time I browse my FB newsfeed is on my phone when I've run out of any other interesting content online. I never browse it on my desktop. I do use FB messenger quite frequently.
I like Instagram and Snapchat because they are what Facebook used to be: real content created by and shared by your friends. Not links to bullshit articles. Not advertisements. Just content that your friends created for you to watch.
My favorite thing Facebook has rolled out in years. So convenient to just point my browser there instead of having a massive pile of distractions waiting every time I want to answer a message.
Has anyone noticed a huge influx of ads when using Instagram? Admittedly I'm an infrequent user but as I use Facebook less I find that time being spent on IG.
One technique that has worked for me to reduce the number of ads I see is to report every single one as "I find this offensive". Do that enough times and you won't see an ad for a long time.
Same, I've only seen two ads since they started rolling them out. The first time, you could report them as spam, so I did so. The second time, months after that, I reported it as offensive.
It might not make any difference, but I can say that compared to most people I know that use Instagram, I get almost no ads, the last one being three months ago.
Perhaps, but in today's world if you tell a company you find something offensive they're likely to listen (for fear of PR fallout). Admittedly, I find all ads offensive (to my time) so it's disingenuous but it works—for now—so I'll keep doing it.
Facebook has become a privacy nightmare and has numerous concerns w/r/t ownership and management. Their role is the only reason I have any hesitation using Instagram, though I do fully embrace the platform anyway.
I used to love Instagram, but since I tried to register an account for a new business (which it blocked before I could even sign in, thus consigning the username into oblivion) I haven't been able to log back into my personal account.
It keeps sending me through a verify phase because of suspicious activity on my account. This leads to my successfully verifying, and then ending up at a 500 server error page, or a bad request 400 error page.[0]
Attempts to search for this on the Instagram help page.. oh my gosh, I get as far as typing two characters into the search box and it locks me out saying I'm too fast. [1] (the search box is search as you type.)
I try and report that as an error using an included link on that page, and low and behold that page is also having problems. [2]
It's a bit of a cluster... in my experience.
I really want to get back into my Instagram account!
I'm missing out getting advertised too, and I'm missing out advertising to others, it's pretty much a double whammy!
P.S. I'd love to prove I'm not a dirty spammer and get into the new business account too, but all attempts to fill out that form with the relevant evidence on Facebook/Instagram has been ignored.
Oh, I had something similar happen. I had 3 (legitimate) accounts banned at the same time, for no reason. When I went through the verification process, the upload button wouldn't work, and the contact link would give a 400. Some weeks later it started working, but basically it's a clusterf*k. It's a clear example of a dumb system, caused by artificial stupidity (AI in practice) and poor organisation.
In my experience, ads are targeted based on your social graph. I routinely see ads relevant to my lifestyle or occupation, never those for spammy products or trashy memes.
not sure about that. if anything its most likely location because this summer when i was in silicon valley i got ads for jobs. however on my college campus its these trashy ones.
Whenever you create an ad on FB, it is also placed on Instagram by default. I wonder how many out of that 1M were people who didn't disable the default.
Has anyone else had the experience of seeing almost zero ads on Instagram since they introduced them? I can count the number I've seen on one hand. I marked the first couple, right after they launched them, as not relevant (they weren't) and since then I think I've seen two, one in the feed and one in their Stories feature.
It's funny because when you want to buy ads on facebook, you spend something like 80% of budget on facebook and the remaining 20% on instagram by default
i agree, loads of casual FB advertisers surely just leave on Instagram
the power of the Adwords and FB Ads customer base is sometimes overlooked I find. if Instagram stayed independent and had to build their own ad-customer base, would they have been as successful?
The advertisements on IG are pretty good. I find that I want to buy about 40% of the products they advertise to me. That's as good as I've seen in 20 years of web browsing.
Word of caution: I've been running a business like yours for two years. We've had "the talk" with Facebook's lawyers. You say the use of the word 'gram' only applies to using their API? Wrong. You will see once you grow to more than a handful of accounts. We've resolved this.
Also, your method will 100% get people blocked. You say it's secret sauce, but you don't seem to take into account that most people here are tech folk. There are only so many ways. I know, and I guarantee it, that you use Instagram's private API by imitating the Android app. This is tripple-wrong. You violate their community terms, you violate reverse-engineering terms and you don't communicate this to your customers.
Anyone who asks for someone else's Instagram credentials automatically is in breach of their terms. So none of our businesses would even be possible. But there clearly is room for interpretation (and I've talked through this with their lawyers, too). But your approach is not where the flexibility is at the moment.
Any social-media agency is asking their clients for credentials. They violate the terms, there is no ifs and buts. Still, this will be fine. Instagram isn't entirely robotic. But you've got to approach it from the right side of things. Use the official unmodified app, use a real phone. That's the minimum. We've been running a business on those (tough) minimum requirements, and service some of the largest brands in the world. They are aware of the risk that anything can happen to their accounts at any time. But our adherence to the crucial parts helps us stay above board.
Read again, it's not about the credentials as agencies do exactly the same. It's about the posting mechanism. And the 'gram'. I feel you, this is a tough place to be, there's a lot of money waiting, everyone needs a solution – but talking to the private API is not the way to go about it.
Does this violate their terms of service? I've heard they do not want desktop uploading or any form of uploading media through the API. I can't seem to find an API reference for uploading on api.instagram.com
We provide a full "end to end" posting service requiring no intervention from you after you have scheduled your posts (no push notifications to your phone and you having to open the Instagram app to post it for example. We don't use IG's API.
This suggests that you're either using people, have found an effective automated method, or have reached agreement with IG.
If the first: how well will that scale with growth? If the second: what happens when the block this current method, or otherwise block your ability to do this because it violates some obscure ToS clause?
All I can say is that this is indeed an automated method. All that IG receives is a https call from an Android phone.
We can't go on details because this is our secret sauce (but we are opening our API so other developers can do the same).
But that is the issue, you as a developer and provider may not run afoul of the terms directly, but your users will.
Section 10 in the Basic Terms forbids accessing Instagrams Private API's.
And if that isn't being used and you are a user of Instagram are running afoul of Section 4 of those terms in soliciting, collecting, or using the login credentials of other users. As well as your naming being in conflict with Terms and trademarks.
Unless you're offering the service, through a reminder system with push notifications, you or yoru customer is probably breaking the Terms somewhere. You should probably have a lawyer verify that you're not running straight into a legal mess.
I think the part that you are missing is that nobody cares about company Terms of Service.
The consequences are nonexistent to negligible at best.
If in this case Instagram kills someone's account because of this service, then Statimgram takes on the possible liability of damages if its worth it to the brand.
Having an understanding of how people spin up accounts on Instagram and build mass real targeted followers quickly and cheaply, it wouldn't even be worth it to sue. But again, Statimgram's liability. Low risk proposition though.
> The consequences are nonexistent to negligible at best.
Unless you build a business model around violating them, and they shut you down when they discover it...
Arbitrary changes are always a risk when it comes to building for a third party platform, but if you're violating the ToS from the start, it's just asking for a 'worst case' scenario for your company and customers.
> The consequences are nonexistent to negligible at best.
Not in all cases. I work for a company that has a Facebook app at its core, and while we'd love to use a service like this to post to Instagram, it'd risk Facebook shutting our main app's access to the Facebook API down.
Using private API's while also infringing on their terms, basically guaranteeing that your service will be blocked the minute it has any type of traction.
The relative quiet on Instagram, knowing I'm going to be getting only photos is serene.