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“It took off faster than I expected,” she says. Her label, Midnight Tokar Vintage, has amassed nearly 6,000 followers since launching in September 2020, and she’s launched a second label focused on resale clothing. Despite having a relatively small following, Tokar, a 30-year-old single mother in New York City, was able to make her Instagram shop her full-time income a year ago.
“I still have my core customer base … but the way Instagram is changing, it doesn’t feel sustainable anymore, I don’t feel like I can really grow,” said Liz Gross, who has been around since 2011. Selling vintage fashion through her label Xtabay Vintage. Gross said 98 percent of her business comes from the platform after brick-and-mortar stores close during the pandemic.
In response to questions about the concerns of small business owners, Anne Yeh, a spokeswoman for Instagram’s parent company Meta, reiterated that Instagram is temporarily reducing the number of recommended posts in user feeds in response to user feedback. “We recognize that changes to the app can be an adjustment, and while we believe Instagram must evolve as the world changes, we want to take the time to make sure we get this right,” Ye said in a statement.
Mosseri says the move to more recommended content is meant to help creators on the platform — suggesting that users will be more likely to find something they’re not following. But some business owners say it’s more important to make sure their posts reach people who choose to follow them.
“I have people writing to me saying they never see my posts anymore and people wondering if I’m still posting,” says Gross, who posts several times a day to her 166,000 followers. “Only a few, a tiny fraction of my followers will see them.”
Similarly, Liz Siking, owner of Six Vintage Rugs, says that while her followers typically pop up in their feeds, her recent posts only show up to about 5% of her followers.
“Being a creator, I’ve grown resentful at that point,” Sikikar, who started her account four years ago and has nearly 42,000 followers, told CNN Business in an email. She said she doubted it was because it was fully visible.
Many small business owners are frustrated with the platform’s focus on video, and say they feel they have to create videos or Instagram reels to get their posts seen, whether or not the format makes sense for their product.
“I didn’t get into this business to be an entertainer,” Tokar said. “Creating this content is time-consuming and it’s a time-consuming job to begin with. My hours are spent searching and photographing and cataloging and researching and cleaning and delivering. … That’s already a full-time job.”
Accounts can pay to “enhance” their posts so that they appear in more users’ feeds as sponsored posts, which many business owners say is now the only way to ensure engagement with invisible images. Sickinger said her ad spending doubled last year “because organic reach is dead.”
For Gross, while sponsored posts have helped her following over the years, she now feels it’s unfair to pay to view. “What’s the point if you don’t actually show it [my posts] To the people I paid to get access in the first place? ” she said.
Given Instagram’s high reach, it’s difficult for both the user and the business to quit. But some business owners say they are considering expanding to other platforms because of the changes. Tokar said she has started doing some sales through e-commerce sites Depop and EC and is no longer dependent on her shop for all her income. And Sickinger said her “saving grace” was being able to reach her repeat customers through an email list.
Still, there’s no easy way to transfer an Instagram account’s followers to another location, and other platforms often come with fees and other guidelines that make selling there more complicated than on Instagram.
“It keeps me up because I don’t know how I’m going to get through the night,” Gross said. “I mean, I’m going to start doing Twitter posts. But visually, the impact of Instagram is that you’ve always had an image that you’ve always seen, so losing it has a big impact.”
Says Sikiker: “My business wouldn’t be what it is today without this platform, and that’s why I invested in it. I want them to really understand who their user is, and I’m not sure they do.”
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