I am going to make the beginning of this post short and sweet blogpost today because I am at my lake house trying to enjoy some family time! I am actually playing Mario Party 8 as I type this haha! I love this game! This post was supposed to go up early this morning, but for some reason I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep until 6:00 a.m. – so when I ended falling back asleep I couldn’t wake up until 10:00 a.m.! I actually considered just waking up for my day when it was finally 6:00 a.m., but I knew I wouldn’t be able to function! Oh well though! I always sleep so well here so I don’t know what was up (I actually never wake up in the middle of the night at all), but I had a snuggly morning with my electric blanket so I can’t complain!
This outfit is actually the freaking coziest thing ever! I mean I can not stop wearing this, I forgot to bring this vest to the lake and I am bummed! These were taken in my backyard on Christmas Eve. We had waken up to the most amazing surprise snow (read about that here)! I really wanted to shoot outfits in the snow, but didn’t want to work on Christmas Eve (or make my mom). She was nice enough to brave the cold for 10 minutes though to shoot these really fast! She is the best! I was wearing this outfit on Christmas Eve anyways so it worked out! Oh, did I mention the vest is 33% off and these boots are 20% off?! The vest comes in two colors too! I wanted to also share that I ended up changing into this dress, but in red, for church. I love it!
^our dogs were loving the snow! They were chasing each other around while we were outside taking photos. Bailey, my German Shepard, kept burying her nose in the snow. Such a cutie! The photo above this is me laughing at them haha!
| Grey Sweater (sold out, similar here and here) | Sherpa Vest (33% OFF! Comes in two colors, I am wearing a size small) | Ripped Jeans (sold out, similar here and here) | Green Hunter Boots (20% OFF)| Grey Pom Pom Beanie (similar to mine) |
Chatting about the Business Profile on Instagram and Why You Should Not Switch
I wanted to chat a little about the Instagram Business profiles and my opinion on them. If you aren’t a blogger, I would just skip over this part haha! A few weeks ago I switched to a Business profile and, well, I am not pleased. There are a lot of mixed emotions and opinions in our community about Instagram and the business profile. After trying it out I ended up switching back to a personal account for three reasons.
1. I only got it because I wanted the “swipe up” feature on Instagram Stories. If you aren’t familiar, once you hit 10,000 followers on Instagram you get the option to add links into your instragrm stories that people can “swipe up” to get to. You have to be on business profile to use it, but it was nice for directly linking blogposts or outfit details. Although it was convenient, from an income standpoint I would rather be reaching more of an audience on my photos than having people just view my stories.
2. I didn’t use the actual business analytics much at all. I have an app called Planoly that helps me plan Instagrams and keeps track of growth for me so that is what I always use. I never really looked at individual photo analytics.
3. As for the biggest reason, my engagement immediately went WAY down when I switched to the business profile. This is because it is believed that Instagram “hides” business profile’s photos from their follower’s feeds so that businesses will pay for ads to get more engagement.
Although Instagram already had a weird algorithm, I noticed a distinct change once I switched to business. I will show you what I mean using my Planoly app’s stats:
I hosted a giveaway in the month of December that received higher comments and likes than usual photos, and the beginning of December I was still on a personal account and had not yet switched to business, so these analytics are not exact (which is also why my “comments per post” are really high in December). However, you can clearly see that I received an average of 100 more likes last month than I did this month. The number is actually a bit higher, but, like I said, the giveaway messed with the averages a bit. You can also see my followers gained was much higher when I was not on a personal account.
Obviously there are other factors that go in to how well a photo performs. Sometimes people just like different content and the time and day matters. However, averaging 600-700+ likes with some photos in the 1000s+ last month and dropping down to 400-500 this month (with some even in the 300s) makes me assume it was the business profile causing the drop in engagement.
Here are a few photo examples below. I tried to compare similar photos. Obviously it may have been the photos with “more likes” were just “better,” however, they are just very off when it comes to normal likes.
These above were both posted on a holiday at a similar time of day.
These are both very similar photos, also posted at a similar time of day. These sherpa sweatshirts (outfit on the left) tend to perform better and 1,678 likes was VERY high for me so I was not expecting that high of a number on the photo on the right, however, 500 was on the lower side of my average a month ago.
Another example. 595 likes is pretty high for what I have been getting lately, but again, not as high as I was averaging before the business profile. Especially for this kind of photo.
Again, very similar photos, with very different likes. The reindeer slippers were very popular which is understandable why the likes were 1000+ however, the other photo didn’t even do half as well.
**None of this was to complain about likes or whine about my Instagram, I just wanted to show you all my opinion and you can take from it what you would like. This is why I chose to switch back to a personal account! I posted about this on my Instagram story and I have had a ton of DM’s from bloggers who had similar experiences. As a blogger I love when other bloggers talk about growth hacks, Instagram tips, etc. So I was hoping this would help some of you! Let me know what you think or if you have had a similar experience!
***UPDATE about to post this and I just won Mario Party 8 WAHOO
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xoxo,
Lauren Emily Lindmark
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