I am not very active on Instagram. I have an account and will share to it now and then, but for the most part my image sharing goes into this blog, my Facebook, or my twitter feeds. I was chatting with a couple of friends at the camera store last week (yes, I hang out there for fun in the evenings) and someone mentioned that they can get a bunch of likes on a picture easily, even if it’s a crappy picture.

I thought it was odd that when I shared I got basically nothing at all, maybe a passing comment or like from a friend. “Oh you need to use hashtags” I was told. Ok, that makes sense. Hastags (like #cat #dog or #funnylookingbride) help users find content via searches. So the next couple of days I made a conscious effort to use Instagram more and tag and label my images more precisely.

It worked. I’m not going to say that followers and likes flooded in, but it was more than before. Random people on the internet were seeing my stuff and liked it enough to hit a little heart button to tell the photographer that they thought it was good. I know it’s silly, but sometimes it is nice to have the validation from someone not your mom that your work is good.

I did notice something interesting though. Lots of times the likes were coming from people with thousands or tens of thousands of Instagram followers even though they only had a few images posted. While they didn’t look like fake profiles, they didn’t seem like the sort of people that would end up on a random picture of a cat I posted and hit like mere seconds after it was posted.

And how did they get all these followers anyway? The only person I “knew” on Instagram was @withhearts, after his excellent interview on the Cult Cast, and I attributed his 202,000+ followers due to, frankly, his excellent work. So I figured maybe there’s a way to shortcut some of the “do good work, get recognition” treadmill, so I did a bit of digging. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t like what I found. As this video shows, you can game the Instagram system for followers in two different ways:

• Follow lots of people, get lots of followers. In the experiment in the video he follows 900 people and gets 300 back in an hour. This is similar to twitter. People either are so happy that they got a follower that they immediately follow back, or have an auto-follow setup that will add you to their list automatically.
• Like lots of photos. Searching on popular hashtags (i.e.: #cats… hmm…. I tag things with #cats a lot because of the subject matter of my photos) and then liking lots of other peoples images will get you followers back as well. Same principle I guess, you get liked by a random person and follow them in thanks.

There is lots of other info if you’re looking to up your follower feed by the way.

See a pattern here? You get lots of followers who don’t know who you are or care who you are or what you do, and a ton of liked images from people who are probably just going down a list of everything tagged #cat or #coffee and hitting the little heart button.

How long before it’s just a massive pool of people posting pictures to get likes and liking pictures they don’t to get followers? Like a pile of dogs humping and no one really knows what’s going on! (Pardon the crass analogy).

Do the people who aren’t putting 20 lines of hashtags get any love? Do people sharing photos who are actually good get recognition of any sort or is it all lost in the crowd of people screaming for followers and likes and….

I realized it didn’t matter. I know it never mattered, that likes or followers on the internet don’t equate to real world friends you can count on, but I do like validation, don’t get me wrong, I think everyone does. Having a following on the internet will also give you a (sometimes legitimate) sign of authority and sometimes followers and likes equate to real clients and real jobs.

Having someone say something like:

… the shot captured me. It was like she was staring at me. The colour was good. Image balanced. It was a great innocent headshot of an attractive girl. […] Your work is getting better and better with every click. Keep it up.

makes me feel great, really great. But I would rather have a few followers that are listening to me because they actually care (for the most part) about my images and my words than 10,000 that are there because I’m one more tick on their own way to getting another follower or two.

I want the people looking at my shots and perhaps thinking of me when they need to hire a photographer for a prom or event, or are looking for a portrait, not to never see me because they’re following 50,000 people so they can have 40,000 following them.

So to you, my 329 twitter followers and 198 Facebook followers, I thank you, appreciate you, and love that you’ve taken the time out to read this, see what I post and care enough to give me that small slice of attention during your day.

Tags: #cat #dog #instagood #followme #highfive #followbackclub #shoutout

(Note: above tags added for irony only)