Back in 2014, I joined the blogging arena for the first time and, not long after, I created an Instagram profile as a way of promoting my content and photography as an extension of my blog. At the time, Instagram was enjoying massive consumer engagement with new accounts seeing overnight success through the sharing of inspirational, high quality content. Brands and PR agencies were beginning to pick up on the platform’s influence over its users and started investing in campaigns that were focused on sharing content via social media platforms, rather than solely blog posts. It was an interesting time to be entering the arena, the power and focus fell with users and content producers who elected to share content and ideas to grow their followings.

However, over the past few years there has been a significant power shift from users and content producers to brands and, as a result, the blogging platform has been pushed to breaking point to help fit this commerce-friendly landscape. So why has there been such a huge shift in attitude from Instagram? Why has user engagement stagnated/fallen and what does the future hold for Instagram and the blogging community?

NOTE: I’ve never been that fond of Instagram, I much prefer Twitter. However, I wanted to use my background in digital marketing to explain some of the struggles bloggers are having and why it’s not likely to change in the future… View Post