Why design carousels on Instagram are starting to s(t)ink?
Late 2019 to late 2020 we saw a spike in the number of people creating carousels on design and marketing. The content used to be good, now it sucks.
Accounts were hitting 0 to 100K followers in few months. 2020 was the golden period of carousels on Instagram. Everyone was spamming carousels daily, the engagement was super high. There were all kinds of engagement hacks that were being used. Let me list a few here with examples.
A few Instagram carousel mantras
- A big block of colour to brand your content and get people’s attention
- Big text to get people’s attention
- An unconventional image (many times an expressive face) to get people’s attention
- A CTA to comment/like/share or link to a course these creators sell on the last page.
- Tag similar creators with a big audience or curation pages with a big audience to get featured
- Leaving a positive comment on all peer’s posts to get discovered
- Using 30 hashtags to increase reach
Countless hours were spent and the effects of it were truly magical. The growth that some of these accounts got was proof that these techniques were working. They still work psychologically, but the effect in terms of engagement is not the same anymore.
Then why carousel is dying? It’s not because of Reels (only)
I know a central source of inspiration for many carousel makers was Chris Do. I love his work. One of the top people I follow. He had mentioned in his videos some of the above techniques he had used to get the exponential growth. One of them was he posted daily for a certain time and his account exploded in the community. One of his best quotes was:
“Out-teach the competition”
Everybody acted according to that. Everybody started teaching whatever they knew. It worked back then. It doesn’t work anymore. Why? Because knowledge is now saturated and individuals are now overexposed. Everybody sold well, the mantras worked but the content got saturated because in the process of out-teaching the competition, people stopped learning anything new. It had all became a business of teaching and selling.
People blame reels for lowering engagement on carousels but the true reason is the quality of carousels in the community has hit a ceiling. There is no new lessons, only popular teachers.
“What is branding”, “8 best google fonts”, “difference between UX and UI”, the same shit recycled and repackaged over and over and over again is what has killed the carousels. I pity those people who quit the game after seeing a significant decline in engagement on their accounts. Like having 100k followers but 2 comments on the post — that bad a drop. It’s sad that people were following the same template, every day and could not use the creative canvas and learning opportunity that the carousel boom had.
Difference between Chris Do and young creators
Chris was not wrong in saying out-teach the competition. He is a geek and old enough to produce 200 unique carousels without spending time learning anything new. He has the volume of knowledge with him. Young people don’t have that but they want to reverse engineer Chris’s Instagram success and that’s where everything got destined to doom. People didn’t have enough knowledge to sustain the daily content game. Many contents produced were just copies of a blog on the internet or another creator’s post.
What was I doing while the boom happened?
I had started making carousels in early 2019 with the intention to share my notes and work on my graphic design skills. During the boom, I also at times got FOMO and used some of the above mantras, but I never could use all of them. Many of them didn’t feel natural. I didn’t like templatizing the process or faking the comments, as a result, I missed out on riding the wave. My growth is slow but it’s not a problem as I am planning to play it long-term. However, slowing down allowed me to observe what was happening around and figure out all the amazing growth hacks that I didn’t need. Perhaps, I could write this today because I was slow enough to avoid motion blur and see things clearly.
How can carousel creators bounce back?
It seems like the bubble has burst but I still feel there is hope for a revival. If people can switch focus from the business of teaching to art of learning, carousels can make a comeback. All we need is creators to slow down and focus on
Out-learning the competition
Learn ten things to post one thing. Don’t play the Instagram game of instant results rather know that you are here to play it long-term. The business will be built and things will be sold, but we all need to focus on learning rather than earning. That’s the only way to raise the content quality and make carousels great again.
Hey reader, thank you for your time.
Regards Bharat Apat.
🟡 Instagram Link — I make carousels on Design and Productivity
🟡 Twitter Link — I test content ideas
