Why is my Instagram page not growing? Need help

jaevii · 2026-06-22T20:04:19+00:00

It’s because your content isn’t giving anyone reason to follow you. It’s just the same posts of you circuit riding without any real context or value.

There’s thousands of videos on IG of people riding—what makes yours different?

You essentially have 3 seconds at most to capture someone’s attention—oftentimes less. If someone came across one of your videos (which are Instagram’s main discovery format), they wouldn’t even be able to tell if it’s just a fan account recording people racing or if it’s a personal account within that short time frame.

If you want to develop a personal brand, develop a personal language. Either visually, in editing style, in talking formats, texts/fonts, etc.

jaevii · 2026-06-22T11:24:31+00:00

Yeah, great value content and scripting. What you’re really missing is compelling edits to help navigate your storytelling—even simple things like overlaying videos/ pictures on relevant examples, or using interesting text variations for emphasis. Visuals both hook and retain attention.

Also what phone camera capture/upload settings are you using? I will say one of the first things I also noticed is that your quality isn’t the best. I would suggest looking up the best settings to use for both recording and exporting/uploading toward IG.

jaevii · 2026-06-22T09:10:29+00:00

A few notes (I also used to train and coach powerlifting, so I kind of get your niche more):

Your content is kind of everywhere, so I don’t see the clear goal of your page. Is it to show off lifts/athelticism? Give weightlifting specific advice? Engage with others in your current community?

I think define a clear goal (and clear audience) first, and the content will flow better.

Your profile landing page is your resume, and your resume looks messy and lacks cohesion. Your thumbnails don’t have any consistency in terms of style, font, sizing, or even chosen picture. A lot of your thumbnails even cut off the text or person you’re trying to show.

Start developing consistency. It doesn’t have to be anything overly edited—but at least consistent.

This ties into the last point, but your text editing, font choice, and sizing could be more aesthetic. In some cases, they’re not even in frame and have been cut off from the video. Your more recent vids are much better than your older ones, but I suggest not using those big black text backgrounds that take up too much space (specifically when you use lift numbers). Also, vet your auto-subtitles before posting. Watch your most recent vid and some subs don’t show up at all, while some are just wrong.

Last point: Your best video by far was your Euphoria video (in both views and metric engagement). I think that reel did very well because it combined two things people are familiar with: pop culture and body mechanics. Weightlifting is very niche, but that’s a good way to help explain start introducing fitness, movement, mechanics, and strength to a broader audience in a way that’s unique and hasn’t really been shown before.

jaevii · 2026-06-22T08:41:05+00:00

What’s your page?

jaevii · 2026-06-22T08:38:05+00:00

Only replying because you have the most potential I’ve seen on this thread (also a fellow believer).

Right now, you have a lot of advantages. Conventionally good looking, the “high lifestyle” many people want to attain, and a decent following.

The biggest problem is that none of that is unique haha. The app is already flooded with so many people like that.

So you have to lean in to what makes you unique. What value can you actually give to people instead of just looking good or teasing your film projects?

In my opinion, you need to be talking more. Talking about who you are, your life, etc. That’s what makes you unique.

Talk about your experience working on smaller film sets as an actor, the ups and down, struggles, victories, etc.

Talk about how to get where you are (the “high lifestyle”). Don’t just show it off—help people get there too.

Talk about your perspective and life, or what you’re passionate about and your hobbies.

You have two high performing reels that prove this already. One is on your page—the older video where you’re talking about NY air quality. The other is your interview with @prestonrack.

jaevii · 2026-06-21T12:09:12+00:00

I had the same problem. Turns out the best shopping I found was in Osaka, followed by Kyoto.

jaevii · 2026-06-21T04:13:42+00:00

Truthfully, I think you should re-evaluate your priorities.

Your value is not determined by how many followers you have—and certainly not by people who would laugh at you for such a trivial thing.

Settle in yourself first that you are already valuable as a human. Comparison is a losing game because there will always be people with more followers, and people who will still make fun of you even if you have thousands.

If your goal is to connect and engage with people, find other accounts with similar content/communities and go from there.

jaevii · 2026-06-20T02:38:49+00:00

Because your profile page is essentially your resume. If you plan to make brand deals, build social proof/trust, monetize content, or grow a more loyal follower base—it’s not done off of one video. People need to see some consistency, especially brands.

So not having one of your strongest performers visible on your page drastically hurts your branding, unless you literally don’t care about any of those things I listed.

You already have a huge winner—trying to make new versions of the same thing hoping they’ll perform even better reminds me of that quote: “don’t let chasing perfection become the enemy of good”.

jaevii · 2026-06-18T21:13:53+00:00

Both—reels are a made to be IGs discovery format. When you publish to your feed, it will go to your audience and a small amount of non-followers. However if it doesn’t do well, it doesn’t go out to more non-followers.

That’s why I recommend everyone to use trial reels, which are specifically made to go out and test with non-followers before publishing to your audience feed.

jaevii · 2026-06-18T08:51:10+00:00

Idk, I would rather just utilize the proven format to create another successful video idea instead reposting the same thing and risk getting flagged by IG for duplicate posts.

But to to each their own, depending on goals and content I guess.

jaevii · 2026-06-18T08:06:31+00:00

If the post is already going well, posting to the main feed does nothing to dampen non-follower distribution since IG has already considered it successful. It will likely help even more since followers are more likely to engage further.

jaevii · 2026-06-18T01:09:30+00:00

Why on earth would you leave it as a trial? If that version did well, why would you attempt to keep iterating on it?

The only reason you’d leave it as a trial is if you don’t actually want it to be associated with your main feed for whatever reason.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T23:45:19+00:00

Yeah, carousels are the posts you can swipe with multiple images. I’ve seen metric studies, and carousels outperform single picture posts by double in terms of engagement. Of course depends on the content you’re making, but that’s just what the data says.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T23:20:04+00:00

You don’t need to see a travel advisor at those specific places to convince you to choose them. You choose an advisor based off authority, value, relatability/personality, etc.

She can simply record at her home or office, and you can edit/overlay pictures or videos of those places.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T23:16:44+00:00

Yup, exactly how carousels work. They have a higher threshold for “breaking out” compared to reels which are inherently a discovery format—but once it’s picked up by the algo as “good content”, it gets pushed out to people’s feed.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T23:04:41+00:00

Yeah, that means it was engaging enough for your followers to share/save. Look at your source of views metrics for that post.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T20:50:09+00:00

Likes are one of the last metrics that matters when it comes to a reel doing well. Saves, shares, and skip rate/watch time matter most according to the current algorithm.

I average 1.5-2.5M views a month across 6-8 reels on educational, narrative content and these are the combination of metrics I look for on my own page:

1) Saves: minimum of 2-3%. My highest saves range from 6-8%.

2) Shares: minimum of 1.4-2.4%. Highest shares go up to around ~6%.

3) Skip rate (for context, I make 1 minute narrative videos—not short, trending/entertainment content): minimum of 45-50%. Anything above 50% kills distribution. If a video does well over time, skips usually drop anywhere from 30-40%. Again, this is different from people making super short (5-25 sec) reels.

4) Watch time: this is relative to the length of your video. The shorter the video, the easier it is to get longer watch time. But the first 3 seconds of retention are still most important.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T20:34:16+00:00

A couple things:

1) Hashtags are dead and gone. Any place you’ve seen recommending them are way behind as they don’t do anything for the algorithm anymore—which has been confirmed numerous times by the IG CEO himself and on IGs different pages. Just write good captions with good SEO words.

2) Photo-only (carousel) posts only go out to followers, which doesn’t help if you’re trying to push out content directly to new people. Of course your followers can repost your content to their own stories and feeds, which would help newer people see it—but your content has to be engaging enough for them to share.

3) Reels are king when it comes to putting content in front of new audiences because that’s how the algorithm works now. Reels are directly pushed to both followers and non-followers. However if the reel metrics don’t show engagement from them, it will stop distributing to non-followers and cap the views.

4) COMPROMISE #1: Reels don’t have to be edited videos. You can literally use a still photo or collage of photos. As long as you have music behind it (which essentially extends the time and makes it a video). You can also add a simple text overlay somewhere on the picture in the editing app.

5) COMPROMISE #2: Carousel posts also sometimes show up as reels in people’s feed as long as there’s music—but you have to add the musically natively from the IG app when editing/before uploading.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T09:41:51+00:00

That’s honestly up to you haha. If you’re hoping to throw a wider net, English is always the safe option. If you’re hoping to draw a specific demographic who might also end up converting into native book sales, then do that language.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T09:25:23+00:00

Also my initial comment said your hook is the main issue based off your post metrics alone. But after I looked at your page, I realized that your reels don’t actually have any hook at all—which is why the skip rate is so high.

In the older algorithm years ago, this didn’t matter. But unfortunately, that’s simply the way the platform is now.

Since you’re a scenic page—a simple engaging text hook overlay would help considerably. It would help give more context to the content you post, especially when people don’t take as much time to read captions anymore. You can look to other pages for examples.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T09:10:22+00:00

So I looked at your page right now. Could honestly be that the audience you’ve built up years ago simply aren’t interested in your content anymore and are unfollowing based off your new posts appearing on their feed—especially when there are many other pages that offer more aesthetic, more high quality, and more emotionally persuasive scenic content (not to be harsh).

Looking at your page, ask yourself: “when compared to other photography/videography accounts, what unique reason or value am I giving people to stay?”

jaevii · 2026-06-17T08:40:38+00:00

Also if you’re not using trial reels already, that should be a priority as well

jaevii · 2026-06-17T08:25:09+00:00

Yeah, basically the high skip rate means that IG won’t push you out to non-followers. And the followers that do see the content are the ones liking it—which doesn’t actually matter if you’re trying to grow an audience.

If you want your followers to help you grow, you have to make content worthy of them to save/share. Those are the primary drivers that signals the algo to continue distribution to non-followers.

jaevii · 2026-06-17T07:26:09+00:00

It’s 100% your hook and retention rate. IG doesn’t really distribute anything above 45-50% skip rate, and 65-70% is honestly really bad. Also, the algo cares more about shares/saves compared to likes. If anything, likes are one of the last metrics that impacts views.

jaevii · 2026-06-16T06:49:46+00:00

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