Related to my post from the 19th where I spoke about Instagram Ads, over the last 15 days, I’ve been asked to follow close to 100 people every 2 days which further backs up my point that if you don’t have a social graph, Facebook can’t deliver ads to you. They’re not currently mining hashtags or the content of my photos or even my location / the most common times of day that I post to deliver ads.
I think that because I can’t imagine anyone but myself using Instagram to follow zero people, there’s no point in Facebook mining any other data except social graph when it comes to delivering ads to you. Step 1, who does Adam follow? Step 2, what do his friends talk about? Step 3, serve ads related to those things. If Step 1 never takes place, error. Does not compute.
I only use Instagram because no one uses Flickr anymore. I never looked at other people’s profiles on Flickr. It’s a place to share my photos and organize them and Flickr supports data-portability. Instagram doesn’t so while I see Instagram as a syndication of media mechanism, I don’t see it as social or as the one-stop shop for my photos.
Luckily, Instagram has started supporting wide-angle photos which is helpful but I still can’t post via desktop or email so I resort to posting via Mobile then going to my Instagram Profile on my Mac to write the description and write hashtags because writing 50 hashtags on an iPhone keyboard would take me close to an hour.
—-
Back to the point of this piece, Instagram used to suggest about 5 unique accounts to follow once a week. I click the X next to someone’s name to ignore the suggestion. Most of these accounts were people who had recently followed me with an occasional recommendation to follow Justin Bieber or Jay-Z. I click X a few times and move on with my day.
Starting earlier this month, I started clicking the X and about 15 seconds in, I’m still clicking the X and realizing that they’ve recommended dozens of accounts. I counted 88 suggested accounts today while I was eating lunch and while I can click a single-x to ignore the prompt completely, I see the same suggested accounts coming back a few days later so I’ve resorted to clicking each account one by one in hopes that one day I’ll reach the end of this virtual list that Instagram has curated for me. The issue is, when I look at the kind of accounts being recommended it’s as if they don’t know anything about me. The only one that seemed relevant to me among the Instagram-Models and Cewebrities was a Diabetes Instagram Account because if they look at all of the beer I drink, they’re coming to some pretty daring conclusions about my diet in general. Kudos Instagram on perceived intelligence here but like recommending I follow Sephora, I doubt they know anything about me.
