Episode 425: The rise of Grid Zero and what's up with fake followers?
In this episode, Fiona discusses the latest trends and issues on Instagram. She also talked about the importance of diversifying your marketing strategy beyond social media. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Love-hate relationship with social media
Instagram's impact on small business marketing
Issues with fake accounts on Instagram
Consequences of Instagram’s flagged fake accounts
The trend of "Grid Zero" among Gen Z users
Shifts in social media usage patterns
Importance of a diversified marketing strategy beyond Instagram
Transition of content creators from Instagram to other platforms like YouTube
The role of social media as a search platform
Addressing digital addiction and its influence on social media trends
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Welcome to episode 425 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today is a little bit controversial but interesting. Particularly if you use Instagram for your business. Before we get stuck into that, I want to remind people that the wait list for Group Coaching is officially open. If you want to get on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching, you can put in all your details and be the first to know when we launch group coaching, which will be starting, I think in August this year. If you're reading, you can join Group Coaching from anywhere in the world so long as you've got internet access, openness and an eagerness to be part of a beautiful small group of intentional, curious and wonderfully warm small business owners.
If that is you and you're feeling like in this next year, I want a network and a community with me and people that I can talk to, that I can vent to, that I can cry to, I can laugh with. Then you want to join our Group Coaching program all the information and the wait list are over at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. The other thing I wanted to mention, of course, is to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the lands on which I live and work and play and run group coaching. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's social media small business tip.
It may come as no surprise that I have a love-hate relationship with social media if you've listened to this podcast for a while. Mainly, I think it's incredible. I think it is an incredibly accessible tool that has massively changed the game for small business owners and the access that you can have to people is out of this world like nothing else that has come before it. However, the reason that I dislike it is that it's also sometimes become a hateful place where people are so quick to judge and cancel and condemn other people without ever knowing them. There's so much trolling going on as well, but also because so many people see it as their pathway to somehow miraculous marketing activity without another more holistic marketing strategy in place. They see, if I can just grow my Instagram following, or if I can do this, and they'll use all sorts of methods to do this that they think somehow equates to business success, which it doesn't.
I have clients who are turning over huge profit margins and doing all sorts of things in their lives financially that they never thought they could do, and they have low social media followings. Likewise, and this isn't always the case, I've had clients and people I know in the past who have hundreds of thousands of followers and don't necessarily have business success. Sometimes, some clients have business success and hundreds of thousands of followers. That's great. But it doesn't necessarily mean that just because you're big on social media means that your business is a success. I wanted to pinpoint two things that are happening recently on Instagram in particular that I think people need to be aware of. The first is, I don't know if they're cracking down or not, but just the highlighting I guess, that Instagram is doing of fake accounts that are following you.
I think Instagram first announced this in December 2023 in their creator's community, talking about a series of proactive safety tools. I don't know if they're putting this under safety stuff or if they're putting it under bots or AI tools or whatever that are following you that aren't real followers. But if you go into your account, if you go into your followers, you'll see at the top almost grade out, it'll say a certain number and flagged for review. Those are the followers that Instagram has assessed and determined potentially could be fake. They could be bots that have followed, they could be if you have bought followers, they could turn up there. I'm not sure how that works. I've never bought followers in my life. But suffice to say, if you've got an Instagram account and you see that they've flagged for review, like thousands of accounts, you want to think about how much time and effort you have put into an account where maybe half your followers are flagged as fake.
The other thing is that Instagram hasn't given a clear pathway for removing them. Now, you can go through item by item and have a look if they're fake or if maybe they're just like crappy accounts or they don't look particularly great with their graphics or if they're like bot accounts. If you go through one by one and remove some, it should be okay. But if you remove all from what I've seen, and I'm not the expert in this space at all, but from what I have seen and I've done a bit of research, there are a lot of people that are saying they're removing all, but let's say they were told that they've got 3000 accounts that are flagged to review, they hit remove all, and the next day their account is down by like 6,000.
There was one person I saw on Threads I think her name was Sydney Summer, and she said, I auto-removed 200 spam accounts the next day I had 45,000 fewer followers not doing it again. Somebody else said that they had five spam accounts, they hit remove all, and they removed 11,000 followers from my account. That was from the Coffee Lover Mama, and this was in June 2024. I think Instagram is just going through a bit of a like, what are we doing with that platform right now? I get why they're trying to do it. It's to create a safer place for people and not have all these bots or spam accounts. However, by not showing people exactly what to do, people are coming out saying, I hit this and now I've ruined my account. This just goes further and further to my point, that you cannot build everything on your Instagram account because the platform can, like this flagging followers for review thing that it's doing right now, it can decide overnight to do something.
If you don't know exactly why it's doing it or how to manage that, it can potentially then end up like these people where they've got thousands fewer followers than they thought they were removing. And then what does that do especially if they're content creators or they're making their money through having a certain follower number, what negative impact could it have on them and their business? That's the first one, just this flagged for-review issue that has come up and it not being clear that every time somebody just removes all that, it is just removing those ones that are flagged not anymore. Because for example, some of these people when they're saying, I lost 11,000 extra followers, what is that doing? Unless people are saying, I only had a small amount, but they'd bought a whole bunch.
Either way, it goes to the 0.1, never buy your followers, you just never do that. But two, Instagram can and will change the game all the time. You do not want to build all of your marketing on social media. The other thing that has come up recently with Instagram, and I have to shout out my friend Marre Smit from Smit Club who mentioned this to me first, but I did do some research on it, and it turns out that this was coined by Bobby Allen in April this year on the NPR website. He talked about the rise of Grid Zero, and he named it Grid Zero, which is a phenomenon that is happening on social media, starting on Instagram, but happening elsewhere as well, where Gen Z is removing everything off the grid on Instagram, and they're doing this one for privacy, but also almost like not wanting to give all of this attention and all of this content to a social media platform.
You can go and read the NPR article. In the article, Bobby Allen talks about this growing trend of Grid Zero. Instead of having all the different milestones and all these different things that are happening, you're giving Instagram and other social media platforms a look into everything that you're doing and a way to track your life and what you're interested in and then feed you a whole bunch of ads, it's deliberately creating a blank slate and then you decide what you want to show that day. Almost taking the idea of stories, which is still popular on social media because they disappear after 24 hours and doing that with the grid itself. People are putting on a post and then taking it away within a few hours or taking it away within 24 hours and archiving it straight away.
This is interesting because if you think about this, I always say to people, just don't put all your effort into a platform like Instagram. After all, all it is is Netflix where we are all making the content and everyone's watching it, but we don't get paid. Imagine if you made films for Netflix and you were putting them up and Netflix was making all this money, but you weren't getting anything for your films, I know a lot of writers probably out there who write for films and and TV shows are like, that's us. But a lot of people don't look at social media like that. They don't look at the fact that we are all creating so much content, and that is what keeps the beast going. If we didn't create all the content, it wouldn't keep going. In some cases, this creation of content is doing amazing things for people and their businesses, but with this rise of Grid Zero, you want to think this is another marker to show that social media is changing.
Particularly for Instagram, the amount of people, even Instagram influencers and people who teach Instagram are coming off Instagram and putting everything into YouTube. It's just interesting to watch this. And this has been happening for years now. This is not new. I know there's a woman in the US who I used to follow a lot for social media content and ideas, and she's just good at what she does. She came off Instagram and was like, this platform is doing nothing for me. It is not doing anything for content creators. she's now teaching Instagram on YouTube, which is interesting, but also honing in more and more on YouTube. And I'm seeing so many people in that space take everything that they were teaching about social media and put it onto YouTube, which is a search platform.
Social media itself is becoming just a search platform. I feel like TikTok is already a search platform. Pinterest is not even social media. That's a hundred percent a search platform. And Instagram is becoming more and more of a search platform. what is that then going to do for your business, particularly if you are tapping into Gen Z, if that is your audience, you want to look at how are they playing in this playground and is still the right playground for you to be in. That is it for today. I guess it's not a tool or a tactic, it's a tip to just keep your eye on these things. If you have only been using Instagram, and I still work with clients all the time where I look at their marketing strategy and it is just Instagram.
There's no other marketing happening, take this as a lesson to start somewhere. Get your email list together, and get something else happening. Look at other platforms like podcasting, YouTube, or something else where you are still connecting with people, still humanising your brand, still getting your message across, but not relying on a platform that is so up and down at the moment and is changing constantly. And to be honest, I think they're incredibly lost on Instagram and don't know exactly what they're doing. They were so smashed by TikTok. And now there's the idea that maybe everyone will come back from TikTok to Instagram. And I'm seeing a lot of TikTok has said that as well, particularly Americans who are like, make sure that you've got your Instagram, because if TikTok gets banned and everyone has to go back to Instagram, but I think that the answer will be somewhere else.
I think that in a few years, maybe there'll still be all of these, but I think the way that we use them is changing, is changing. And even in this article from NPR where they talk about Grid Zero, one of the things they talk about is the idea that Grid Zero is a reaction to the amount of digital addiction that social media, particularly platforms like Instagram, have instilled in people. Just something to think about. We will link to the NPR article. We'll link to anything else that I've mentioned in the show notes for this, which you'll find at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/425. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
