The Reason Your Instagram Followers are Ignoring Your Posts

If your Instagram engagement is low, aside from the mysteries of the algorithm, there is one major reason your followers might be ignoring your Instagram posts. I’ll tell you that reason but to understand it, we first need to talk about your brain.

How Your Instagram Followers Process Your Posts

Your brain is the biggest calorie burner in your body (a whopping 11 calories a minute—if only we could think ourselves in shape, right?), because its main job is to keep you alive and thriving. Thinking takes a lot of calories, so to conserve energy your brain constantly scans your environment for ways to help you survive and thrive.

When you’re bombarded with a ton of information that isn’t relevant to your survival (or in this case your business’s survival), your brain tunes it out. It doesn’t want to waste calories on something that isn’t relevant to your basic needs.

So what does this have to do with your Instagram posts?

How Confusing Design Sabotages Your Instagram Posts

If your Instagram posts are busy, cluttered, or confusing, your followers will tune you out and keep scrolling, because you’ve failed to answer their basic question, “How does this post help me/my business thrive?”

After watching accounts in my Instagram feed, I’ve noticed 3 mistakes people often make that have surprisingly easy fixes.

Are You Making These Design Mistakes?

Text Over Busy Backgrounds

When your followers see text over busy backgrounds their brains shut down, because they have to work too hard to read your amazing message! Don’t make them work hard.

Fix It: Choose a plain background with contrasting text or make the background lighter or darker depending on your text color.

Not Enough White Space

White space is simply blank space around text or a graphic. If your posts have text that spans from edge to edge so you cram in as much info as possible, you’re losing your audience, because have no idea what you want them to focus on. When you create space around your graphic or text, it immediately draws their eyes exactly where you want it to look.

Fix It: Only include the most relevant points in your post and add the rest of the info in your caption, on a carousel, in your stories, or break it up to make a couple of separate posts.

Using Too Many Colors or Fonts

When there’s a lot of different, non-cohesive elements in a post, the brain get overwhelmed and says, “Moving on!” Because, again, it can’t quickly process what to look at or how this contributes to you surviving and thriving.

Fix It: Choose 2–3 colors and 2 fonts to create cohesion and consistency.

Make these 3 fixes and I guarantee your followers will take notice.