Social Media Engagement tanked?

[Iris-Grimoire]

This is mostly tangentially related to webcomics, but stay with me here for a second.

Ever since the second half of July, both Twitter and Instagram just kind of started to forget I existed somehow. I went from a lot of engagement and even comments to having my handful of friends even notice the posts, let alone interact. Before I didn't mind because I could just slowly work towards...something, but now I want to promote my comic and that's impossible if I post the links and no one even sees them.

I tend to post around 10:30 EDT, because that was recommended back when I started and it seemed to work for the first half of the year - and I've experimented with no hashtags, only two, a ton. Now, while it works on Tapas and I get the usual activity, it's just crickets even for major artwork that I post. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Is there any way to even climb out of this hole without paying for promoted posts/complex analytics? Thanks in advance for any help.

[Birbmagadon]

Perhaps it has to do with holidays and school break happening during July and August in most countries? The internet tends to get slower during this time of the year, from my own experience.

If it doesn't get back to normal by the end of September, though, it might not be the source of the issue ^^;

[jdlareva]

I've noticed a decline in engagement in Instagram, though I go through long stretches of time without posting, so I thought that may be it.

Another theory is that Instagram seems to be pushing paid advertising and tend to give more and more space to that.

I honestly miss the days when Instagram didn't mess with my feed and would just post everything in chronological order.

[Iris-Grimoire]

I've heard that Instagram actually favors not posting every day, not sure, so there I try to post every other day while Twitter is at least a bump or a new sketch every day around that hour. They both seem to have the same problem still.

School break might be it, I just hope the update on Twitter didn't hide me for posting something the algorithm didn't like.

Oddly enough, I get some activty right around now on my posts, but if I post at this hour, it goes unseen. Boy how I miss just posting whenever on a blog or deviantart(not that I want to go back there) and people eventually checking it out over the course of the day.

[jdlareva]

Yeah, but I will go months without posting, lol. Yeah, I've heard that about Instagram, though they used to favor day posters back when I was more involved on that site. I know nothing about twitter hahaha

[therealbereth]

Based on what a lot of people have experienced in the past months, Twitter has inserted algorithms lately that basically favor already big accounts over those with less than 1k followers. People get shadowbanned left and right because the algorithm is only good for mistakes, and then you can't forget that people are frequently thrown back to "Best Tweets First" instead of the "Latest Tweets", regardless of personal settings – until they notice, they may already have missed your posts. And so on and so forth. Twitter is just getting worse and worse, it seems.

I can't speak for Instagram, though, but considering that all these sites make money off their users, it wouldn't surprise me if their algorithm is screwed up in one way or another as well.

[Anithia]

I think instagram it's the same. If it wasnt for a group that i joined, i would have zero likes.

I hope that thing changes...

[nathanKmcwilliams]

Huh, I thought it was just me being inactive on Instagram. I came back from a two month hiatus and I've had a hell of a time getting any likes. Especially from the usual followers I had before.