Why The Insta Challenge?

If you follow me on Instagram, you'll have noticed my daily uploads as a visual way of counting down to my 21st birthday. I've liked the challenge and it's been great to upload photos without having any significance to what I'd done that day or any relation to the caption.

But despite this, what I've noticed is that by not planning out my photos for the next day or even the next week and not uploading them the first thing in the morning, my likes are barely hitting what they used to. If anything, I feel lucky to even hit 30-40 likes on 1 post now which, when I have just over 550 followers, I don't like. It makes me feel like my feed is well, useless? I wouldn't say that's the right word but you know what I mean: it doesn't make me feel great when after being logged out of it for a good 2 or 3 hours, I only achieve 7 more likes.

Only 27 likes on this post, all of which I appreciate very much.
 Recent millinery designs for my minor project

My current Insta feed

Okay fair enough, the small number of likes may be down to when I upload the photos. I mean, many of my followers/users may not be active at half 3 in the afternoon when I want to upload that photo. Yet what this made me realise is how Instagram has changed from being a carefree social media platform to one where likes mean something. Sometimes I don't care if I only hit 20 likes on a post because I'm documenting the build-up to a special birthday, but when it comes to uploading images of my university work where I would highly appreciate feedback/love, it's very scarce. And that knocks my confidence.

As I say, the lack of likes and comments may be a result of my poor engagement on the app in recent months and also my blog which I had to push aside because I was too involved and focused on finishing my uni work that I forgot I had set the aim of blogging more often (but that's for another rant on a separate blog post). I scroll through Instagram more now and engage with others on their posts where I want to/can and hashtag plenty on my posts to try and bring the engagement in, but not a lot appears to happen.

Search and follow me on Instagram!
Let's see if I can achieve the 1000 followers mark!

I would love to hit 1000 followers on my account before the end of the year as I feel the amount has been hovering around the 550 mark forever. I'm not saying this isn't great because it is and I am very grateful to those who have followed my account since the start and continue to do so now. Yet with entering my final year and thinking about my career once I've graduated, I want this following to grow. So that means more Insta use, more blogging but most importantly, more uploading for myself to document the year to come.

Much Love

V A x