How Instagram is falling short for some small businesses

When Kate Lindello, a former photo stylist and creative director, founded her small business Noihsaf Bazaar more than a decade ago, Instagram seemed like the obvious platform to start a brand focused on peer-to-peer resale, where ethical fashion enthusiasts could find a community of like-minded individuals willing to trade and sell their clothing and accessories. For years, it was a perfect match as Instagram's image-friendly layout helped propel the Duluth, Minnesota-based Noihsaf Bazaar from its humble roots in 2013 to a company that now boasts 46,000 followers, 2.5 million monthly impressions, and more than 200 daily posts, and has been profiled in The New York Times, Elite Daily and the Star Tribune. But of late, Noihsaf's growth has been stunted. For the last three weeks, Lindello’s posts have been mysteriously disappearing on Instagram; she and her seven employees have often been locked out of the Noihsaf account and are prevented from consistently offering items for sale, which is costing the small business thousands of dollars in revenue. And Lindello has had a difficult time getting a straight answer as to why. A spokeswoman for Instagram parent company Meta told Ad Age Noihsaf’s posts have likely been flagged because different contractors are logging into the account from different regions, triggering the platform’s hacker integrity checks. Yet an Instagram support person told Lindello the posts were removed for inappropriate content and community violations. But the posts in question seemed innocent, including a scarf, a swimsuit and Lindello’s own updates to her followers about her accounts being down. “Instagram is this gigantic app so they’re constantly rolling out features and updating their system and usually when an update happens, we trigger some kind of bot with how many posts we do,” Lindello said. “I don’t think we’re a big enough fish in the pond to get the help we need and part of me is always worried we’re going to be one of those cases, that account that just gets deleted and we never know why.” She’s one of a host of small and micro business owners experiencing issues with the once mutually beneficial social platform. Lindello’s plight, ahead of a crucial holiday shopping season where many brands see the bulk of their profits, is emblematic of how Instagram works with those smaller companies that, while still sizeable with followers, do not offer the same marketing heft of an influencer like a Kardashian or a big brand like J. Crew. Some retailers complain of so-called “shadowbanning,” in which posts are blocked from being seen by users due to algorithmic changes. Others say without enough paid advertising, their posts are taking a back seat to deep-pocketed brands able to pay more for sponsored content. Darling Clementine, a small children’s retailer, in October posted a chart to Instagram encouraging followers to save posts, like posts, and share content in support. Earlier in the month, the shop posted that fewer than 1% of followers were being shown posts. “We need you to like, comment and share our work if you’d like to continue seeing it,” Darling Clementine wrote. “Times are really hard and this matters to a small business.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Darling Clementine (@shopdarlingclementine) Lisa Congdon, an artist who runs her own business, published a post to her Instagram account in September about her recent experiences. She started by crediting the platform for its help with her career, but went on to say that its benefits have changed—her posts in the last few months have received fewer comments, engagement and followers. “I have no interest in being an entertainer, she wrote, adding “I am not here to post content that feels inauthentic just because it garners more views.” Congdon concluded the post to say that she will not leave Instagram but is also exploring ways to “connect with you all (my community) in ways that feel pure and non-performative.” Congdon did not immediately return a request for more comment. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lisa Congdon (@lisacongdon) Beaton Linen, a Canadian retailer, last week included a post on its Story feed regarding the recent changes on Instagram. “What is happening with Instagram? The algorithm? It’s so painful for small business,” the brand wrote. For Noihsaf Bazaar, posts are simply removed, despite the LLC being a paying advertiser. Many brands lament little access to support and live help from Instagram representatives. As a result, some are diversifying to alternatives like building their own sales platforms and marketing tools such as newsletters. “What’s happening for small businesses on social media platforms that disguise themselves as social but really always had aspirations of being revenue generators rather than connection generators is that the barrier of entry that was low when these platforms started have risen back up,” said Gretchen Jones, a creative consultant and advisor to small and micro businesses in industries such as media, retail and events. “There’s no control outside of what content it is that you’re posting—the only control each small business has is what the image is, or the copy is—they can’t control who is seeing it, the way in which paid advertising works. The limitations that have come up around consumer demographics and customer profiling has really hindered the effectiveness especially for small businesses.” A June blog post from Instagram attempted to explain how the platform ranks content, and promised "more to share soon." The post read, "We can’t promise you that you’ll consistently reach the same amount of people when you post. The truth is most of your followers won’t see what you share, because most look at less than half of their Feed. But we can be more transparent about why we take things down when we do, work to make fewer mistakes – and fix them quickly when we do – and better explain how our systems work." Noihsaf Bazaar, which is fashion spelled backwards, is unique from other retailers in that it effectively operates as an intermediary where consumers can upload items to sell. Noihsaf employees then post the items and their prices to the Noihsaf Instagram account, where it is seen by thousands of followers. Once sold, Noihsaf collects a small commission from the seller; the buyer is responsible for shipping costs and working out payment with the seller through peer-to-peer providers such as Venmo or PayPal. Other Instagram accounts such as SellTradeSlowFashion and SellTradePlus offer the same proposition, which is not hugely dissimilar from larger clothing resale platforms such as the publicly traded Poshmark and ThredUp. Noihsaf distinguishes itself by specializing in the “slow fashion" segment, which follows ethical labor practices and uses a sustainable supply chain. That contrasts with “fast fashion,” which includes cheap throwaway items. Over the years, Lindello has expanded into other categories such as beauty, home, men’s and vintage, all operated by her team of eight employees, including seven who post on Instagram and a developer. With resale and online shopping both on an upswing during the pandemic, her business grew 40% in 2020. Yet as Noihsaf has grown, so have the problems. Posts are disappearing typically whenever an Instagram upgrade occurs. And it is hard to get support, according to Lindello, who created a backup account to deal with the challenges. Earlier this year, she became a paid advertiser, giving $500 to the platform to see if that would result in better attention to her troubles, but the recent outage, which began Nov. 1, proves that is not the case. Though Noihsaf is an LLC, Lindello's years-long attempts to get the brand "verified" on Instagram with a blue checkmark, a process she heard would provide access to help with troubleshooting, have not been approved. “Instagram markets themselves as this community builder and supporter of small business and that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve built this amazing, robust community. And now we’re getting completely punished,” said Lindello, speculating that “maybe we’re getting overlooked because we don’t have the ad dollars like these big companies do.” Getting one-on-one, human support has been especially difficult, Lindello said. Some Instagram employees referred her to Facebook’s Help Center, which then referred her back to Instagram. A Meta spokeswoman provided the following emailed statement to Ad Age: “We know it can be frustrating to experience any type of disruption as a small business. We are working hard to make our tools simple and easy to use and offer self-serve, free guidance for all businesses. In addition, any advertisers can get 1:1 support via a chat concierge or email channels by clicking ‘SUPPORT’ from our help resources page.” Yet small business advocates say the platform is simply not set up to offer support on a level that would help a company like Noihsaf or its peers grow their businesses. Jones said Instagram simply lacks the infrastructure from a customer support perspective to assist those smaller brands that rely on it as a place to generate revenue. “They are not set up in any capacity of support from a customer service standpoint for any of the small businesses or big businesses that are dependent on them,” she said. “If they were truly working with the intention of maintaining a robust small business and big business engagement on their platforms, they would have to have true customer service that was meant to be engaged with regularly,” she added, noting the accessibility of customer support operations at Square and Squarespace, for example. Jones urges her clients—which include creative founders and entrepreneurs like wedding designers, florists and ceramicists and executives in the movie and TV industry—to avoid what she calls “co-dependency” with social platforms. She estimates that she spends between 30% and 40% of her time helping clients navigate around the effectiveness of such platforms and exploring alternatives. In Lindello’s case, that means building out Noihsaf’s own website, a project she has been working on for several months. The membership-based site will operate on its own, like a Poshmark, without reliance on Instagram, which Lindello may continue to use as a marketing tool for content and designer interviews, for example. Her site should roll out in beta later this month, with the expectation that it will be fully up and running by Jan. 1. “People log in and check Instagram just to look at Noihsaf Bazaar—we have totally fed the machine,” she said. “Many factors are involved in switching platforms, but the biggest factor is we can’t provide the level of service to our community, we can’t continue to grow our community on Instagram. From day one we were at the mercy of them.” Register for Ad Age Next: CMO at AdAge.com/NextCMO.

How Instagram is falling short for some small businesses

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